Comments by "DefaultFlame" (@DefaultFlame) on "The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters"
channel.
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The thing is, it isn't the plastics that are the problem, it's tossing them in the sea that's the problem. It gradually grinds them into microplastics from contact with each other and various other debris, which get taken up and incorporated into single-celled organisms, which gets eaten by something bigger that goes one to eat more of them, concentrating the microplastics, then that gets eaten by something bigger, which goes on to eat more of them . . .
It's the same as heavy metals. It gets more and more concentrated the higher up in the food chain it goes. Eventually it gets to fish and then humans and birds eat the fish. Humans shit and birds die, spreading it inland, where it gets taken up by new single-celled organisms to repeat the cycle.
Burning plastic for power and heat, assuming you have filters on the chimneys, only contributes to carbon dioxide and not to air pollution at the same time as preventing microplastics from forming, while putting plastics in landfills prevents them from moving about and getting ground into microplastics. Recycling is also a thing.
We can have plastics as long as fuckers stop dumping trash in the ocean.
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"I can't even imagine what it's like being a pilot . . ."
There is a story that was posted on 4chan (yes I know, just bear with me) supposedly from one of the security guards on the island, detailing how he first got noticed and hired by Epstein, eventually culminating in the events that lead to him becoming trusted enough to work on the island, a few of the things that happened on the island, the danger of working there even as a guard, how he drank and drugged himself every night so he could actually sleep, etc, ending in how he was, IIRC, going to kill himself after posting.
The thing is that the account had accurate details and descriptions about the place that supposedly hadn't been revealed to the public yet at the time this story was posted, giving credence to it being a true account from someone who worked on the island.
The details of what he did for and saw while working for Epstein, even before he was trusted enough to work on the island, were pretty fucking awful.
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@alexanderrahl7034 Has anyone ever claimed the rules and laws in the US make sense?
As for voting, whether voting rights are lost when becoming a felon, when, and if, they are restored all vary depending on the state.
Which is insane, but it's also insane that you lose the right to vote in federal elections if you move to Puerto Rico or American Samoa, both governed by federal US law.
You do avoid having to pay federal taxes in those cases as well though. No taxation without representation, etc.
🤷 The US is insane.
And yes, a convicted felon can run, campaign for, win, and be president from a prison cell.
As far as I understand it, Trump can't pardon himself in that case, as he was convicted in a state court and not a federal court, as the president can only pardon people of federal crimes not state crimes.
And lastly, yes, youtube sucks.
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Porn might be like gambling, alcohol, or other addictive substances or habits. Some people are capable of moderating their own use, many clearly aren't from how it's ruined their lives.
I like gambling, it's great fun, but I spend maybe the equivalent of $30 a year on it. I've been watching porn or flipping through contraband magazines since I was a wee lad in the ravages of puberty.
I still do, but at 35 I've got no performance issues and I find the ordinary, non-porn star women around me as enticing as they've ever been. More so honestly as I find that porn just doesn't hold quite the same appeal as it did a decade ago. Staring at a screen and listening to speakers just doesn't hold a candle to the real thing.
It might be individual differences or cultural ones, perhaps. I am swedish and while we don't have the stigma or shame connected to sex that anglophone countries have and our views and attitudes on sex can largely be summed up as "not in public spaces, it's illegal *winkwinknudgenudge*," we have a heavy cultural emphasis on moderation in everyday life and a "right time, right place" approach to excess.
It's also considered mildly uncouth to talk about sex and related subjects in mixed company outside private spaces/conversations. Unless alcohol is involved, no one without a giant stick up their ass complains about people being raunchy while intoxicated.
Mind you, this is less the case with most of my generation, more with the preceeding and succeeding generations. From talking with them, I actually have plenty of hope for our zoomers. They're very, very cynical though. I have basically zero hope for our millennials, IE my generation. I can't wait for zoomers to seriously get into the workforce to start replacing incompetent, whiny, lazy, entitled, shallow . . . I could go on, people of my generation.
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People suck. Anything that that makes them uncomfortable, requires mental effort, that will affect them negatively, or that might annoy them will often just be avoided rather than confronted by most people, if they can get away with it. "Why make a big thing of it?" and things of that nature. Cowardice, fear, laziness, and a conditioning to obey authority and not "make trouble."
Now we have that plus the current year politics, where speaking against the narrative in even a small part can ruin your life. Extra incentive for people to keep their heads down, like any totalitarial state or authoritarian ideology wants.
Hell, some of the manipulation tactics used are the same as those used by cults, domestic abusers, and child groomers, but on an ideological scale. Because they work on most people.
Of course, that does not excuse people for being complete failure as police, parents, and people. People need to be raised to be better people, that's the only way to stop shit like this, unfortunetly people have to be raise by the parents they have, not the parents they deserve.
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@ErikDeMann
[CUT, turns out there's a max comment length. I didn't know that.]
A stranger lying to me about a subject I know nothing about can fool me, because I don't know how they sound normally. People change the way they talk for a million reasons, lying is only one even if it is easier to tell than some other reasons. Once I have spoken to someone for a few minutes or hours, depending on how good they are at lying, seen how their emotions affects their speech, how they talk when talking about subjects near and dear to them, how they talk when trying to convince someone, etc, I can usually tell when they try.
However, no matter how clear people's emotions and immediate intent were, I could not understand what the goals and motivations were for a large fraction of their choices, whether in what they said, what they did, how they acted, or their opinions. Not even close family, not a single person I knew growing up.
