The corporate news media doesn’t exist to put the good of the country and public service first, it exists to make money, and it’s making a lot of money; they’re not about to fix what isn’t broken just because the country - and the world as a whole - is falling apart.

Yeah, that’s part of the reason why I just dealt with the pain whenever I was prescribed stuff like Vicodin. I don’t want to risk it at all.

I’ve seen plenty of people who think they could take hard, addictive drugs and not get addicted, or that the addiction would be a small price to pay for the highs of the drug. Plenty of people have far too much self confidence for their small understanding of the situation. It’s why drugs like heroin are still around; if everyone intrinsically understood that they’re not worth it, they’d have disappeared a long time ago.

My wife and I usually plan big vacations about a year in advance so that we can follow flight prices and whatnot to get a good deal. We also book a few days at a cabin for our anniversary every year, so we just book the next year’s reservation while we’re there, since reservations can fill up even several months in advance.

Only planning a week in advance seems stressful to me - we planned a last-minute (for us) road trip vacation earlier this month for the long 4th of July weekend, and it was tough to find cheap places to stay that weren’t super grungy.

From what I can understand, they think of freedom not as the ability to do what they want, but as the inability for others to stop them from doing something, so instead of focusing on doing what makes them happy, they focus on the things people dislike about them, making sure that they never feel forced to stop, as that would make them less free.

Yeah, it’s specifically because they’re trying to increase profits for so long that they need to get so incredibly meticulous and complicated with how their business works. Companies that just try to earnestly provide a desired service to people who need it in their area of operation don’t need to worry about such details.

That’s exactly it. Determinism is the idea that all the various forces of the universe impact things in such a way that, however things play out, it’s how they were always going to.

Imagine a time in your life when you made an impactful decision, and imagine you can go back in time to that moment. However, when you do everything is the same - you’re thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same feelings. You’ve had all the same experiences, and are in the same frame of mind. Every single atom in the entire universe is exactly the same as it was in that moment. Would you ever actually make a different decision from what you had in that moment?

Determinism says no - if you had the capability to know the exact state of the universe in a single moment, you’d be able to tell what the next moment’s state would be, and on and on to the end of the universe, since it’s all nothing more than a single incredibly complicated chain reaction.

I didn’t really see people mentioning that “would” can still be used past-tense outside of “would have,” though it’s not in the same way - you use it when talking about something that happened multiple times in the past. For example, “When I was a kid my friends and I would go to the pool every Saturday,” which means that, as children, my friends and I did visit the pool every Saturday.

Another issue is that information is easy enough to find that people don’t bother to remember things as much anymore, since they can just look up the majority of stuff on Wikipedia or something if they ever need to know it. It leads to people having a smaller pool of background knowledge, which makes them easier to mislead.

Microsoft was screwing over consumers before Google was even founded.

Maybe I’m basic, but I love exposition over pretty much all else. I watched the entirety of Adventure Time despite not really being a fan of the humor or the main characters just because I craved more information about the history of Ooo.

Did you get the chocolate cake shake with it?

I mean, the bleak thing is that the world works through people making deals with murderers to not be murdered, instead allowing other people to be murdered. I don’t give a shit about her gender, I just want a story about a good person winning in spite of corruption, not a bad person winning because of it.

The robot was my favorite. I liked making him blow up and come back.

As bleak as it is, given the high amount of other political opponents that died, the fact that she didn’t is likely an indication of how nice she plays with the people doing the murdering. I’m hopeful that she’s just good at dodging assassins, though!

Makes sense. I’ve always been disappointed that instead of using better processing power to make bigger, more complex games, we used it to make the same games with more complex animations and details. I don’t want a game that only differs from its predecessors through use of graphical upgrades like individual blades of grass swaying in the wind, or the character starting to sweat in relation to their exertion; I want games with PS1-PS2 graphics and animation quality, but with complex gameplay that the consoles of that era could only dream of being able to handle.

Go for it, bud.

I’ve always felt that republicans were the ones to push pronouns mattering, to the point of obstinance; they frequently get worked up about people’s genders, and refuse to use pronouns that differ from what they believe to be the “correct” ones for a person. The lefter people understand that pronouns really only matter to the person who identifies with them, so we’re fine calling people whatever they want, since it’s their choice and we don’t really care what they choose in the end.

Yeah. Obviously if a candidate is a criminal that should invalidate them in the eyes of any sane voter, but really the bar should be a lot higher for anyone to be happy with their choice. The real motivation shouldn’t be to vote for the lesser of 2 evils and call it good enough, it should be to literally fight back against corruption until we have options we actually like. Obviously it’s too late for that in this election, but we should already be getting started in the fights to get someone worthwhile in the 2028 elections.

This looks really cool - I put in my beta tester registration!