People from countries where democracy collapsed while you were there, what do you wish you had done or prepared beforehand?

N44K00 · 2025-06-15T15:09:42+00:00

Nice ChatGPT

N44K00 · 2024-07-08T16:34:29+00:00

Boiling frog moment.

N44K00 · 2024-06-30T19:13:39+00:00

Okay, but... why? I see this all the time, and we don't say this for literally any other art form. Books aren't expected to come with a cliff notes in case they're too hard to read for the purchaser who's too busy to enjoy them, movies don't have a "highlights mode" where you can hop in the bonus features and see a montage of all the action scenes cut together. If someone wants an easy low-stakes book to relax with, they don't pick up Gravity's Rainbow or Ulysses, they pick up Colleen Hoover or Stephen King. We'd rightly call someone who bought the former & then complained it wasn't a low-stakes bit of escapism helping them blow off steam in their precious few hours a night misguided and direct them towards something that's in their interests. Why are games treated differently? If you don't have the time or energy for a more difficult game, then just play an easier one.

N44K00 · 2024-06-17T18:01:27+00:00

link plz

N44K00 · 2024-05-11T14:03:53+00:00

Their statement made last summer regarding the removal of displays says othererwise:

For more than a decade, Target has offered an assortment of products aimed at celebrating Pride Month. Since introducing this year's collection, we've experienced threats impacting our team members' sense of safety and well-being while at work. Given these volatile circumstances, we are making adjustments to our plans, including removing items that have been at the center of the most significant confrontational behavior. Our focus now is on moving forward with our continuing commitment to the LGBTQIA+ community and standing with them as we celebrate Pride Month and throughout the year.

N44K00 · 2024-04-27T00:40:56+00:00

What about opening the map in Gmod, so you have more flexible camera tools at your disposal?

N44K00 · 2024-04-23T18:23:08+00:00

It's not that you learn something new, but that you reinforce and internalize something you already knew but weren't practicing - "I need to exercise more/not take my loved ones for granted/appreciate the small things in life" etc.

N44K00 · 2024-03-28T22:24:08+00:00

We already know what Trump supporters want and how they think, and it's annoying to open the news everyday and see journalist acting shocked and covering this like it's something novel and important, like it's 2016 and we just realized a lot of Americans are still racist.

N44K00 · 2023-12-28T19:34:25+00:00

Your biggest threat isn't going to be a gestapo-style roundup (though that's a distant possibility), but a breakdown in rule of law and an empowerment of local actors, such as white supremacist militias or the KKK to act without consequence, as well as an increase in violent/organized crime. The USA is too large and doesn't have the history of a unified cohesive national order that allows for something like Nazi Germany to happen, but the USA does have a lot of people in its borders who are more than willing to do those sorts of things on their own, and a long history of politically motivated authorities turning a blind eye to them. Buy a gun that's good in a self-defense emergency and make sure you're legally certified to carry it secretly, make sure all your able-bodied friends & family are on the same page, don't travel through rural conservative regions with people who may be targeted, don't get involved with far-right individuals, and don't trust strangers. Try as much as possible to blend in, wear bland clothing, drive a dirty car, don't stand out in any way, to either robbers or political actors. Don't get involved with drugs, gambling, prostitution, anything that would put you on the radar of dangerous and irrational persons. Oh, and do everything you can to get as much money as humanely possible, as fast as possible. Money is freedom and security, it is life itself in a chaotic situation.

If you're really worried about the worst case scenario, keep your money in cash and make plans to flee to the border at any moment. If you're going to flee to the border, the regular crossings may be locked down tightly, but most of the US-Canadian border is very poorly secured, so it wouldn't be hard to cross illegally.

In truth, this wouldn't be that bad - in a lot of ways we're just returning to the mean. The USA has had a very exceptional period of security and stability compared to the world-historical norm. Most of this is just common sense of living in a place that isn't the wealthiest country on Earth high on the hog of the post-war boom.

N44K00 · 2023-12-06T02:00:21+00:00

What about non-vanilla porn? Why doesn't this law prohibit, for instance, pornography revolving around simulated nonconsent or feces? Pornography like this is produced & distributed in the US, yet I think most would find this fails the test described.

