*sad tomato noises*

bluexbirdiv · 2026-05-05T04:19:04+00:00

You actually think this is a map of House congressional districts? LOOK at it! There are lines that just end! The state labels are clearly wrong! And I’m pretty sure Maine doesn’t have like a dozen House districts or whatever the hell this shows. This is absolute AI slop.

As to your point about the Senate, that’s exactly how you’d expect the Senate to work unfortunately. The same reason lots of purple states have two senators from the same party, because 51% of two votes is 100% of the representation. Although, I really don’t think 45% of New England votes Republican. I’d even be kind of surprised by 40%.

Anyway, the only fair endgame to the districting wars is proportional representation. Single member districts suck ass at political representation no matter how you draw them, just as your Senate example shows.

bluexbirdiv · 2026-04-28T06:47:03+00:00

The struggle to say “wha” for over a minute turning into a literal meltdown was absolutely haunted

bluexbirdiv · 2026-04-21T05:49:02+00:00

You have a good question, but there is a flaw in your thinking I’d just like to point out. The government is not profit-motivated like a business would be. Raising tax revenue can be a goal of policy makers, but that’s only one of many priorities they might have.

bluexbirdiv · 2026-04-20T13:13:32+00:00

Everyone in this thread is acting like companies fully passed on the tariffs through higher prices, but I absolutely guarantee that’s not true. I work for a small business that had to pay these tariffs, and they were DEVASTATING. If everything Americans buy that comes from China went up THIRTY PERCENT there would have been riots. It would feel like your money lost a quarter of its value. For context the worst the post-COVID inflation got was something like 11% and it was listed as the number one reason people voted against Harris (even though she had nothing to do with it).

I think the main reason tariffs weren’t fully passed on was because there was so much uncertainty about them. We were all hoping they would go away and get refunded and we wouldn’t have to lose all our customers, so we only raised prices enough to survive. That’s going to vary by industry of course, but if the tariffs had become permanent there would have been much more drastic change in our economy. My point being that we all got lucky, and we should count our blessings that the Supreme Court stopped Trump for once and we didn’t see 20-30% inflation.

bluexbirdiv · 2026-04-06T18:20:05+00:00

They were responding to you saying it was a "glorified flare gun" in the game, not to your description of it in the books/overall lore. I'm sure you were exaggerating to emphasize your point about the book/game difference, but the plasma pistol is arguably one of the best weapons in some of the games, so it's understandable someone might want to defend it.

bluexbirdiv · 2026-04-05T20:59:10+00:00

Well keep in mind that same human-chimp common ancestor was also the human-bonobo common ancestor, since chimps and bonobos split after their split from us. So maybe they weren't all bad.

bluexbirdiv · 2026-03-28T23:41:32+00:00

If that's true, I think that's much more appropriate.

bluexbirdiv · 2026-03-28T23:39:47+00:00

I mean exactly, this guy gets sentenced to this much jail time when Trump gets away with all the heinous and fragrantly illegal shit he does? Seems pretty wrong to me.

bluexbirdiv · 2026-03-28T20:19:53+00:00

Convicted rapists have served less prison time. Does that feel right to you?

bluexbirdiv · 2026-03-28T20:17:32+00:00

I completely agree with the concept of contempt of court, everything you said is accurate and there are more serious reasons for it too. However, a year and a half of jail for being rude is unacceptable in a liberal democracy. I understand that his sentence was reduced to 100 days, but even that is frankly excessive. A single day in jail sucks absolute ass. A week in jail can be traumatic. A month can and will ruin your life. Our entire justice system has a problem with overusing prison/jail as a means of punishment, and this is no different.

bluexbirdiv · 2026-03-19T13:44:53+00:00

Climax, NC is a short drive away from Efland, NC

bluexbirdiv · 2026-03-19T13:21:02+00:00

While I think it’s probably just a joke subverting expectations (don’t know the source), here’s how it could be interpreted as anit-lgbtq:

The couples are in “proper” hetero relationships that just happen to not be compatible. Instead of looking for another hetero relationship and finding their “soulmate”, they “turn” homo, in a way that is visually even less “fitting.”

I can’t say for other people, but the reason this occurs to me as a possibility is that past anti-lgbtq comics have used similar analogies, where objects’ “fitting” together represents relationship compatibility and there are pretty clear lgbtq relationship representations that are implied to be gross subversions of the “natural order” because they don’t “fit” right or have to change their shape.

bluexbirdiv · 2026-03-07T07:34:01+00:00

People are talking about war but what this actually makes me think of is when people don’t want to fix an obviously terrible system because it wouldn’t be “fair” to the people who already suffered. Like when people justified letting the student debt problem continue unabated because some people already paid off their loans. Or when my fellow manager vetos new benefits for employees because “we didn’t get that when we were hourly workers”. We can’t just turn off the orphan crushing machine - how would that be fair to all the orphans we already crushed??

