Gadg8eer

Are they legal in the US?

“Please don’t.” looks lovingly but fearfully at her two year old daughter “He’ll… He won’t like it.”

Sorry to anyone who may have PTSD related to abuse, my point is this…

@rivalary SAY THAT AGAIN, YOU SON OF A BASTARD, I FUCKING DARE ANYONE TO SAY YOU AREN’T AN ENTITLED ASSHOLE WHO HAS THE MONEY AND CONNECTIONS TO JUST UP AND LEAVE IF YOUR RELATIVELY FREE COUNTRY STARTS TO ACTUALLY TAX YOU! TRY LEAVING NORTH KOREA AS A NORTH KOREAN PEASANT AND SEE HOW EASY IT IS TO “jUsT fUcKiNg LeAvE”!

Good point.

Thanks, you make several good ones too…

Yeah I’m not a huge fan of lumping everyone in the same bucket just because they all happened to have been born within the same lines on a map.

I’m sure there are some goose stepping citizens, some who hate the leadership with a passion and those who just want to get on with their lives and pay their bills.

Sadly armed resistance isn’t an easy thing to effectively get off the ground, especially in an authoritarian nation today. So the fact that there isn’t some wildly ambitious revolution ongoing, isn’t an indication that every resident is in agreement with the decisions their self appointed leaders are making.

As with China or really any country including my own, I wish the best for the citizenry of Russia but am appalled by what their leaders are doing to the world. It’s not going to end well, is it?

Ideally. Unfortunately, the people doing the buybacks now are no different than 19th century industrial barons; once they have a household name due to sheer wealth, they stop pretending (if they even bothered to in the first place) that they’re in any way good people.

Ah. Okay, that ruins the coolness but if that’s the case I’m not going to try and bet on a dead horse.

More like “no measurement without action” and “action = modification” but I get the reference, yes.

Sadly, IIRC, measuring an entangled particle on one end changes the result on that end, despite the other end trying to be the one that changes it.

I mean, it’s a Yin-Yang symbol. That’s some spooky coincidence right there. That, or someone in Asia once had a very weird dream/drug trip like when DNA was discovered to be a double-helix.

It would be, except it’s apparently been calculated that quantum entanglement doesn’t work that way.

Cowards? I don’t think you realize what happens when you get caught by authoritarians.

I’m not brave but I would stand up to them, but only because I feel like I’m better off dead than living in Airstrip One.

Hey, I don’t see anyone here saying those idiots who thought the War on Terror were justified.

Would it happen this way if New York was being hit over the past 6 days? Considering events like 9/11 and the aftermath of Trump give conflicting signals, I’m not sure, but if it did… I don’t think the majority of people on the continent, from remote Alaska to Halifax to Mexico City, are going to see a random person complaining about how their kids missed soccer practice because of a bomber run like it’s a minor inconvenience to a news reporter and not think “that rich soccer mom is a b**** and she needs to get a clue that we’re at f-ing war”.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that’s not what’s going on in Russia, because somehow I suspect that’s what places like Kamchatka (Easternmost Siberia) is thinking about Moscow right now.

Basically, “Leaders =/= Citizens”. Please don’t judge people based on what their corrupt government does. I don’t like the CCP but you don’t see me saying Chinese people in general are somehow a uniform entity that is some sort of political hive mind, because that’s not how people work.

Yeah, the theme is “Don’t underestimate Neanderthals, they’re pretty much the granddaddy of Homo sapiens”. Or in short, “primitive, not unintelligent”.

The OpenTTD community does sometimes. Not that it matters much.

That’s not funny. Seriously. I’m getting so fucking sick of “dark comedy” or especially “deep chararacters in an engaging story” that abuses shock factor by dead dropping child death.

I’m going to go the devil’s advocate route and say most managers are less effective at THEIR job in WFH situations.

Of course, it could just be that middle management is obsolete but that doesn’t explain why the CEOs aren’t just laying off firing a bunch of middle management.