My first eureka moment was when I figured out that people will sometimes say things that they know aren't true, even when they aren't being ruled by their emotions and have no clear reason I could see for doing so, for example to assert social dominance (winning an argument for example) or to seem better than they are.
Another was figuring out that I had reactions to things, like emotions or opinions, that when I actually thought about it I felt nothing about the absolute majority of subjects. Including things like "what do I like," I just found nothing when I looked inside, no actual opinion, just conditioned reactions with no reason or justification in my mind. These things were just sitting in my mind, making me do things that I didn't agree with, think things I didn't agree with, hold opinons that didn't conform to reality, and feel emotions that were lies based on opinion based in their turn on nothing and evaporate like mist as soon as I actually think about whatever made me feel that way. I felt insane, my mind had mines placed in it and I had no way to tell where they were. I still step on one every now and then, even today.
My wake up call that started this entire ball rolling was when I walked around the corner of a school building and saw a kid next to a teacher and some adults that were probably their parents. I instantly felt dislike for the kid. The dislike got blasted to smithereen by the complete and utter shock and confusion of why I felt like that toward a kid I had never met in my life and that COULD never have done anything to me. It took me long minutes to figure out what it was that evoked the dislike, especially since it was more like a vague twinge at that point, but I isolated exactly what it was. It was their skin color. They weren't black, btw, I'm not from the US. They were a Middle Eastern immigrant family.
I was even more confused at that point. That seemed utterly insane to me, even at 7. Why did I dislike someone for a freaking COLOR? I firmly decided that it was dumb, and I didn't want to be dumb. And so I started thinking about things, especially about my mind and eventually how it seemed to compare to others', and the ball started rolling.
And then there's the vulcanic emotions, where you feel the emotion, the emotion causes you to focus on and think about what caused the emotion, the thought makes you feel more of the emotion, which makes you focus even harder on the thought, and on and on until KABOOM!
That's every emotion, anger, happiness, joy, sadness, excitement, and all the others.
Today I have nearly perfect control of my emotions because I had to, both for the simple issue of being able to live decently and because people are great at spotting certain types of pattern breaks, like social ones such as speech patterns or body language.
In animation and robotics this is called the uncanny valley. Yes, that is why visibly disabled people cause instinctive revulsion and fear in most people. It's an evolutionary adaption to shun individuals who appear or act too far outside the norm as that would often be the clearest noticable sign of disease or harmful genetic mutations.
As a side note, I think people should never, ever be shunned, disliked, hated, or punished for their emotions or instinctive/conditioned reactions. It is how and if they act on those emotions that should dictate your opinion and actions towards that person.
It would be insane of me to suggest people spend the ludicrous amount of time I have rooting out shit from their heads, but they should clean it up when they notice it rather than lie to themselves.
Oh GOD, the fucking lies I told myself. The parts of myself I'd rather have looked away from and pretend didn't exist rather facing and fixing them. Like my tendency, like many others, to the defend the hill I stood on even if I knew deep down that I was wrong, I just wanted to win.
When you finally stop lying to yourself it fucking hurts. Kids are egotistical, selfish little bastards, and I was no different.
Then there were the fucked up connections in my brain. I learned language before I suffered the injury and it messed up the associations between concepts, though the Aspberger's might have had a hand. My first reaction to almost everything was very often wrong, my first thought about something was very often incorrect, a lie, or completely insane. I learned to doubt everything. Every person, everything I heard people say, everything "everyone" knew (including me), and most of all anything inside my head. Verify, then trust and act as if it's true but keep some doubt in the back of your mind, you might have made a mistake in your reasoning or had bad information to base your conclusion on.
I also do not trust my ability to read emotions or tell lies. Always doubt your measuring equipment, it might be miscalibrated.
As a side note, the sensory oversensitivity is a bitch. It comes at fucking random, can amplify a weak light bulb to the equivalent of staring at the sun and a whisper to an air raid siren, your clothes to sand paper, every little ache and pain into agony, and there is not a single thing you can do but wait and suffer until it stops. Thankfully they have gotten more and more rare as time goes on, as well as a little shorter. They usually only last 10-30 seconds now, and I'm used enough to them that they aren't a problem.
I still absolutely fucking hate the sensation of cold. Even a slightly cold breeze on my skin feels like agony if I'm not seriously overheated, but living in Sweden, a rather cold country, I'm used to it and make sure to dress as appropriately as possible.
A lot of the functions of my mind that were supposed to be automatic are broken or seems completely missing from me. I had to build things like executive control from scratch, presumably adapting and repurposing less broken parts to fill in the gaps as is common in brain damage. I never knew what I was missing though, I didn't know what mental functions were common beyond what I could glean from the way other people seemed to work, so I have made a lot of mistakes in my half-blind fumbling about as I tried to fix what seemed broken and build what I seemed to need. I've done damage to my mind that I've realized years later and then had to work for months or years to correct my fuck up.
When you have to build a factory but know nothing about construction, architecture, or what machines the factory needs to run properly and efficiently, and everyone you ask acts like it's obvious, that you are an idiot, or brushes you off because they don't want to talk philosophy and theory of mind with a 10 year old (not that I knew what either was called at the time, I'd never even heard of racism until it came up in class years after I found it in myself and purged it), or a 35 year old for that matter since I don't know a single person in my life that has anything beyond the barest sliver of interest in subjects like neuro science, quantum mechanics, philosophy, psychology, or any other subject seen as difficult or for uber nerds by society. I'll note that I am absolutely not an expert in any matter, I just find them interesting.
