If you're rigging an election, it can be better politically to give yourself 65% of the vote than 97% of the vote.

97% is obviously fake. 65% is easier to make people beleive in.

Western Europe used to be much more of a dialect continuum. Every village had their own dialect, and you could understand everyone around you.

But if you went from Castile to Paris, you'd go from hearing Spanish to hearing French. It's just that between them, you had dozens of intermediate languages/dialects that transitioned very smoothly. It's not like today where if you cross a border people go from speaking French to speaking Spanish.

A large part of the nation-building project in Western Europe was to force everyone in the country to learn and use some standard dialect. So very few people now speak Occitan, Picard, Burgundian, etc., and instead speak standard French.

This is also why the stereotypical NJ Italian-American pronunciation of things sounds so unlike Italian.

It's not that Americans somehow turned "pasta e fagioli" into "pasta fazool". They turned "pasta e fasule" into "pasta fazool", which is a much smaller leap.

She's a 37 year old divorced grandmother.

You're essentially correct, there, but slightly off on a couple details. About a month before her divorce finalized, she was kicked out of a musical for vaping and being rowdy with her new boyfriend.

You can argue, sure. But people have actually studied this, and you're factually just plain wrong.

You've seen the centralized waste. But you haven't picked through a neighborhood's worth of trash cans to put that centralized waste into the larger decentralized context.

Keep in mind: the largest source of food waste is residential. The second largest source is restaurants.

Food waste is bad for the environment, sure. But the rent being too damn high is a lot more of the reason why people go hungry than me letting a bagged salad in my fridge go bad.

The idea of a Pokémon clone isn't protectable, but existing Pokémon are.

You can make a Pokémon clone with entirely novel monsters, but if a judge thinks they look too much like an existing Pokémon they're gonna have a problem.

Cruise ships are pretty big polluters, yes. Cruise passengers have about 8x the emissions that they'd have from a comparable land-based vacation.

But when people talk about ship pollution, they're usually talking about non-carbon pollution.

For example, ships often burn heavy fuel oil, which produces tons of sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain, and NOX, which depletes the ozone and causes smog and asthma.

Cruise ships are bad for the environment, but there's honestly bigger fish to fry. Gas power plants are way, way worse for the planet.

From the article:

"Our office cited an AP report yesterday that the IDF had hit a Baptist hospital in Gaza. Since then, the IDF denied responsibility and the US intelligence assessment is that this was not done by Israel," she wrote. "It is a reminder that information is often unreliable and disputed in the fog of war (especially on Twitter where misinformation is rampant). We all have a responsibility to ensure information we are sharing is from credible sources and to acknowledge as new reports come in."

Omar called for a "fully independent investigation to determine conclusively who is responsible for this war crime."

It sounds like she acknowledges Israel probably isn't behind it, but also isn't apologizing for her initial remarks like some Republicans were calling for. The story should probably mention that higher up and more explicitly, rather than burying the lede.

Misfires happen, but "rocket falls short of target on empty field" isn't a news story; you'll never hear about it. You'll only hear about them when they result in tragedy.

It's not saying that the top row can support at most 100 people.

Just that if you have 100 people per hour, you need something like what's in the picture. The train tracks aren't being fully utilized in the top pic, either.

As an aside, you're forgetting that cars are ~15 feet long on average. So you've got an hour of traffic with consistently 1 car following distance, which is fairly unrealistic. Real world capacy of a lane is closer to 2k people per hour, or 4k both directions.

In the US, an apartment you own is called a condo.