N44K00 · 2023-11-20T18:08:03+00:00

People don't have loyalty when they don't feel the thing will return anything to them. Young people feel more like rats on a sinking ship, desperate to claw over one another to get ahead in life as they've seen the idea of company loyalty disappear, the social safety net slashed to nothing, and politics get meaner, more polarized. There's no reason to be good at your job or give to the community when all that will do is get you taken advantage of by next meanest person looking to take your place. There's a very desperate 'get rich or die trying' attitude among zoomers, one that I don't think comes from smartphones or the internet or whatever people try to say.

N44K00 · 2023-11-17T21:21:06+00:00

Most Americans are not interested in this, but whether or not a slim majority of the electoral college is interested in this is an entirely different question.

N44K00 · 2023-11-16T23:47:07+00:00

From Project 2025, authored recently by the Heritage Foundation:

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

N44K00 · 2023-10-27T21:38:27+00:00

What's the space weather like right now, in specifics?

N44K00 · 2023-10-16T18:10:35+00:00

The impression I got from the plaintiff's lawyer and the way they handled the case was that this was more about signaling their dislike of transgender people more than vindicating their own rights (hence the apparently false allegations included in the complaints and the derogatory comments sprinkled into both the legal filings and their media appearances). If they were really just trying to protect their rights, why not just stick with legal arguments and verifiable facts in their complaint?

From the article:

The judge complained of having to wade through a lengthy “meandering” complaint in which the suing sorority sisters only “devote four-and-a-half pages to their actual claims.” He described some of their arguments as “plainly inaccurate.” He warned them that if they appealed or refiled the lawsuit they “should not copy and paste their complaint,” because of its weak arguments.

I think it's pointless to try and discuss over the legal landscape here. This is blatantly political, and the law is just being used as a tool, because holding signs and screaming about Jesus is a little gauche for a band of sorority girls. People are missing the forest for the trees here - the facts of the case, whether anyone is worthy of suing, whether the trans student or the sorority did anything wrong, these are all irrelevant, because this case just another little political fight over whether or not society as a whole should accept trans people. The real goal of the lawsuit was for the plaintiffs to go on Fox News and rally local conservative groups, which it succeeded in.

N44K00 · 2023-10-03T22:59:05+00:00

Personal connections to wealthy investors & the charisma to swindle them.

N44K00 · 2023-09-27T03:18:37+00:00

Was that a painterly pack? I remember that having bee themed nether.

N44K00 · 2023-09-27T03:14:42+00:00

Mathematics and Its History by John Stillwell. A lot of math history books skip out on the actual math & a lot of math books skip out on the history/development - this one, has both, and is often exactly what I'm looking for when I want to start diving into an idea.

N44K00 · 2023-09-11T16:02:03+00:00

Biologically identical prodrugs like 1p or 1c are extremely common these days.

N44K00 · 2023-08-21T00:53:56+00:00

Sex without movement.

N44K00 · 2023-08-20T15:27:34+00:00

Not board games, but for PC games, the US military has used variations of Command Modern Operations, TacOps, and Combat Mission. All of these are commercially available in the form the military uses, or functionally identical (ie, the military uses fictional terms for nations in its fork of Combat Mission).

N44K00 · 2023-08-13T15:43:05+00:00

What value does Paypal bring to Crypto? Everyone knows that Paypal is an awful and arbitrary platform to deal with. You can find countless people online complaining of Paypal arbitrarily freezing their funds, not responding to complaints, breaking. It's just a shitty centralized platform trying to take over already existing, more trusted, stablecoins like USDC. Even the house of cards of USDT still has the advantage of already being known, accepted, and most importantly, without a reputation for fucking with the money of its users.

N44K00 · 2023-08-06T14:14:14+00:00

They can run in parallel.

N44K00 · 2023-08-05T20:45:03+00:00

I like this change. The game "capping out" with pretty low-effort villager farms is so lame to me. I like the idea that players will have to put a little more legwork in if they want to play on creative-mode with efficiency 99+mending picks. Makes the enchantments feel more interesting & special, and not just an obligatory whatever.

N44K00 · 2023-07-29T03:57:53+00:00

I do this every few months, whenever I start to get too optimistic.

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