Upvoted because I vehemently disagree which is the hallmark of a good hot take.

I think it should be “symmetricalous”. Compromise?

I think every time people say that it’s at accident.

I don’t think it’s quite the same thing. Smoking has almost zero redeeming qualities. Alcohol has a lot of social value, cultural heritage, crap like that. If you’re going to break the law, there are more attractive substances than tobacco.

There are other benefits too: restaurants stop having to dedicate space to smoking tables; people are far less likely to smoke in public places (like bus stops), which is already against the law but people do it anyway, if smoking is banned altogether they’d do it less.

If people are gonna smoke tobacco, I’d rather they do it in secret than out in the open. Also I think even “failed” prohibition likely reduces actual usage by a lot.

Sure, it was alright, but I do love my family too ❤️

Last time I went out on a trip with the extended family (we’re roughly 20 people, give or take), it was in a rented big structure with a sleeping area, a dining area, and a kitchen, and a yard outside with a place to make a fire. We started a fire, but come dinner time they all wanted to leave the fire going and eat at the table.

I absolutely refused. No way in the world in leaving a fire unattended like that. I said we either stop the fire altogether (and restart it later), or I’ll stay watching it until someone comes to replace me.

In the end I took a plate of food and ate it by the fire alone, until someone indeed came to replace me and I went to finish the meal at the table. It turned out fine, but it really annoyed me how no one in my family saw sense. They kept trying to convince me to just come and eat dinner… as if the social togetherness somehow makes the risk of starting a forest fire unimportant?! There’s some smart people in my family, but some days I don’t understand how they can all be so blind to the obvious reality.

Cigarettes (and to some extent alcohol) are one thing I think should be very heavily taxed, and therefore very expensive. The high prices are intended to encourage people to quit smoking, and more importantly, discourage people from getting addicted in the first place. Heck, a handful of countries are finally starting to ban cigarettes altogether for people born after a certain year. This is good.

I know I’m speaking from a point of “privilege”, I’ve never smoked in my life and never been addicted to any substance. I know it’s just not feasible for some people to quit, and for them, the high prices really suck. But on a society level, I still think it’s better if cigarettes are expensive enough to remind you you should quit every time you buy them.

The world of Shrek has tons of cool magic in it, sign me up! But also most cartoon/animation worlds, where you can survive all sorts of physical shenanigans with no injuries or consequences.

But coincidentally, your mistakes turned out to give the best results. Your colleague needed someone to step in as soon as possible. How long would it have taken you to guarantee your own safety before each of those steps? How would you even do that? You can’t know why the panic button was pressed without stepping into the room.

Also, I’m kind of wondering what happened to the suspect you were interviewing at the start. Did they stay put as you told them? Did they, as I expected when first reading your story, try to flee?

I tell the suspect to stay put, I jump out into the hallway (first mistake), hastily pull open the door to the room in question (second mistake)

Why were those mistakes?

Who is she? Your partner, your mother, your daughter, your friend…?

Morning about a year ago, I was still in bed. My mom started screaming in shock and surprise, and yelled for me to come quick. This kind of reaction isn’t too uncommon from her for relatively mundane things (like a cockroach) so I wasn’t in that much of a hurry.

As I slowly got up and exited my room, suddenly I was breathing smoke. Apparently, she left a pot with oil in it on the stovetop which had turned on somehow. The pot had a lid on, but large amounts of smoke were escaping around it.

If I remember correctly, I rushed to open the window closest to the stovetop and made sure the stove was turned off and the pot was away from new heat, and then the smoke was overwhelming me so I ran back to the other side of the apartment to catch some breath. I was also going to bring over a fan to push out the smoke as much as possible, to make it tolerable to be in the room and deal with the emergency.

While I was away doing that, my dad had come down the stairs and into the kitchen and, in his infinite wisdom*, opened the pot lid to see what was going on underneath it. Then I hear him yell “fire!” and he goes out to grab the fire extinguisher. By opening the lid, he allowed oxygen to get inside and thus fuel the fire.

I quickly rushed back to the kitchen and saw the fire in the pot. My dad was already back with the extinguisher (it was just outside our apartment door). But he couldn’t figure out how to use it. I grabbed it, aimed it at the flaming pot, and extinguished the fire.

Fire is out, emergency over.

I got a little bit of splashback from the flaming oil which gave me a small burn on my finger (which healed just fine, I don’t even remember which finger it was and there’s no scar), and the extinguisher made a giant mess that needed to be cleaned all over the area, but overall I’d say damage was close to minimal. Close to minimal.

My first plan, when I saw the pot with the lid on, was to keep it starving for oxygen and prepare a “bath” of cold water to place the whole pot into to cool it until it stops smoking. If my dad hadn’t opened the lid, I think that plan would have worked, and would have saved us the cleanup and the burn on my finger (though I might have gotten burned another way, who knows).

After I saw that he had opened the lid, my instinct was still to put the lid back on and go back to plan A, which would have been tricky since the lid itself is obviously too hot to touch bare-handed and the fire in the pot makes it hard to get close. But still, I think it was doable.

But when seconds later he was already back with the extinguisher, I knew it was not the best solution, but I also knew that it would work, and that trying to convince him that it wasn’t the best idea would take way too long. In that moment, just accepting the sub-optimal extinguisher plan was the best choice. Oh well, it did work.

* I’m not actually that mad, In an emergency situation it’s hard to blame someone for not thinking things through, and doing an instinctive thing. Still, I expected more of him, he’s a smart man with over 60 years of life experience and you’d think he knew not to let fire get oxygen.

It was removed completely soon after: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/406169/383346

After some reflection, I’ve removed this Easter egg. It’ll be gone in the upcoming man-db 2.8.0.

I’m glad that it made some people smile, which after all was the whole purpose of it, and my Twitter notifications and so on today suggest that most people thought it was more amusing than annoying. Still, some people did find it annoying, and six years seems like a pretty good run for that sort of thing; it probably isn’t going to get significantly better exposure than it already unexpectedly has by way of this question. Time to put it to bed.

I think OP meant giving this word a new meaning.

Dehydration?

Superpowers are a prerequisite.

It is a given that every road leads to Rome.

Therefore, every endpoint of every road must be within Rome. For example, the entry road to a parking lot leads to Rome, therefore the parking lot is in Rome, and presumably so is the area or establishment(s) the parking lot is intended to serve. (Rome wouldn’t waste its precious land area on parking lots serving other countries, that would be ridiculous!)

It naturally follows that basically every inhabited area on earth is in Rome. Q.E.D.

March 11, 2016 according to https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1654:_Universal_Install_Script

According to the Rust Wikipedia article, it was juuuust starting to be used in real things around that period. Definitely before it was popular.

Good. If you couldn’t that would be a real problem.