That is quite the well-assembled list. All of the context is helpful for everyone to make suggestions. Also, your comment about Greg Egan is pure awesome.
Gareth L. Powell's "Embers of War" series was excellent. Scalzi's "Starter Villain" had me laughing painfully hard at points.
Whole, modern, domesticated fruits do contain quite a bit of sugar, but that sugar is locked up in fiber. There are lots of anti-sugar crusaders that consider whole fruit to be a "gimme." Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories) and Robert Lustig (Sugar: the Bitter Truth) are two that leap to mind.
We never got rid of slavery in the US. We merely shifted cost of ownership. Quite successfully. The laws have been advanced and tweaked to make everyone a potential criminal, especially if a minority. Prison labor is absolutely legal. The prison system is mostly privatized and for-profit. Healthcare is tied to employment, with dental care (a foundational element of good health) often being an add-on to employer-provided health insurance.
Stop the country, I want to get off.
Refs:
"Bigger and bolder and rougher and tougher In other words sucker, there is no other..."
The Pacific Northwest would be a wonderful place if it wasn't part of the US.
Cascadia Now! Yeah, totally not happening at least until the US implodes, but one can dream.
Children are allowed in Omega Mart and Area 15. Regardless, serious upvote for Omega Mart!
"Stop calling me Shirley."
That's a new depth to "Don't yuck someone else's yum."
Except the results from DDG are also a dumpster fire of affiliate spam "listicles," Pinterest garbage, and unrelated SEO BS. Oh, and Reddit sure has risen in all the results since the APIpocalypse. Almost like big business is all starving each other's backs.
Can confirm: $1000USD is an ISO standard boat unit. "How much will that cost?" "Only about 20 boat units."
Source: own and live on a sailboat.
Conflicted upvote. But seriously, that place was one of the pioneers of public NHL viewing in Seattle. And his restaurant has busy been screwed over and over by circumstance. There was the gas line explosion that damaged the entire block. He's had break-ins, survived COVID, and (if I recall correctly) some BS about there ventilation hood in the kitchen. He absolutely deserves every bit of good luck that can possibly come his way.
I went to a state school in the early 90s. Taking a specific sequence of physics classes was the cue for Navy nuke tech recruiters. And they were aggressive. Turns out someone in the registrar's office would search for students with that class sequence and sell the info to Navy recruiters. The person got fired, and there was a bunch of pearl-clutching. And yet military recruiters are still such a fixture of college campuses.