cheeseomlit

He was always a propaganda tool, he just did a better job of it when he was in-character and had funny writers

That doesn't really make sense considering low-income demographics have the highest birth rates

Around here the end result of the flavored juul pod ban was a proliferation of cheap chinese disposable vapes with all the fruity flavors, while juul was relegated to virginia tobacco and menthol flavors only, so now everyone just gets the disposable ones. Big win. Makes no sense to me, if juul ran an ad they didn't like then just fine them and pull the ad- don't pull the product while allowing others to sell a shittier version of it.

Those 5 billionaire guys do want this- The french revolution probably wouldnt have happened the way it did if they had to deal with an army of terminator robots

Just ban smoking indoors then

Back in the day I remember my brother got his hands on a PS1 modchip, but it didn't require any soldering- you just plugged it into the "parallel I/O" port in back of the console and it let us run games on burned CDs. We really got our moneys worth at blockbuster after that

What would be your next move after shooting your commanding officer? You're a dead man yourself after that. Possibly even shot by your fellow soldiers who did drink the kool-aid. And your family back home would probably face consequences as well.

I wondered the same thing when reading about WW1 where soldiers were ordered to charge at enemy trenches and they'd predictably get mowed down immediately, then the officer would send the next group out. I can't help but think 'just shoot him', but it's a lot different actually being in that situation vs. reading about it

'Ewe Heard Me!' reminds of that looney toons sheep raider game on ps1. And it's exactly the kind of game I'd expect a dog to make

I'm just questioning the 'most users' aspect- just anecdotally among my 'normal' peers those big servers dont seem like the most common use case. For every big million-user server there could be a million private 10-user servers

Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people

Do they? Personally I've never willingly joined one of those massive servers, only when forced to by some projects that refuse to host their content anywhere else- and its always a terrible experience. 99% of my discord usage is just a group chat with my IRL friends, so when looking for alternative I dont really care about roles and moderation and bots at all. I just want a group text chat, a mobile client for it with notifications, and drop-in/drop-out voice calls

Yeah, after he was forcibly injected with drugs against his will.

Mr. Wright said the hospital later apologized to him and gave him a $50 gift card for a restaurant. The crisis center also apologized and gave him a $25 Walmart gift card.

That alone would be enough to drive me clinically insane

For me the real headaches emerged when I started writing [Tool] classes in C# for scripting within the editor itself. I don't know enough about the lower level nitty-gritty stuff to explain it, but I basically had to close and re-open the editor every time I recompiled. It had something to do with not being able to load assemblies, for example if I had a Tool script which referenced a sqlite library. There were also some concerning instances of Exported properties losing their saved values, though in that case they can at least be restored from previous versions of the .tscn file from version control

Agreed 100%, C# is obviously a second-class citizen and I'm not going to waste my time with GDScript. It really is a shame because there are so many things to like about Godot, but the litany of issues with C# support due to their focus on GDScript has just soured the whole thing for me. Unity is just not an option as far as I'm concerned due to their bizarre licensing fiasco (and their own mountain of technical issues). So it's Monogame/FNA for me I suppose.

Anecdotally, I have mentioned PRISM to several non-techie friends over the years and none of them knew what I was talking about, they know 'Snowden' but not 'PRISM'. The amount of people who actually cared about the Snowden leaks is practically a rounding error

including facts

What do you mean? When a Fremen dies they extract all the water from their body- Paul is given the water extracted from the Fremen he killed in a duel. And when the Fremen first encounter Paul and Jessica I think one of the first things they say is basically "so why shouldnt we just kill you for your water right now?", meaning the water in their bodies

Yes, but there were practical limits to currency debasement when the currency was a physical commodity with intrinsic value. People notice when their coins start getting filled with lead, and there were serious political repercussions for it. You cant just conjure a trillion gold/silver coins out of nothing like you can with fiat, and the ability to do so is 100% guaranteed to be abused.

it is designed to protect UK citizens

Is that really what it's designed for?

And as far as the PRISM comparison goes, I'd rather mass surveillance not be done at all, but if it's being done no matter what I'd rather it be illegitimate than official policy. At least they have to jump through some hoops for parallel construction that way, and it doesn't normalize the practice as morally/socially acceptable- it's a "secret" because its embarrassing and shameful for it to exist in a "free" society. If its not a secret and nobody is ashamed of it then you dont even have the pretense of a free society anymore

Ask for it?

Nice edit. I'm not sure "don't put an ipad in front of your infant" qualifies as "unproductive" or a "hot take".

If that were true I wonder how much the emergence of fentanyl influenced the decision to pull out of Afghanistan

Not so sure about that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson

Probably beside the point because I imagine the author just wanted to show a neat math-based solution, but in this situation with no dice available I've just used playing cards. If you want to simulate a 6-sided dice roll you grab cards 1-6 and shuffle, nice and simple

Branding surely played a role too, microsoft is constantly upping the ante on naming things as terribly as possible. I'm an avid gamer who follows gaming news and I couldnt tell you the difference between an xbox series s vs xbox one vs. xbox series aeiou and sometimes y. It's almost as bad as .net framework -> .net core -> uh.. lets just call it .NET actually that won't be confusing for anybody

I'm not advocating that people not be allowed to vote, I'm just pushing back on the dogma of more voter participation = better, IE. just because you can vote doesn't mean you should if you dont understand what you're voting for and don't really care enough to learn.

Seeing the constant barrage of campaign ads every couple years made me think about it- Why does campaign financing matter, how do they turn money into votes anyways? The answer apparently is ads, but I see these bottom-of-the-barrel slop political advertisements and wonder how that trash could possibly have a measurable effect on the outcome of an election. But it must work, otherwise they wouldn't spend so much money on it. And the fact that elections can be meaningfully influenced by the amount of ads a campaign can run is a signal to me that the democratic process is broken in some fundamental way. The votes of well-informed constituents are drowned out by the more numerous cohorts of partisans, reactionaries, and the apathetic just going through the motions to fulfill their 'civic duty', so it seems to me that increasing voter participation without changing anything else is only going to exacerbate the problem

We need to do everything possible to increase participation in the democratic process

Do we? Participation should be made easy for those eligible and inclined to do so, but I don't see the benefit of encouraging participation from people who can't be bothered to put some effort into it, or are ignorant of the issues and candidates and are easily swayed by trashy campaign ads. I've seen the statistic thrown around that less than half of americans can even name the 3 branches of government, and if that's true I think those people have a civic duty not to vote.

The difference is magnitude, the benefits that European countries provide has made them a very attractive destination for immigration, so it stands to reason that something like UBI would make them even more so. No matter which side of that debate you're on theres a point where the math breaks down and some difficult choices need to be made, either you provide these generous benefits to your citizens or you have a generous immigration policy, but both of them together may prove unsustainable

They downvote because it makes sense and they can't refute it

Ok but for every person who tries to save a stranger from drowning how many other people choose not to? Probably not 0. If I saw a stranger drowning and they were larger than child-sized I probably wouldn't attempt it- apparently its pretty common for the drowning person to panic and use their savior as a raft, drowning them in the process

It's not about writing off the injured due to their low odds of survival, its about your willingness to lower those odds for your other loved ones, or yourself. How does your thought experiment change when caring for your mother/father means your children might starve?