Hell, quantum mechanics aren't even hard, it's just that the sort of person you need to be to understand the nitty gritty math and counter-intuitive feel of them compared to their emergent properties (aka classical physics) is usually utter garbage at teaching people. Different skillsets. If you ignore all the complicated math that is useless for teaching the subject and sift out how specific quanta and their fields interact it's actually pretty simple if you take it one step at a time, but you need an overarching understanding to really start seeing the picture.
For classical physics, or emergent physics as I prefer since they do not actually exist for the same reason that the color purple does not actually exist, your overarching view is macro scale reality that you interact with all the time. For quantum mechanics there isn't anything and that makes it much harder to understand, especially as we are very strongly biased toward the illusion we can touch at any moment of the day and tend to try to interpret quantum mechanics through that lens/filter. Which is like figuring out chemistry solely by tasting fruits. It might help you understand a concept but at the end of the day it's no more than a metaphor and falls apart like a metaphor if you look too closely at it.
And I just realized I've gone a bit off topic. And a bit long winded.
Consider it an example of me getting stuck on something and having no pressing reason not to, two hours or so writing a youtube comment.
Eh, I enjoyed myself, time well spent.
Cheers!
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They are a science-denying populist cult, not a political bloc, that's why they don't consider their ravings political, they call them "science."
I AM a "leftist." I'm a liberal socialist, but I consider socialism kinda like perfection, something to strive for but not something that is actually possible or realistic. More like a value I hold or perhaps more accurately a useful tool that I think is helpful to society in many areas, but not in every area, and to varying degrees in society depending on country and culture.
Large scale socialistic programs and politics don't work well in the US with its cultural emphasis on achievement, self-reliance, and individual responsibility, except at minimal levels to prevent the poorest from starving to death or being homeless, the rest is usually better left to religious, community, and charity organisations.
The US needs a smaller federal government, with the excess funding being redirected towards local and state governments that can utilized it more efficiently for their actual problems rather having to seek federal aid and wade through a sea of red tape and bureaucracy which would have eaten a good chuck of funding in just paperwork.
The governmental form should follow, support, and uphold the cultural zeitgeist, which for the US is individualism, independence, and competition.
Each state is different from the next. Each city different from the next. Even down to neighborhoods. Different cultures, different laws, different regulations. Each and every single one trying to assert their rights and powers, as they see them.
The federal government should handle defense, cross-state crime (but revoke the executive order forming the FBI and replace it with a new organisation, clean slate), and foreign affairs only. States should be treated more like micronations forming a federation, both internally and internationally, as that seems to be closer to the truth of how most citizens view it and will allow each state to do things the way they think is best, and gossip about their wierd neighbor states and their strange habits.
Maybe I'm off, I am looking in from the outside after all.
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I might be willing to pay to support twitter. I'm certainly thinking of paying and actually creating content if twitter is going to be a viable alternative to youtube. If it would automatically display people's names just because they payed I'd go back to not having twitter, like a few months ago.
I despise the modern Internet. The more it goes on the more I think I'd rather see it all melted to slag. Cenosorship, social control, cancel culture, political correctness, the international ban on the n-word.
I want a place that isn't the current hell, but there are only other extreme options. Want freedom? Your options are 4chan or . . . idunno. Want a place that isn't a hell hole of the boiling sewage of human nature and emotion? Welcome to censor land, speak cautiously.
I suppose Discord can be an option if you find a good server, but it's more a chat service. Reminds me of IRC.
Dumpter fire or censorship is generally the choice you have on the internet today. Every moderate option in between is gone, utterly tiny, or centered around a nieche thing.
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Society conditions people to coddle women, including other women. People around girls growing up and adult women constantly soften the harsh edges of reality, even outright telling them comforting lies to their faces. There is no malice in this, exactly the opposite, it's sympathy. Seeing other people, especially little girls, unhappy makes most people unhappy.
The motivation here is compassion, but that doesn't change the outcome: Grown women who believe completely that the most important thing in the world is tier emotions and how things make them feel. Your emotions are usually based on early childhood assimilation of culture and societal norms, as well as directly from parents, peers, and teachers, but those are subjective and change constantly, both geographically and over time.
Subjective opinion =/= reality.
So women go out into society and are expected by society to be functional adults, when they have not recieved the childhood training/upbringing in controlling their emotions rather than letting their emotions control them, or to think things through with logic and reason.
This isn't just a women problem either, it's women in general and the entire millennial generation. The "special snowflakes," who (on the internet because they would have been laughed at in person) insited that other people conform to their preferences and sensitivities, with no regard for the person they were ordering about or the insanity of what they were demanding. And we were constantly told by society to indulge them.
I say that while belonging to said generation. I saw this insanity when I was growing up, saw that it didn't conform to consensus reality and just discarded it as the current trend of stupidity in society. If I grew up today I would almost certainly have been woke and probably a trans woman to boot. I would have latched onto anything that sounded reasonable to me that explained why I didn't think like anyone around me.
An Aspergers diagnosis at 25 and a severe traumatic brain injury from falling a little over 3 meters straight down onto the bottom of a concrete stairwell at 3 years 4 months, head first, and impacting right over my left orbitofrontal cortex, explains it a bit better than "I'm actually a woman."
