“would you rather have nothing to eat, or poison?”

If you eat nothing, maybe you can figure out a better solution with your remaining time. If you eat poison, you’re probably going to be too sick (or dead) to improve things.

Trump is poison.

Also Biden did improve some things, so it’s less “nothing” and more “some crackers”. Sure, a full meal would be better.

t’s not stupidity, it was a clear option between something the American people know does not work, and something that might work.

There is no reasonable expectation that Trump would “work” for anyone outside of some very wealthy and grifters. So, yes, voting for Trump is stupid.

Accelerationists can fuck off.

I failed calc2 and am gainfully employed as a mid/upper level software engineer.

One guy at work really saved the day because he’s good at math, and made a very slow process much faster because he knows … uh… vector math? He did magic with numpy

I don’t buy a game solely because it’s the zeitgeist or whatever. A friend of mine routinely buys games that are “the new shiny” and then doesn’t finish them, or loses interest quickly. I usually wait for a sale, some patches, and/or the dlc to be bundled into a goty edition.

Some exceptions:

I bought elden ring near launch because I’m a big enjoyer of the genre, and my friend confirmed it was good. No regrets.

I bought bg3 shortly before it’s full access. I’d liked the other games larian did, and a friend told me it was good. No regrets.

Both of those were pretty light on DLC. No season pass or “goty” editions were likely.

I’m going to wait for the dragon age game to go on sale. I don’t really trust Bioware, and I don’t know if they plan to do a bunch of dlc that will get bundled up later.

I’ve been waiting for Lies of P to get cheap. The demo was just ok when I played it, but a friend tells me it’s phenomenal.

Right now I’m playing a MUD (aardwolf). It really distills some online RPG into the essence of “go kill some stuff to level up, get new skills, and kill bigger stuff”. It’s strangely satisfying.

I think you have to also account for the kids’ ages. An infant is different than a toddler, teen, or adult child.

Sure, if you stop externalizing all the costs that let them afford it.

Lots of people never reach more advanced stages of moral reasoning. They don’t do bad things to avoid being punished, or maybe because they have a simple understanding of “it’s against the rules”

The current justice and prison system is abhorrent, but something needs to happen if someone tries to murder someone else. Most people are alright but there are a lot of anti social people out there, too. And a lot of people who would be alright if they were in more stable circumstances

Sex scenes on the other hand, come out of nowhere, add nothing to the plot and only leave you in disgust

These are not universal truths

I remember a bunch of years ago talking about This Film Is Not Yet Rated, and how I thought it was absurd a scene where someone’s brains get shot out and they die is ok, but a non-graphic cunnilingus shot was unacceptable. The two people I was talking to, a woman older than me and someone my age, were both like “No that makes total sense. I’d watch a violent movie with my kid but not one with sex in it”

I was like, “You’d rather your kid run around fantasizing about murder than sex?” And they were like “yeah”

They don’t care about truth, or consistency. They care about power. Specifically, the power of their in-group.

Conservatism has been aptly summarized as “There must be in-groups for the law to protect but not bind, and out-groups for the law to bind but not protect.” That’s pretty much the whole thing. Conservatives are, in a kind of fundamental way, bad people. They value the in-group far too much.

best solution could probably be good public transport in the city and self driving cars in the countryside.

You don’t even need self driving if it’s mostly just the countryside. That’s just not a lot of people and the resources required to get it working would be better spent on building mass transit and walkable areas in cities where people actually live (and thus where culture and economy actually happen)

Yes. What’s blocking you? What circumstances are you in where you want to talk and aren’t?

I think there are voter suppression efforts that target youth. Plus they’re likely struggling to get by and may feel like they can’t spend hours/all day voting.

A lot of conservatives are authoritarians that value group cohesion above most everything else. Going against the group feels bad in a deep way, I think, so all sorts of justifications will be made to stay with the group.

Honestly, as far as I’m concerned that’s a form of stupid. Kind of funny given the boomer cliche of “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump off too?”. It turns out yes, a lot of people would.

Something like half of US adults cannot read at a 6th grade level. That’s like reading for plot. That’s reading a couple paragraphs about like “Sally moved to New Jersey from Maine when she was 17. She went to college at NYU, where she met her future husband Jake. They got married and now have two children.” -> “Where did Sally meet her husband?”. A lot of people struggle with that. And we kind of expect them to keep up with politics.

Some of that is their fault. They don’t try. They don’t want to be literate. But a lot of it is a failure of our public education system. But that is largely the fault of conservatives who don’t want to fund it.

You’re also not going to find a lot of those people on a platform like this that’s mostly written, and where the norms generally a somewhat high level of diction that adheres to standard english.

There isn’t really agreement on who is too shitty to “participate in society”, whatever that means. And if you build a mechanism to exclude people, assholes will use it for evil.

But like if I had a magic wand I would remove all republicans from power. They make it easy by self identifying as shitheads.

Depends a lot on the details and execution.

Some friends can tell a good story about having a beer anywhere. Other folks would make meeting (some well liked celebrity) tedious.

I’m a little too deep into the “I had an onion on my belt” side of things, so I try to be patient with other people’s meanderings.

Among other reasons, caps chill usage. A lot of user content would not get shared because “ehh I don’t want to waste my data for the month”

There’s a lot of like management being like “we gotta hit this deadline (that we made up)” combined with “if I hit all my targets and put in some overtime, the boss can buy another sports car this year”

I don’t want to work extra to make someone else richer. Maybe if I had a shit load of shares. Maybe. But I don’t. So I do my job with professional standards, but I’m not doing 12 hour days