To be fair, the dramatic nosedive in quality of GoT happened when they ran out of source material and had to wing it.

3-body problem is a finished trilogy, so it could all have the quality of the first seasons of GoT.

A dozen cosmere novels is what, four years of writing for him?

Yeah, it doesn’t really belong in the ‘no’ column. It’s not an appropriate cat food because it’s not nutritionally complete.

So it’s rather like how just eating bread or cornmeal that don’t have added vitamins will give you scurvy or pellagra. But obviously they’re not poisonous or anything and most of the world eats them without a problem.

I mean, this is mostly about treats, so…

Cats being obligate carnivores means most of their calories must come from meat because they e.g. can’t synthesize taurine like a human or dog can. But eating a bit of cat grass isn’t gonna kill them.

Depends on how the product is described and what the warranty covers.

Like, if these are sold as decorative art pieces, swinging them around probably voids the warranty.

The only problem is that the functional replica anime sword section is probably going to be entirely empty. They’re basically all decorative wall hangers.

They’ll differ in build quality, though. Some might break if you swing them hard, others might break if you hit something with them.

Yes.

In particular, you ask questions like “what type of steel is this made out of” and “what kind of tang does it have”.

Many of these swordlike objects aren’t made to be swung, and are liable to break if you try it.

Yes - like the guy on the home shopping network who cut himself up when the stainless steel “practice” katana he was trying to sell snapped in half and flew back at him.

There’s a reason people call these wall-hangers “sword-like objects”.

it’s not unreasonable to expect the cool prop to feel like it’s not trying to fly across the yard if you swing it around.

You might think that, but most of these are called wall hangers for a reason.

Many of them have rat-tail tangs or are made with stainless steel. They might feel balanced, but are liable to snap if you swing them around.

So you have $35,000 left to account for.

How much did you buy your car for, and how much can you sell it for after a decade? Depreciation is one of the larger costs of car ownership. Assuming you financed it, there’s also the cost of interest on the loan.

Also registration and other state fees.

That wall isn’t structural. There’s a much thicker wall behind it; this is just a thin internal layer for running electric and mounting drywall.

One important thing to realize is that different dialects of English have slightly different grammars.

One place where different dialects differ is around negation. Some dialects, like Appalachian English or West Texas English, exhibit ‘negative concord’, where parts of a sentence must agree in negation. For example, “Nobody ain’t doin’ nothing’ wrong”.

One of the most important thing to understanding a sentence is to figure out the dialect of its speaker. You’ll also notice that with sentences with ambiguous terminology like “he ate biscuits” - were they cookies, or something that looked like a scone? Rules are always contextual, based on the variety of the language being spoken.

English definitely has rules.

It’s why you can’t say something like “girl the will boy the paid” to mean “the boy is paying the girl” and have people understand you.

Less vs fewer, though, isn’t really a rule. It’s more an 18th century style guideline some people took too seriously.

No.

There’s two types of grammar rules. There’s the real grammar rules, which you intuitively learn as a kid and don’t have to be explicitly taught.

For example, any native English speaker can tell you that there’s something off about “the iron great purple old big ball” and that it should really be “the great big old purple iron ball”, even though many aren’t even aware that English has an adjective precedence rule.

Then there’s the fake rules like “ain’t ain’t a real word”, ‘don’t split infinitives’ or “no double negatives”. Those ones are trumped up preferences, often with a classist or racist origin.

The beginning of the ‘Final Solution’ was in June of 1941, and began with the death squads of the Einsatzgruppen murduring Jews as part of Operation Barbarossa.

The commander of Einsatzkommando 3 submitted a fairly detailed report of his squad’s daily murder count by location. Through November 25th of that year, his squad alone murdered 57,338 Jewish men, 48,592 Jewish women, and 29,461 Jewish children.

Babi Yar happened on September 29th and 30th, 1941 - only about 4 months into the Final Solution. Germans put posters up in Kyiv, saying that any Jews who didn’t show up to be relocated would be shot. They took the crowd of 33k people to a ravine, herded them forwards and machine gunned them all down.

Is the Holocaust really the most apt historical comparison? Yes, the Holocaust is in the past, while this is ongoing. But the early days of the Holocaust were incredibly bloody; the massacres didn’t ramp up slowly once the killings commenced.

Two things can both be bad without being equally bad.

The war has been terrible. But do you really think it’s been as bad as Treblinka or Babi Yar?

That sounds a bit more like a nightclub.

I’d never want to live next to a nightclub, but living next to a tavern or pub would be fine.

Ish.

There’s precisely zero skill involved in e.g. roulette.

Poker, fantasy football, and horse betting though, are influenced by skill. But they’re all clearly still gambling.

The important thing in those 3 is that you’re not betting against the house. You’re betting against other players, and that you’re the smart enough to come out on top even after the house takes their cut. Unless you’re Nate Silver, though, chances are you’re not the smartest person in the room.

Better yet:

Give me $1, and I’ll roll two six-sided dice. If you roll two sixes, I give you $20.