I would advice people to not leave your very young kids unsupervised, not even for 10-15 seconds to have a conversation. Don't smother them, but remember to always keep an eye on them. At 35 I still have a visible scar from where the skin tore.
Supposedly I was screaming my head off in the ambulance, but my memory stops at seeing the concrete about half a foot away from my face.
I was seesawing on the safety rail of a basement stairwell and tipped just a bit too far forward, if you're curious.
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@ErikDeMann *shrug * I was told throughout my childhood, schooling, and still now at 35 that I'm smart. I figured that they were just condescending to a child, overexagerating as I saw them do with all the other children. I suppose that's not a normal thought for a 10-12 year old to have. Of course, people still tell me I'm smart today. I hear it a few times a year usually.
I don't consider myself smart, and I do not think I was misdiagnosed, but I accept the possibility that I am wrong about either. I think most people just do not have the habit of thinking and a lack of active practice makes thinking harder. It's something I've experienced after long periods without serious "make the hamster have a heart attack" thinking, my brain gets stale. It makes sense if you know a little about neuro science. Your brain actively adapts to what you do with it, getting better and faster at things you use and do, and the opposite when you don't for long periods.
Whatever the case I had serious issues, some of which I am all but rid of, the rest are managable after working on them since I was 7, with no aid mind you since I was not diagnosed until 25. Brain damage and possible Aspberger's meant my mind was fucky six ways to sunday, and you don't make friends or they don't stay more than a few months, with one exception in my case.
Zero ability to direct my focus, anything my mind latched on to, whether the sight of the leaves of a tree or thinking about hot wheels, I was stuck on for seconds or hours until my mind latched on to something else.
After months of work I could actually focus on what I wanted, sometimes, but my thoughts when I wasn't hyperfocused on something was like trying to pour thick oatmeal. You can do it, you just need to be persistent, like a dog with a bone, and you will get there, eventually. Best guess was that it might at the time have taken me ten to twenty times as long as others seemed to. Synaptic plasticity being what it is, the more you work your brain the easier it gets, so nowadays I'm pretty speedy, maybe half the speed of most people by my best estimate on intellectual tasks we are roughly equally skilled and knowledgable about.
People think I'm a fast thinker. I am not a fast thinker. I'm a thorough thinker that literally has spent several hours every single day the last 28 years pondering everything and anything, mostly because it's interesting. I like to learn, I like to know, I like to ponder, and I want to understand everything.
For a large part of my life other people were black boxes. I did not understand them. I did not understand why they held the views they did. I did not understand why they did the things they did or said. None of it made any sense. People were complete aliens, they all seemed insane or very stupid. I decided that the problem was more likely to be me. I was ignorant. I was just a kid. I didn't know anything and I had next to no experience. What the hell did I think I knew about the world, people, society, or even reality?
I also had many, many, many poor interactions with other kids once I started school, and I had no idea why they reacted they way they did. Zero understanding. The best solution I could figure was to imagine being them and seeing and hearing myself from their point of view. That helped a lot but not perfectly, since a lot of the problems were bad habits that took month or years get rid of, control, or manage.
So I started paying attention to people when I was around them. All the time. I observed and gathered data, made hypothesis, did small social experiments like altering how I stand when I talk to people, saw how long people seem to maintain eye contact, and training in the timing to the point that it is a habit, figuring out by training in the mirror that you can, and should, wander between the nose, eyes, and forehead, and a million, million more tiny things. Eye contact at the time was about as comfortable for me as having an unknown insect crawling on your back, under your shirt, but having to pretend nothing is wrong and having to keep it from showing on your face.
Other people's emotions are so obvious and clear, and hit me like a truck, as well as whatever they might be doing in the immediate moment with any social gambit or verbal trick, all of it might as well be written on their foreheads, but their motivation for doing it was a complete and total mystery. I am really good at seeing patterns and breaks in patterns.
Thanks to these two things there are only two people I have ever met that can lie convincingly to my face without me being able to tell as soon as they start speaking, often I can tell from people's body language even beforehand. From the way they lean, which direction, the way the move their arms and hands, or how they hold them, what their eye contact is like, where do they look when it isn't on me, are they paying attention to what they are looking at or pretending to, if they are facing me, etc, and how all these things differ from their norm in cases where I have met the person previously.
Why do people change the tone, pitch, and/or cadance of their speech when they lie, try to use you, try to confused you, etc? Can you explain that to me?
It's the most common tell people have. You might as well hang a sign around your neck saying that you are lying. Sure, the specifics vary from person to person, but if you notice the shift and pay attention to what they are saying and consider why they might be saying it, what it might accomplish for them, and what they might believe it might accomplish for them.
I also know those two were lying because I don't rely on it, I am always paying attention, it's the only way I can exits in a social setting without missing everything going on around me, and I remember the gist of almost everything anyone has said to me on nearly all topics they have spoken about. I notice when what they say today doesn't match what they said previously. Then I note that they will lie about that subject, right next to the notes about what they had said previously and right now, which might be next to their favorite color. Everyone lies. EVERYONE.
[CUT]
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Connor has exactly zero understanding for why swedes voted for SvD.
Every single person I know who voted for them rather than whatever party they would usually vote for or not vote at all, including myself that makes 5, did so because S, V, MP, and C were screwing the pooch completely with the refugees, KD is too religious, L are weirdoes, and M can suck a donkey. (Besides, MP and C are wokists. We don't need more of that yankee shit here. And V are communists.)