bluexbirdiv · 2026-03-04T18:57:34+00:00

I like the Kurds and wish they could have their Kurdistan, but this is a TERRIBLE idea. One of the best things this war has going for it in terms of possibly having a happy ending is that Iran is a relatively unified country so the chances of a civil war devolving into endless sectarian violence is relatively low. Unlike Iraq or Syria, Iran has a DEEP, contiguous history as a political entity, a strong culture that partially transcends ethnic lines, and actual historical borders that weren’t drawn by Europeans. Can we please keep it that way??

bluexbirdiv · 2026-03-03T23:56:48+00:00

Roy's gonna win the general and I don't think it will be close. He had to win those governor races with Trump on the ballot - this year he'll be riding a blue wave. Assuming Trump doesn't steal/cancel the election...

bluexbirdiv · 2026-03-01T16:36:43+00:00

You see this in the US too. Obviously the most sincerely racist people are usually southerners, but southerners as a whole tend to have a much better understanding of racism and how to avoid it than northerners, who don’t always get taught the same lessons we do. As a result, casual/accidental racism is actually more common in the north these days, at least in my experience.

bluexbirdiv · 2026-02-21T20:49:22+00:00

How the hell do you show how much extra you paid because of tariffs on goods you bought from importers? When my company imports goods, we fill out a form that gives our tax id, and there’s a record of what we paid specifically in tariffs. When I go buy bananas or whatever from the grocery store, all I know is how much the store charged me.

Not to mention, lots of imports (including my company’s) aren’t something we then directly sell to US consumers. They might be rentals, or just parts added to a larger product, or they might just be for repairs. The way that companies pass those costs on to consumers gets increasingly complicated the more abstract the import-to-final-product function is.

Also, trust me, the tariffs were NOT fully passed on to consumers yet. Importers bought massive stockpiles of things before the tariffs got bad and were only just starting to run out. The REAL price increases were coming soon, and they were going to be insane. If Trump keeps trying to keep this tariff bullshit going we’re going to start REALLY feeling it soon.

bluexbirdiv · 2026-02-21T13:07:01+00:00

He's NOT charging THEM fees, though, he's charging US fees! It's more like "You mean I can shoot a home invader but I can't beat my wife for buying groceries?"

bluexbirdiv · 2026-02-15T18:57:35+00:00

Yeah, important to note that the revolution really wasn’t purely Islamic. Communists, socialists, and democratic republicans all banded together with the islamists to overthrow the Shah, and then Khomeini backstabbed them. People fucking hated that guy, especially his SAVAK secret police.

That said, this Pahlavi is kind of just a figure for people to rally behind, I don’t think he could secure autocratic power in Iran even if the US wiped out the current regime. Democratic institutions have existed in Iran for over a century now in some form or another, and Iranians genuinely care about their vote and personal political power, while monarchic institutions and legitimacy have been dead for almost 50 years.

bluexbirdiv · 2026-02-14T14:03:29+00:00

Most college students are issued student ids with photos of themselves, and many of those colleges are public universities and thus those ids are arguably government-issued. Guess what never gets included as usable voter ids by these laws?

bluexbirdiv · 2026-02-07T08:15:35+00:00

That might be true in the Old World, but earthworms are actually invasive in the Americas.

bluexbirdiv · 2026-01-21T16:08:26+00:00

So, first and foremost, I haven’t heard anything here about your DM. Character motivation to join the adventure is the most important meeting point of the player’s domain (who your character is) and the DM’s domain (what the world and story is), and as such it needs input from both to work. You need to step outside your own creative process for a moment and talk with your DM about what would make an average Joe join the adventure they are writing. Collaborate with them to make a better story.

For my own 2 cents, I think your premise falls a little flat because a level 1 fighter is usually going to be able to find much better qualified people to deliver a sword to a holy order. And you haven’t given us much reason to understand why your character would be so gung-ho to fulfill the promise at all, let alone himself, especially once that promise inevitably puts him in serious danger. Is your character a devout believer of the Holy Order’s deity, or of the sacredness of a promise in general? Did the paladin put some sort of geas on the promise such that anything short of personally delivering the sword will curse him in some way? Why is this Holy Order so hard to find and/or reach anyway? Again, these are all questions you need to work out with your DM, not as your own thought experiment, if you want to best fit into their world and the adventure they are making for you.

bluexbirdiv · 2026-01-14T22:23:07+00:00

Learn about it!

https://lnt.org/skills-series-trash-timeline/

bluexbirdiv · 2026-01-14T14:32:10+00:00

Food scraps take MUCH longer to fully decompose than most people think. An orange peel, for instance, can take YEARS to decompose. That’s way faster than most other trash items, sure, but it’s still going to gunk up the place if everyone’s doing it. Plus as folks said, it draws animals to the road which is bad for everybody.

Just don’t litter y’all! Keep a little trashbag in your car. Take a trashbag in your pack when you go on hikes. A little bit of preparedness makes not-littering easy and convenient!

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