Mark Arnest

My engineer brother-in-law says we’ve lost a lot of technical papers from the 70s and 80s because they were written on now-vanished computer operating systems.

Well, you have a point.

Interesting data point, but unless you know that Sanders doesn’t believe what he’s saying, the more accurate and less incendiary word is “mistaken.”

Years ago my wife and I submitted some cartoons to the New Yorker and received a rejection so quickly that it must have crossed our cartoons in the mail.

How will Trump’s attacks affect higher education?

Let’s look to history

Germany's universities were the world's premier research institutions

Hitler destroyed them

How long did they take to recover?

They haven’t

Sure, at Communist Martyrs High School!

Still explaining: How do tariffs work, and who pays?

Just shows how prescient New Yorkers are!

I should believe you over the cumulative knowledge of three millennia of human history?!?

Credit where it’s due: Kessler has written *by far* the most eye-opening piece about the decimation of the Washington Post.

The only faint glimmer of a silver lining here is the likelihood that Trump will entrust this money to grifters who make off with it instead of perpetrating the evil he intends.

Two votes a day!

to knee or not to knee

Happy gotcha day to the internet's cutest poet!

Screenshot from constitution.congress.gov showing the end of Article 1, Section 8 and the start of Article 1, Section 9

When I looked just now, the sections are there but are not accessible from the menu on the right. I had to scroll down on the left side to find them.

A page from constitution.congress.gov, showing the end of Article 1, Section 8 and the start of Article 1, Section 9

I just looked at the link you provide, and those sections are currently there, but are not accessible from the menu on the right side of the screen. I had to scroll down the text on the left side to find them. On my laptop, the menu began to scroll again at Article 9, Section 10.

Wait, my evil lady is two-timing me?!?

But they're fine with an uncontrolled experiment on the planet's atmosphere.

And if they hadn't rigged the 1864 election for Lincoln, the CSA would have survived the Civil War!!!!!!!!

Matchka, an orange cat, sits on her person's chest, preventing him from doing work. In the background is a baseball autographed by Ernie Banks.

A recent fb post:

We eat well, and our monthly grocery bill for two is not $800. I'd say of $400/person that whether it's reasonable or on the high side depends upon where one lives and what one's tastes are.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with Stancil's perfectly reasonable point.

Yes, inflation is widely divergent among different areas. I just replaced my eight-year-old phone, and paid about the same number of dollars, unadjusted for inflation, as I did then.

Meanwhile our house insurance premium is up 150% in the past six years, even though we haven't made a claim.

You are wrong – my wife is utterly indifferent to price, and I'm the one who input everything into Quicken for a dozen years and knew EXACTLY how much we spent on groceries.

I agree that $400 is a reasonable one-person monthly grocery bill; but many households contain more than one person.

My wife and I shop together, most recently yesterday.

And I'm assuming that you know that 5% inflation in groceries doesn't mean that your total monthly expenses on everything go up by 5%? Of course inflation is generally correlated.

Stancil's basic point is clear: Even 5% inflation, which is high, is not dramatically noticeable month to month.

Yeah, but if you're a household of one, $400 is too much – unless you have expensive tastes or live in a super-expensive-for-food area – and if you're a household of four it's too little. So he chose something very reasonable for a single shopping trip, and easier to conceptualize than, say, $400.

"Seems" is doing some heavy lifting here. Using a typical grocery bill as an example is basically impossible, since households differ so much, so Stancil chose $100 for ease of comprehension.

Where does he suggest that the $100 bill is monthly? He could just as easily mean a single shopping trip. But very obviously he's using $100 because it's easy to comprehend what $.42 is in relation to it.

In 1990 I was ballpark organist for the Colorado Springs Sky Sox. On the evening of June 6, all of us in the press box were transfixed by an enormous anvil cloud in line with the outfield. That cloud birthed a tornado that devastated the town of Limon, 60 miles away.

Are you sure? Someday it will be the answer to a wonderful trivia question.