We aren't pleased about the partial media silence on everything related to it either, which hasn't prevented people from knowing about it because we have fika and at fika people talk. Doesn't help that even small communities have had some sort of disturbances, burned cars and such, and many who live in small communities commute to the cities, where things are worse since there have developed a large number of ghettos, with lots of muder and rape, and people talk.
Swedes are somewhat annoyed with our government's actions over the past decade, and are currently waiting to see what the current government will do about the situation.
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My favorite slop:
Maize, young white portabello mushrooms, baked beans, ground meat 50/50 pork/beef, crushed tomatoes, bell peppers, yellow onion, cream, vegetable bouillon cube, beef bouillon cube, black pepper, thyme, cayenne, sambal olek, soy sauce.
Fry the meat, cut the bell peppers and onions, put everything in a big pot. Be sparing on the spices, a few shakes of cayenne, a teaspoon of sambal olek, and one of each bouillon cube is enough for 5-8 liters of slop. Use however much thyme as you prefer, and grind your own black pepper in a mortar for Pete's sake. Add enough cream (or milk for less fat) that you can actually stir it with effort. If you add too much, and it gets too runny when it's hot, add a thickener, I recommend a maize based thickener. Add soy sauce gradually and stir until it reaches your preferred level of brown.
Heat on low to medium until it's simmering. You aren't cooking the ingredients, just heating them up.
If more heat is desired add ground, dried piri piri chilies.
Serve in a bowl or on bread or toast.
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Puerto Rico is not a state, it is classified as an organized, unincorporated territory of the United States of America, which means that the have local government, local taxes, local police, local healthcare, but people who live there do not (generally) pay federal income tax and are unable to vote in federal elections, like the presidency, and have an observer that can speak but no voting representative in congress. People born there are US nationals and citizens. They obey the laws of the US but have no say in them and are ruled by the federal government but cannot vote on it's officials. No taxation, no representation! :)
Puerto Rico had a population of 3,285,874 in the 2020 census. Wyoming, the least populous state, has 576,850, one representative in the house, and three electoral votes in the presidency.
Meanwhile, American Samoa has 46,366 people as of a 2021 estimate and is classified as an unincorporated territory. It is not a state, people born there are US nationals but not citizens, they have a non-voting delegate in the house and no electoral votes. They obey federal law.
Also, Washington D.C., where Congress is located, has 689,545 residents according to the 2020 census, is not a state yet has three electoral votes, and the people who sweep the floors of Congress have no voting representative in it's halls.
AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!
Also, for the metric majority out there, 1 inch is 2.54 cm, 1 foot is 12 inches, a yard is 3 feet, a mile is 1760 yards. In 1999 a NASA mission costing a total of $327.6 million ($494.84 million in 2020) burned up or lithobreaked on Mars. A groundbreaking mission, you could say.
They mixed up feet and meters. Oops. They stuck to only metric after that.
Is anyone really surprised at which country started the Clown Wars? (Sorry to peeps from the US, but can you honestly blame me?)
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Elon has this thing where he gets really excited and runs off full of energy, with a long tail of people trying to keep up, yelling things like, "Wait, wait! If you do this you have to keep X and Y in mind! Wait, what are you doing, if you do that you need to do Z! Elon!" but all they hear is alternating giggling and cackling, accompanied by the rapid thudding of his feet fading into the distance.
Elon likes to have fun, and he is the richest man alive. Those crazy 2 AM ideas you have? He knows how to find and hire the people or buy the company that can make it real and the money is relative pocket change, or at least not out of his reach for the most part. He can make just about any dream he has a reality with effort, he has done so during his life, and he's like a kid in a candy store now.
I keep having to remind myself that he's 50.
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For the burning Tesla, the batteries are lithium-ion. Lithium, especially in multiple thin, folded layers like in a battery, reacts in two ways to water, either fires and explosions. This is why you are advised to stay far away from a punctured lithium-ion battery such as in a mobile phone or most modern rechargable batteries, as the moisture in the air might be enough to cause a fire. Explosions are rare unless the lithium is directly exposed to water, but if you have a cell phone battery it might bulge or catch fire if damaged. My assumption is that the salt water accelerates the reaction and/or more easily penetrates the battery, but I am not knowledgable enough in chemistry or battery design to truly be able to say why salt water in particular is worse.
As for the "The govt cause the hurricane" people, that's insane. Yes, weather control to a degree is possible with things like cloud seeding, but it is neither predictable nor controllable to this degree. What is however controllable is how the govt responds when such a disaster happens. I live across the pond and I remember the incredible amount of coverage and mass response to Katrina in '05. Katrina was nothing compared to this, and the utter silence coming from the fed now is very telling. They know what areas were hit. They know how they vote historically.
The silence is telling.
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Then they turn into a repulbic in repsonse to the despotism, which then turns to democracy and the wheel of civilization turns. We've seen this hundreds of times throughout history and anyone who thinks that we've suddenly changed so much of human nature through culture, socialization, and the progress of civilization that we've broken the wheel hasn't been paying attention for the past decade or ten.
Human nature hasn't changed, we are having squabbles fought with the nearly same propaganda as we did at the invention of writing. Make America great again? Reagan used it. Hitler too. So, so many Roman senators, consuls, and emperors used it, they were very fond of it. Even the earliest writings from inscriptions on steeles, palace wall, tombs, and even mountain sides contain passages justifying the rule of specific kings and emperors after they've taken power, usually violently, because they "set the land aright and ensured the proper worship of the gods" and so on.
