Space itself is 3-dimensional (or 4-d if you include time…and even higher dimensional orders if you want to get into deeper theories).

The reason almost all solar systems (including our own) are relatively flat, or disk-shaped, is because of the way solar systems are formed. Solar systems start as large clouds of gas and dust which coalesce into orbiting objects. The gas, dust, and objects “flatten out” as they spin around the central star because of the physics (conservation of angular momentum).

So even though the planets, asteroids, etc, in our solar system are all mostly moving along a relatively flat plane, the surrounding space is not 2-dimensional. Our planets also vary in how flat their orbits are. For example, Mercury’s orbit has a tilt of about 7 degrees from flat.

Yup!

Yup. Be aware that if you do donate money you’ll get bombarded with snail mail, email, texts, and phone calls for the rest of your days. I don’t say this to discourage anyone from being charitable. Just be ready for that. Politicians are the most aggressive about it.

Years ago I went through a phase of reading his books one after the other. I devoured several of them and had a great time reading. Then I kind of hit a wall with it and haven’t read him since. I still like him, and will read more at some point. But I sort of overdosed on it. I needed to branch out, read other writers, and take an extended hiatus from King. But it was fun to binge on it.

I loved the Dark Tower, but it’s a slog. And he did one thing in that series that made me roll my eyes. But overall it’s a masterpiece. I won’t spoil the one dumb thing, but anyone who’s read it probably knows what I’m talking about. (I’m not talking about the ending. Some people HATE the ending, but it made sense to me once I thought about it.)

His big hits are all big hits for a reason. Some book snobs look down on him, but if you like fantasy and horror, you can ignore the critics. He writes engaging stories in a well-honed style, not high falutin’ literature.

Makes sense.

Ha! Yes, we have various fruity flavors of “licorice” in the US. In an attempt to avoid confusion we sometimes call it black licorice. We sometimes spell it properly, liquorice.

Licorice jelly beans and gum drops are somewhat popular.

Some iffy candidates:

• root beer
• black licorice
• grape

That’s a bummer. I have noticed products like that will often vanish. Or drop dramatically in quality when they swap out quality ingredients for cheaper ones.

Thanks for the followup!

Profits are fine. Have you not been paying attention to skimplflation, CEO bonuses, etc? That’s the min-max mindset I’m talking about here.

Pure speculation on my part, but it’s probably a safe guess to assume some market studies and/or trial runs they did on the flavor showed it wouldn’t make enough profit. It’s always about the money. I’m sure many people would buy it and enjoy it, but we are talking about corporations run by people with expensive college degrees in min-maxing everything for profit.

My employer generally sucks, but one of the few things they do right is give us no-questions-asked PTO. Nobody cares if we take a day, it’s part of our compensation.

I’m with you, I think it’s probably BS. But I suppose it could be taking highly compressed low resolution snapshots.

I had a pair of speakers (studio monitors) with rubberized plastic on them that did this. It was truly maddening. My guess is it’s something plastic/rubber like that. Your phone case is a good suspect, have you taken it off the phone and inspected it inside and out?

As usual the problem is people will bitch about it… but then they will do it anyway. We always forget that voting by keeping our wallets closed is a powerful defense against bullshit like this.

Wholesome Lemmy better than reddit moment going on in here.

Techmoan has entered the chat.

I’ve been acquired by two different cats in variations of this scam.

That mental image is gold. And yeah, corporate raiders suck.