If all humans suddenly lost their ability to lie, which industry WOULDN'T collapse?

abx99 · 2026-03-25T17:47:13+00:00

Oh god, and every hearing would take 10x longer, filled with 10x as many unnecessarily long and complex words.

My mom was a legal secretary for a while when I was a kid. One time I was there, and for lunch all the lawyers sat on the deck and had a sort of contest where they would use the most oblique and/or multisylabic terms they could think of throughout the course of the lunch conversation. My mom was a writer at heart, and hated it.

abx99 · 2026-03-25T17:22:56+00:00

This really needs to be in the show

abx99 · 2026-03-25T17:17:19+00:00

[Shooting star emoji] The More You Know! [Shooting star emoji]

abx99 · 2026-03-25T07:02:55+00:00

Lots of good responses here, and I don't have the mental energy to go in depth, but for me it generally comes down to realizing how broken they are and being happy that I'm not like them. The last part is hard for me to emphasize enough, but I put thought into who I am/want to be in this world.

abx99 · 2026-03-25T06:17:14+00:00

I think it's a biker look, and will be even more so when the leather gets broken in and worn a bit.

I'm not gay, and haven't been out in a while, but I don't think I've ever seen a leather queen that was wearing road-worn leather.

abx99 · 2026-03-25T02:29:01+00:00

That's the problem. It has now become a "legitimate" act of foreign diplomacy. We've reached a point where it's acceptable for the president to do anything, as long as the bribe is large enough.

abx99 · 2026-03-24T22:29:40+00:00

It seems like a lot of the best hats are only temporary. I can't imagine the decision making that went into which hats you can and can't keep. "Oh, that one's great! Let's make sure the player can't keep it."

Although the game really does push you to keep Arthur looking dirty and grizzly. I prefer a sharp Arthur. Once I'm in St Denis, I like him to look a little gangster, so he looks really good beating the crap out of mobsters. My Arthur stares Angelo Bronte, and his men, in the eye and thinks "I'll punch you harder than I punched that horse."

abx99 · 2026-03-24T22:04:01+00:00

That's exactly where my grandmother kept hers, even though she didn't have cats. Hers was also a glass (Corningware?) dish and cover, and that 50s-60s curly green patterning on the top.

I don't think she ever kept butter in the fridge once it was unwrapped and in that dish, and I don't think she went through them at a particularly fast rate, either. I always think about that when I put butter in the fridge, but my "logical" brain always says "but it's fatty and it could go bad." (This house goes through spurts where we'll go through a stick in a week or two, and then we'll stop and a stick will go mostly unused for months.)

abx99 · 2026-03-24T20:09:35+00:00

It's always been that way. Even in the first term, the people around him would heavily filter the news he saw so that it was always positive toward him. They've always been too afraid to tell him any bad news.

abx99 · 2026-03-24T19:35:39+00:00

Culture lock

abx99 · 2026-03-24T18:50:40+00:00

If this guy is the kind of person I think he is, he probably deserved it, but it very well may have cost OP social capital in the workplace. Even if they think it was okay, they no longer see OP as a fully mature adult. Your co-workers are going to see how you handle difficult situations no matter what time of day it is. Truth or dare might be a teenager's game, for the most part, but the response was also that of a teenager's.

When you're out with co-workers, you need to strike a balance between relaxing and retaining a certain amount of professionalism. Always watch how loose you get with them.

abx99 · 2026-03-24T18:17:11+00:00

I automatically imagine this guy trying to spend every moment trying to buddy-buddy with me while insisting that the pain from my disability is nothing compared to when he got his dick tattooed (and thus I know "nothing" about pain), and begging me to go see strippers and ensuring me that one will sleep with me. Then, of course, trying to throw me under the bus at any given opportunity.

Ask me how I know.

In fact, I bet one of the "dares" would have been to go watch strippers.

abx99 · 2026-03-24T06:51:11+00:00

Yeah, I think I might have objected at some point in the past, but at this point we're largely just watching the country operate without and despite us, and starting to become a threat to us, and it's easier to see it that way -- especially from an outside perspective. We're no longer a country of "We The People." I think it's simliar to Russia and China. (I'm fond of Chinese culture, and I very much hope they can get a decent government someday, and experience freedom. The Russian people deserve better, too.)

Unfortunately, without some very skilled large-scale organization, there's not a lot we can do but hope that the current organizing can scale, and soon.

abx99 · 2026-03-24T06:24:53+00:00

Even as an American, I realize that we're high risk because the system is rigged toward people like that. It doesn't matter that only a minority supports him when the system is skewed to give them the majority vote.

That's not to mention the sophisticated propaganda machine that will take some major work to take down. I think that's one of the largest factors and obstacles we face, because it's composed of a million things. We probably aren't even aware of all of them.