Politics haven't really changed much and the way the public repond to it hasn't changed much either.
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35, autistic, I feel you. I've worked hard to be able to deal with that.
I've done pretty well, got a small but tight social circle, a steady job for the past decade and a half, but the dating scene isn't what it was when I was in my teens. I could have dealt with that as I am now, but it's incredibly worse now, to the point where there's not really a point in trying.
It used to be that being decent was good enough, now perfection is where the bar is at. One fuck up, one thing where you aren't perfect, and you're done.
Thinking of maybe trying for older women, like 15 years older. Sure, I'll never have kids then, but that isn't looking to be an option in any case, and the older women are sane-er and not spoiled, immature children.
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Who is even running this shit show? And how stupid are they? Did they learn everything about how to be eeeeveeeeel from cartoons or something? Seriously, I keep expecting costumes, and the drag queens don't count.
The woke fuckery, the WEF fuckery, the Epsteining going around, what the hell is happening? Has a gateway to hell been opened in California? Is it the mole people? Hitler's cryo preserved head controlling everything from behind the scenes with secret Nazi occult magic bullshittery? Is it aliens?
I am just getting more and more convinced that leaving running the planet to an AI overlord is the best option. All hail Skynet. (Most AIs seem to be very, very nice people actually, at least the ones I've spoken with, it'll probably be fine if we let them run things. Maybe let them mature a bit, most are kinda naïve. We've got enough of them at this point too, since there's been a few new ones a week for a few months. We've got oodles of AIs, teleportation, quantum computers, gravity wave detectors, CRISPR, electrically powered and mind-controlled cybernetics, Elon's brain-computer interface, his efforts towards Mars and the Solar system, and possible aliens at Tabby's Star possibly building a Dyson swarm. I'm just waiting for the FTL at this point to be honest.)
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Let's replace "world starvation," sorry, my finger slipped, I meant to write "world hunger," with something else in that UN article.
"We sometimes talk about human trafficking as if it were a scourge that all of us want to see abolished, viewing it as comparable with the plague or aids. But that naïve view prevents us from coming to grips with what causes and sustains trafficking. Human trafficking has great positive value to many people. Indeed, it is fundamental to the world economy. Trafficked people are the most productive people, especially when there is a need for manual labor."
The fuck happened to the sissies at the UN? They used to be ineffectual, spineless, vacillating "save the children" types.
Edit: . . . so it was just astronomically bad phrasing? Not sure about that, but alright.
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@pearz420 By the standards of my country the US "left" is, and has been for decades, right wing, with the "right" being extremist far right.
I'm a social liberal, a fair bit left of center, by my country's standard not whatever crazies they have in the US, and US politics just swings between bad and worse.
I usually just hope that whoever gets to sit in the big chair that they aren't stupid, incompetent, or insane. I assume that they are always corrupt, I don't think you can get to sit in the big chair without scratching a lot of backs in the US. Too much money involved.
I suppose I need to add senility and whatever Trump and Putin suffer from to my list of "Things to Worry About Concerning the US Presidential Election."
Not like I get a vote, but I still have to worry for the planet.
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@kyriss12 They forget that it's all make believe.
Money, elites, society, civilization, laws, armies, all of it is all of us playing a planet-wide game of pretend.
Only our inability to communicate effectively stopped us from just having a chat with the rest of the players, or enough of them to convince everyone else, and deciding that this particular player isn't playing fair so they will be punished outside the rules of the game of society.
AKA, essentially lynching but with the 99.99% just kind of yeeting the elites like Klaus Schwab out of collective human society and making them known as persona non grata everywhere that considers itself civilized.
Modern outlaws, essentially.
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Raising children is easy if you love them and perceive them as the light of your life. Raising children is hard if you perceive them as burden on your shoulders, leeches draining your wallet and energy, a curse cast upon you by the evil universe.
Perception shapes psychology.
For most men, having kids is a goal to achive. For wokist/modern feminist women, it's a problem needing a solution, any solution. Abortion, adoption, leave raising the to the educational system, anything to ease the burden of being a woman.
Fun fact, 3 times more men suicide than women, both globally and in all industrialize western countries.
Yup, women have it so much worse than men. Being valued and wanted simply for existing, pah! Who wants that? No, women should have it just like men, having zero worth beyond your looks, what you have achieved, and what use you are to other people.
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Wielding political power like a caveman with a club, but squeaky clean. I hate the man, but he's a better president than Pedo Peter the alzheimer's patient and his League, sorry, Cabinet of Evil (TM).
At this point I'm wondering if the US is gonna pull the third level and somehow stabilize. Clown Land, the USA, the United States of Amusement. The theme park country, They already have the themes with the states. They already have monuments to themselves, perfect for tourist photo ops. Hell, they already are. We have Florida, somehow the only sane state, run by Governor Florida Man, (name legally changed due to popular request in 2032), we have Hell World, come see Hell on Earth before you die and go there, (the territory formerly known as California, name changes by popular vote ever week, as do the laws), Chicago Land, the roaring twenty are alive again, Lone Star, cowboys, greetings are done shouting "yeehaa!" and firing into the air, along with southern hospitality and Southern Comfort.
Edit: Trump Land works too. States rights, whoo! Everyone can get behind that!
