Having a private office would be a nice symbol of status but I don’t think I’d actually enjoy working in one - in grad school, I was really happy in my shared office since the other guys there were my friends. I graduated a year after them and that last year was not fun. Of course new people took their spots but those people were strangers to me.

no assigned seating

One professor in my department was so protective of her lab’s space that when she noticed me sitting at a desk assigned to one of her students, she went and complained directly to my advisor. The desk’s owner was a friend of mine and on a month-long international trip at that time and I wasn’t even making a habit of using his desk - it was just a convenient place to sit while talking to another one of her students.

How did you guys share computers? My work was 100% on the computer so we would have had to work in shifts if there had not been enough computers for everyone (but there were).

7x7ft is tiny but 7x7m would be remarkably big.

They say so, right above “Never: come in without knocking.”

How do you get the impression that this is a grad student?

He’s working on his dissertation.

Now that I think about it some more, I do recall seeing places where grad students did have their own personal closets…

I did a science PhD so I also got paid, enough to live modestly but comfortably. I shared an office with four other people but it was a big office. The incident with the chair probably had more to do with the struggle between the professors and the university to avoid paying for things like that than it did with an absolute lack of funds.

Dissertation? This grad student has his own personal office? With a door? I wasn’t even issued a chair. I had to get my own.

As for dogs: when I was in grad school, one of the professors had a dog that sat quietly next to his desk all day, at least as far as the professor knew. When he went to the bathroom, his dog would run into the hall and play with people, but the dog was listening for his footsteps and was always back in his office in time. This didn’t last long because the department head didn’t like dogs and complained :(

No kid wants a toy Aquaman.

The interesting thing is that anatomically modern Homo sapiens appeared about 300,000 years ago and did live exclusively as hunter-gatherers for about 280,000 of those years.

I suspect that as Nate Silver says, Trump is doing this sort of thing because he wants to fight about immigration rather than his other, less popular policies - he thinks he has the public support to win on immigration.

Sorry, I edited my post to add more specific information before I saw your reply.

The bill had enough support from both Democrats and Republicans in the legislature that the governor couldn’t have vetoed it.

A single car with ISA can also prevent multiple drivers behind it from recklessly accelerating, so even a small number of ISA-equipped vehicles could have a dramatic impact on regional or even national road safety.

In my experience, a slow driver will be passed (often rather aggressively) by drivers wanting to go faster if that is at all possible. That feels a lot more dangerous than simply having everyone drive at the rate of traffic. Or is the author envisioning a scenario where there are enough of these slow cars to cause a traffic jam?

Republicans? The Virginia state legislature is controlled by Democrats.

Edit: I think the author is talking about this bill. It has Republican support but I didn’t think presenting it as a solely Republican initiative is fair.

That’s my whole point. Might things be a lot worse in a couple of years? Yes. Are things as bad as this article is all about saying they are right now? No, clearly not.

“The American democratic republic is in danger of dying” is true.

“The American democratic republic has died” is histrionics, and histrionics are particularly counterproductive at a time when what’s actually going on is so serious.

The U.S. is survived by a country of the same name, the United States of America, now a presidential dictatorship.

This gets an eye roll from me. The USA is certainly in a lot of danger but anyone who calls the current situation a dictatorship is ignorant of what a dictatorship is.

Here’s a hint for the author: you wouldn’t be getting an article like this one published in a dictatorship.

Trump destroyed with facts and logic at Pope’s funeral.

Any possible negotiated end to the war at this time would involve territorial concessions by Ukraine. Putin himself won’t agree to withdraw from most of the territory occupied since 2022, and even if he is replaced by a new, much less expansionist ruler willing to withdraw from all that territory, the new ruler still won’t give back Crimea.

I used to worry about what women would think when they saw my home, but it turned out that none of them ever see it at all so I might as well be true to myself and collect all the My Little Ponies.

The Uyghurs in Guantanamo didn’t want to go back to China.

Do you remember how prisoners were kept in Guantanamo Bay, even after they were no longer suspected of any wrongdoing, simply because there wasn’t a country that would both accept them and treat them in accordance with US law? Many of those prisoners ended up nowhere near where they came from.

Some countries refuse to accept deportees. Some countries are so likely to mistreat deportees that sending them to those countries is illegal. Some countries simply don’t exist anymore.