Absolutely. My dad plays the flight simulator X-Plane, he says that if these pilots can even make it to being airlines certified, they are most definitely experts in their field.

Also, FAA records are a big log to go through; they store everything, so you can see reports as far back as the beginning of civil aviation. 1948 was 75 years ago, aerospace is no computer science but it’s a distant second followed by a much more distant third. Imagine the difference between the deHavilland Comet and the Boeing 787 in terms of how many deaths occurred aboard the plane models and you have the magnitude of improvement gained by learning very, VERY well from every crash ever.

I honestly don’t get why my brother has aerophobia, I am far more terrified of passing on a two-way road and cloverleaf interchanges than an aircraft losing a major system, because unless that system is a wing or part of the tail, engineered redundancies make that kind of crash landing more survivable on average than the kind of black ice followed by post-crash blizzard bullshit I experienced in 2020.

Sorry, just a complaint about waiting an hour and a half for the ambulance when one of us accidentally undid her seatbelt in her sleep (pressure from her bag pressed the release button) and woke up with her jacket on top of her and her spine damaged by being slammed into the center panel.

My point is, cars are fucking terrifying compared to planes.

Then why not just kill yourself now? Rhetorical question, my point is fight to live or give up now

Give them access to only two things: Amazon Kindle and/or Libby (no audiobooks) for learning how to read, and a Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck.

The game console should be loaded up with puzzle games like Crossniq+ or Tetris or Pokémon Shuffle, platformers like Super Mario Odyssey or Super Lucky’s Tale, and text-heavy and child-friendly RPGs like Pokémon or Squid Odyssey.

If you get a Nintendo Switch, subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online so your child can play emulated games from older consoles. The parental controls work with the emulation library IIRC and old RPGs will encourage your kid to learn to read them.

If you get a Steam Deck, it’s more complicated and there’s no parental control integration, but you can pirate the old console games and hand-pick which games are loaded onto the console in the first place.

I know you probably think this is just more screen time, but video games are far more mentally stimulating than purely passive TV/Movie content, healthier than YouTube for the 1-7 year old age group, and a hell of a lot healthier than TikTok.

Speaking of which, last piece of advice; If TikTok or a service similar to - or more addictive than - it still exists when your kid gets old enough for that kind of thing, don’t let them use it. It’s debatable how much dopamine addiction is a real thing, but TikTok is a seriously bad influence. You know the “boyfriend with a motorcycle and intentions that are most definitely not honorable” trope? TikTok is set up so that idiots who almost get themselves killed doing stupid things are given the biggest audiences by the sensationalist algorithm, and I know the peer pressure argument is iffy, but I can’t exactly trust idiot teenagers to not kill themselves trying to swallow a spoonful of cinnamon powder in a single gulp (yes, that could actually cause them to choke and suffocate) and I definitely don’t trust a platform that acts as a digital version of that one dumbass “friend” you had in high school who kept getting you into trouble by daring you to be a total yahoo in public.

Hopefully this helps, there’s no instruction manual for raising kids but don’t limit their experiences purely based on feelings. You’re right about video content but games and books (even comic books) are not at all the same in their effects on kid’s development.

To be honest, if a person is going to study something that will let him earn a lot of money, I’m not particularly inclined to subsidize his success with taxes. A person who has (e.g.) a developmental disability is apparently not very important to you, but my unprofitable writing career is more important to me than fucking money…

I will not let you declare me a burden for my handicaps including me not being able to go to college, nor will I let you assume that just because I type well it somehow means “he’s just faking it”.

Pretty sure the definition of “asshole” is “person who is so stupid and hateful that you can compare them to a social feces excreter” anyway?

Fair enough. Just note that I didn’t make a typo when I said I make the equivalent of just barely 5 digits of income. $3000 isn’t a vacation to Hawaii, it’s a once-every-5-years PC upgrade.