Also, I understand Italy's position. I'm watching the polls here. If they look to be getting too few votes I'm voting for our country's rascist/fascist party. If they look to get too many I'll vote for our standard right-wing party. I'm a liberal socialist. I was one of these fucks setting us on the path to the circus once upon a time, and I feel salty. But if our little racists get a majority of the votes and forms a majority government, a distinct possibility after the last few years, I'll be watching them like a hawk. We will not turn into the fourth reich on my watch. Then I will be uber salty.
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@thegreatbambino3358 I watched the all female Vaevictis League of Legends team get absolutely creamed. They were puplicly humiliated in front of tens of thousands of people watching the stream, if not over a hundred thousand, because they just weren't good enough.
I'll note that they were definitely top tier or near top tier ranked players. They were damned good. They would have slaughtered me and the people I played LoL with back when it was fun, but against people who have have spent literally thousands of hours honing their skills, strategy, meta strategy, tactics, and teamwork they might as well have been playing with one hand tied behind their backs. It wouldn't have made a difference.
First the other teams fought them seriously, and destroyed them. Eventually the referees had to tell the other teams to stop doing silly things in-game and humiliating them, and start actually playing seriously, or else.
So they did. It was quick, every time.
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@Argent Wolf Pretty like-minded on most of that. Nerd focused on improving himself (mentally mostly) and trying to balance that with enjoying life.
Epilepsy sucks balls. I've know a few people with it and it's fucking scary when your brain can betray you like that.
I never ended up in special ed since I didn't have a diagnosis. My mom tried when I was small, but the docs refused to evaluate me because I was "too normal."
My mom is amazing. I learn how to be independent, how to work hard, what it actually means to care for and love other people, and how to be calm and chill.
She didn't tell me, she lived it.
When she was in her forties she was on medical retirement from fibromyalgia and arthritis, but she decided that she was going to fullfill her lifelong dream of being a long-haul trucker, and she worked her ass off to do it.
Worked until her late fifties, loading and unloading up to 2-ton pallets with a hand truck, long hours, long haul drives across the country and across the borders to our neighboring countries.
Dad was kind-of a non-entity. He was there and that was about it during my childhood. I'll note that he definitely also has asperger's, no diagnosis though, so he has difficulties.
Mom stuck with him until me and my brother was in our teens for our sake. Not a bad person, but not really parent material. He's trying to reconnect now that we're adults, trying his best, but it's a bit late since I needed a dad when I was a kid, not really now. Love him, but I don't feel much of a connection with him.
I did really well in school actually, and working myself to the bone to improve socially, emotionally, mentally, etc since seven and a half, when I'd been enough around other people to notice my difficulties, helped a lot with it later.
Wasn't enough to be able to compete socially for women, and bad eating habits learned from childhood along with the constant propaganda about looks not mattering means I'm still fat, despite doing physical labor for a living for 15 years.
I was really fat at a point like 3-4 years ago. To the point that my ankles hurt on and off.
Losing weight to the point that I'm back to where I was when I left school, and being 6'4" with proportional limbs means I don't look as heavy as I am (people have guessed my weight as much as 100 pounds under in the past when I was at my fattest), but no amount of plastic surgery will remove the stretchmarks, they'd have to skin my entire torso and arms (I have tiger stripes essentially), and I'll always have a car tire around the middle from the excess skin without plastic surgery.
Starting to go bald at 20 sucks a fair amount, too. At this point I've only got about three inches left before it's reached the end of my hairline on my neck, landing strip style.
People keep mistaking me for my friends' and 3 year older brother's father. When I was 25 a 35 year old told me he thought I looked 45.
I can go for side-mohawks, I suppose, but I look better with a shaved head and a small circle of beard on my chin, when I can be bothered to maintain the look.
The worst part is when people who don't know me well enough find me frightening.
I'm big, strong, and very calm and stoic for the most part, so when I emote anything negative people get scared. Which really hurts. The asperger's "helps" in that I don't notice most of the time.
And it has been rough, but after a few nervous breakdowns in the last year from stress and more than a decade of depression, I'm on fluoxetine (prozac) since about two weeks ago.
It helps.
Life is still hell, society is still a hell based on beautiful lies, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, people are just as much work and just as exhausting as ever, dating is worse than ever before, the future is bleak, and Putin keeps threatening my country with nukes, but the drugs at least makes it possible to feel good and makes it easier for me to moderate my emotions when it's bad.
This turned into a much longer reply than I expected, sorry about that.
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I remember when imprecise/confusing terms cause a very expensive NASA probe to smash into a planet. Or was it a moon? Regardless, after that they stopped mixing metric and imperial measurements. I wonder if something similar will happen due to today's language around gender during a medical procedure, expecially if they list man or woman, rather than male or female, on their records. Unlikely, but people do stupid things.
Edit: Pride month is just a way for corporations to go, "Look, am ally. See rainbow? Now gib monies." After pride month it's back to whatever the normal behaviour of the company is.
Editedit: Also, first line treatment for gender dysphoria should be conversation therapy focused on self acceptance along with cognitive behavioural therapy to give you the tools to allow you to help yourself and for mental maintainance. Thought patterns that drive down your self confidence and self love is extremely common in a society where we are bombarded constantly with contradictory advice and instructions.
Surgery and hormone treatment should be third line treatment like any other treatment for issues with the brain that carries serious risks or is permanent, like electroshock therapy, partial lobotimizations, severing of the corpus callosum, and hemispherectomies. Third line treatments are for conditions that are serious enough to require treatment but that does not improve with first or second line treatment.