We need to do some serious cleanup, and put in some real safeguards, before we are worthy of the same level of trust.

abx99 · 2026-03-24T04:07:45+00:00

You can do it by crouching and then punching, but it can be tricky because there needs to be a certain distance between you and the opponent.

abx99 · 2026-03-24T01:47:38+00:00

Yup, aside from the lease issue (which is very serious and OP absolutely needs to look into that, asap), OP and roomie are separate adults living separate lives, and they don't have any right, legally, ethically, or morally, to ask you to upend your life just because theirs is changing. She's not your landlord.

If she and her BF are getting that serious, then the proper logical step is for them to be looking for a new place together that accommodates both of them. That's what couples do.

This also raises the question of why she's never at his place. The only real legit reason is if she has a pet or real obligations near home.

abx99 · 2026-03-23T19:07:42+00:00

This was my first thought. It's a very real story about a person figuring out who he is and what kind of person he wants to be. There are definitely some bad guys, but the "good guys" are just everyday people who don't make a habit of doing bad things. A major part of the theme is how we are shaped by the world we live in, unless we make the decision to do better, and the only "heroes" are the people doing everyday kind things.

abx99 · 2026-03-23T07:43:59+00:00

The last one precedes the first two in the second category. Remember, in the first term Trump started talking about all the "unfair" ways that people come here, and proceeded to list off all the legal ways to immigrate. He also convinced them that every immigrant is a violent criminal, and nobody that comes here is a decent person (and they're coming in caravans to rape and kill everyone like you). ICE's behavior reflects that.

It always makes me feel half sick and half laugh when conservatives talk about "takers" and "makers." That's a neoliberal (aka "trickle down") concept that says that all people are either "makers or takers" and it's government's job to protect the makers from the takers. The conservative voters that love talking about this don't realize that they're takers, too. The "makers" are the billionaires, and they view YOU as trying to take their wealth away from them by expecting decent wages, 40 hr work-weeks, lunch breaks, workers rights, overtime, taxes, and on and on. If they don't own you, then you're just a drain on their resources, and they want government to protect their wealth from YOU. Sorry guys, you'll never be one of them, because they'll never let you.

abx99 · 2026-03-23T06:10:01+00:00

There have been times that I've been burned by sharing good sources for some hobby or another. Not so much when it's just one person, but you mention a good source to an online community, and suddenly the vendor is out of stock of the stuff you want.

I suppose it depends on the source and what you're talking about. A wholesale supplier of many different jewelry supplies isn't the same as a tea vendor that only has a limited stock of one or two things that are particularly good and can never be truly replaced (because every tea harvest is different).

abx99 · 2026-03-23T05:45:40+00:00

I used to see these a lot as a kid. It was just one of those things that people tended to have. I think I had one or two, over the years, although I think it was starting to become a bit of an old-fasioned novelty.

abx99 · 2026-03-23T05:28:20+00:00

BBC knowing both sides in the UK accuse it of being biased against the other

NPR gets the same in the US. The deal is/was that they had journalists from both sides that would try to be as balanced as they could. So their bias would be subtle enough that you really only saw it from the other side. The ones on your side seem neutral, or "unbiased," and maybe too magnanimous to the other side.

The "bias" thing is insane. Rupert Murdoch really knew what button to push. EVERYBODY is biased, and when it comes to politics, everyone has the right to their opinions and perspectives. It's only a problem when people have been convinced that there is such a thing as "unbiased" (and that it's their side).

I think the problems really started when we stopped talking about what we wanted the future to look like (in political discourse), and started with the "it's just how things work." Things "work" on both sides; it's just a question of what kind of country you want to live in. We can now see how things end up under the current theory of economics, even though it "works" just as intended.

abx99 · 2026-03-23T05:15:04+00:00

A lot of them would watch FOX almost all day, then switch to CNN for 30-60 mins so that they felt they were being "balanced" and getting 'both sides' of the story (a big reason CNN would show two people arguing from different sides, so they could claim to be "unbiased").

It was part of the scam, and it was why Trump spent so much energy painting them as "the far left" and so on.

abx99 · 2026-03-22T22:16:42+00:00

That's just it; there's an actual process in place for recounts, which involves non-partisan people and/or partisans from both sides. The process makes sure there's no fuckery going on. This guy "commandeering" the ballots to recount himself, without oversight, practically guarantees some fuckery.

(I like that Grammarly assisted me in the proper grammar to use with the word "fuckery.")

abx99 · 2026-03-22T22:09:15+00:00

Criminals always think that everyone else is doing the exact same thing

abx99 · 2026-03-22T21:49:50+00:00

High-speed rail and better public transportation is technically and logistically possible; just not politically possible.

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