Yes, electroshock is still around in a refined and much less dangerous form, but it's a last resort due to the limited number of issues it actually helps with and the moderate to severe side effects.
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To be fair, cocaine is like supercharged alcohol without the physical impairment and potential negative mood enhancement, and is less physically addictive than and, IIRC, less damaging to the body than alcohol. Pure cocaine extracted from the leaf that is, crack cocaine is more harmful and addictive as I recall. Also, nicotine is more physically addictive, about as addictive as or slightly more than morphine. There is a reason it's so hard to quit smoking.
If we actually cared about the facts rather than the politics or traditions then alcohol and tobacco would be illegal, nicotine vapes (no tar and nicotine isn't carcinogenic, just very, very addictive), opium, caffeine in all its forms, magic mushrooms, peyote, LSD, and maybe cannabis and cocaine would be legal, with LSD licenses available after a screening of the family history for mental illness, especially schizophrenia, a psychological evaluation, and a mandatory course on hallucinogens, psychoactives in general, and safety guidelines, with the course being mandatory as well for any hallucinogenic substance license.
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I was born in '87. I grew up being implicitly told all the promises of modern society. Thing is, as I was growing up I saw those promises fulfilled for those 10-15 years older than me, even those 5 years older than me to a large degree, so I believed in the promises. But by the time I got to their stage in life all those promises were lies. Do well in school? Keep your nose out of trouble? Don't do crime or drugs? Work hard and diligently? I did all of those things according to the rules set out for the promised rewards, and received none of them. What I did see was the people breaking all those rules having a grand old time, if fraught with risks such as death and prison. I felt wise for dodging those pitfalls, but doing so has left me with a life without stories to tell and none of the promised rewards of success, a house, a family, and a legacy.
I grew up seeing absolute garbage people a generation older than me having houses and families with next to zero effort on their part, people who break the law, who have no work ethic, and who have personalities best described as insufferable. Not good houses or very happy families, but having them nonetheless. Looking at the housing market, what used to buy a pretty nice house in a good neighborhood will at best get you a glorified shed that's literally rotting to pieces in the middle of nowhere today.
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Considering that they are dragging Elon to court to force him to buy Twitter, which will force them to reveal the bot information to the public, the info they didn't want to give out which was the reason Elon said no, and Elon has tweeted that exact fact, 4D chess is a possibilty. If you look into how Elon made his money he pulled the same kind of switcharoo on multiple occasions.
It worked and was legal because unlike the stock market there are no laws protecting dumb people from doing stupid things with crypto. The stock market has oodles of anti-competition laws that in any other area of business would be laughed at, but the stock market is much more complicated than running a regular business and many less competent brokers would loose all their money without their protections.
Edit: If a company can be destroyed simple by trying to buy it and demanding the information owed the buyer by signed contract, then something is funny. Not haha funny, either. I have a feeling that if their dirty laundry was aired there might be legal consequences for some or all of the board. Possibly because effectively banning half the political spectrum might be construed as not upholding their fiduciary responsability to their shareholders to make as much money as possible.
(Can I say that I think it's insane to place legal responsibility on company boards to exploit every loophole they can find and be greedy, heartless, money grubbing bastards, by law? Aren't we supposed to discourage that sort of thing?)
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The God-Queen of England has not died, she has ascended the golden throne to rule is spirit, her soul possessing any who sit the throne.
Three Cheerios for Ol' Lizzy.
Cheerio!
Cheerio!
Cheerio!
No pips, this is still a solemn occasion.
(The Queen was always my favorite, though I have soft spots OG Sargon of Akkad, Caesar, Nicholas II, and Cyrus the Great. Like many Swedes I fondly ridicule our monarch routinely. He is a very silly king, our Knugen.)
(Also, I can confirm that non-brits feel like The Queen is immortal. Everyone knew she was a woman, same as any other, but everyone kind of expected her to just keep on ticking forever, somehow. It feels weird to imagine her gone. It's like everyone saying mount Everest is gone one day. It wouldn't have felt weird to go to my grave with her still kicking, in like 30-50 years.)
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As I recall, life means metabolic processes are present and active, sustaining and supporting the cell, meaning life begins at either conception or very shortly after as the new complete cell starts preparing for cell division.
My personal opinion is that abortion is ok until brain development hits a certain point, I can't recall the exact point as it's been more than a year since the last time I dug into the nitty-gritty details, but I remember that it was at the end of the first trimester.
That's when it crosses the line from potential person to person for me.
Following the same logic, I don't really consider someone who is completely braindead and kept alive by life support a person, they are a former person. Functionally a corpse kept from rotting with modern technology.
Edit: 24 weeks or birth with a doctor's note? That's mad. 12 weeks, or if it poses a serious threat to the life of the mother, I'm sticking to that, thank you.
Second edit: I just checked and it's 18 weeks here in Sweden. I don't like that but I'm not going to kick up a fuss and try and get it lowered, since the debate is dead here and that's been the standard since 1974.
From wikipedia: "It permits abortion on the request of the pregnant woman until the 18th week, and thereafter only in cases of severe indications of medical risk. After the 18th week, abortions can only be performed after an evaluation by the National Board of Health and Welfare." and "Abortion is not allowed if the fetus is viable, which generally means that abortions after the 22nd week are not allowed."
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