I’m curious about two things. Will nesting birds or animals find this material tasty or good to gnaw on?

I always ask that ever since I learned vehicles using a more organic plastic for wiring harnesses suffer from shorts due to animals like mice nibbling the plastic because it smells tasty.

I wonder if Ukraine is having an effect on attitudes.

Anyway, I can’t speak for others, but one thing I’ve come to realize through life experiences is that the best way to resolve differences is to behave civilly and talk. BUT. I’ve also seen that there are people who do not ascribe to or live by my preferences and ideals for this. There are people who don’t value rationality, there are people who can’t be shamed or pressured by society into behaving nicely and getting along with others. Those people respect the stick, and only the stick. I don’t want to use the stick. But these people do not live by my ideals (which are to talk things out and behave civilly), no matter how I say pretty please to them, and it’s foolish to project my values onto them when I see with my own eyes that they behave and react in patterns different to my own. They respect things that scare them or directly threaten them only, and continue to misbehave if all they’re going to get for it is a finger-wagging and a scolding.

So it seems very wise to “speak softly and carry a big stick”. The military is our stick. There are people out there who will behave in the most horrific uncivil ways right up until the moment they realize you have a big stick, then they’ll suddenly rein themselves in, and you can then be civil and talk things out. But that opportunity to talk doesn’t appear unless you actually have the stick when you’re dealing with folks of that sort of mentality.

It’s very important to look at your opponents with clear eyes and see what they ARE doing, not what you wish they would do, and not what you would do if you were in their shoes. As the saying goes, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

Without laws letting child workers maintain their own bank account in their own name without parents being co owners allowed to drain it at any time, children working become money pinatas for abusive parents.

I say this as someone who would have benefitted from being independent earlier. My uncle did have me work at 14, and when I went to the bank I found he had stolen every penny, and because I was a minor I had no legal recourse to get it back.

A few years later the courts emancipated me, but it didn’t return the money he had stolen. Mind you, he was not working at the time himself and he got a few hundred from the state a month to care for me, and he spent what he stole on computer parts so he could game.

Children working only is in the child’s benefit if there are ironclad laws allowing them to keep their money, and right now there is not.

Instead of nine lives, it has ten venom claws, and one breaks every time it stings. Once it’s out of claws, its dead.

You can’t tell if it makes buzzing noises or purring noises.

It can be other things. Some of why I didn’t get stuff done when younger was actually a symptom of PTSD from unrelated trauma. Basically my stress response is messed up and so anything I could link to stress or shame can make me avoidant, which snowballs into not doing the thing and more stress.

When I unlinked daily tasks from shame and stress I could suddenly do them, as I actually have ok executive functioning when PTSD isn’t messing with me to cause avoidance which as I understand would not really be the case for ADHD. Although PTSD and the like can also pop up in ADHD people who were bullied for their symptoms.

Not from a video game exactly, but in the early days of the internet, I had urges to delete things instead of putting them into the trash.

As far as I know, everyone dreams every night…it’s part of the sleeping process…but you usually forget it ASAP so it seems like you didn’t dream.

As for dreams I remember…less often as I get older, I find. Although I do get a few vivid dreams when using magnesium supplements, but I also acclimate to those quickly. And if I’m woken prematurely, sometimes a dream sticks around a bit more than it otherwise would.

Because it’s very difficult to get things you need to live solely through barter. Many trades are very niche, and an economy that uses money allows those trades to continue being viable parts of society.

Like, think of plumbing. If everything goes well, you don’t need a plumber. But when you do…you really need it. Now imagine being the plumber who wants some bread and eggs but the farmer has no problems currently that needs the plumber’s skills. Plumber can’t eat, leaves profession, there’s now no plumber when the pipes do break.

Obviously, the next thought here might be, “Well, why doesn’t the plumber say if they get eggs and bread now, they’ll come and fix your toilet later if needed?” But that sort of re-invents credit, right? “I’ll trade 3 future plumbing problems for 3 boxes of eggs now.” If you have that, why not money?

So basically, money is very useful. It can be traded for many things you otherwise wouldn’t be able to get if you were only able to offer as barter a specific item that might be rejected by the other person you want to barter with. Money is a “universal” trade good, and it’s also easy to store (you don’t have to have lots of physical room to store your Universal Trade Good).

The BEHAVIOR of people surrounding this very useful thing can absolutely be suspect, depending on the person (greedy sociopaths hoarding wealth)–but that’s a human thing, not because money is innately a bad thing. It’s a social problem, not a technology problem. You could totally have a greedy hoarder storing up a non-money trade item too…see people and toilet paper/sanitizer during Covid.

The Big 5 is the only “personality” test used in actual scientific studies, if I recall correctly.

I began using Freetube exclusively to watch YouTube when YouTube complained about my ad blocker.

Just so anyone reading knows…some games with Linux binaries sometimes run better using proton and the windows binaries.

Crusader Kings 3 is buggy with Linux binaries but fine using proton, while Stellaris is the reverse for me. Ymmv.

I’ve been trying to move to Linux for about 20 years, but gaming issues always sent me back to Windows.

I tried again after hearing about how proton and steamdeck have made it so much easier for most games and it’s true. Been exclusively on Linux on my gaming rig since about September. The only one I couldn’t get working was oddly a little simple indie game, it lagged badly while stuff like No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk ran fine.

Microsoft is pushing this at a very bad time, because you CAN game on Linux now.

I really don’t like this article because it reminds me of the crazy health nut parents who get disgusted by fat babies and try to make them diet for “health” and instead starve them. Babies are supposed to be fat.

Is the writer here applying guidelines for adults to babies? Babies are supposed to take in foods that are high calorie. I think Nestle is a shit company, but I am extremely suspicious of the article.

Does it turn into a gryphon when it grows up?

And would the fiber from its cocoon be considered fur or silk?

Yeah, I’ve had such an easy time of it that I’m actually surprised when a game doesn’t work in Linux now too. Which is a reverse of how it used to be.

I switched from Windows to Linux in the last year.

There are sometimes odd things to configure, but it’s no more difficult than the windows XP era was.

It is much much easier than Linux used to be due to Steam, and I find I more often have problems with smaller indie games than big ones.

I’ve been playing Cyberpunk, Baldurs Gate 3, Stellaris, No Man’s Sky, Crusader Kings 3 no problem. Plus many others.

I tried to game on Linux for many years with wine, but it was Steam that actually made it feasible for me .

I was raised Catholic in a deeply Evengelical town. The little girls were saying out of the blue that I wasn’t Christian. I was like 8, they were like 6. They were absolutely parroting what their parents said, there’s no way the little girls I played with daily came up with that shit on their own, and since then I’ve noticed that’s one of the “protestant culture” things that gets passed around in those circles and occasionally escapes. That Catholics aren’t Christian because saints or whatever.

They get all wound up about the “pagan” elements of Catholicism then turn around and worship their dollar bill golden idols. Hypocrites!

But basically, Catholics get crapped on when there’s no other minority around and they are tired of talking about Jewish folks.

I don’t practice, I’m atheist, but in the USA from a culture perspective Catholics aren’t in the WASP good old boy group, even if you are otherwise white. And WASP types are happy to let you know it, although its less common than it was a few decades back.

Biden being Catholic, and JFK before him, is basically a dog whistle to certain rightwing groups to make them lose their shit, it’s just less obvious than, say, Obama being black esp if you don’t have a family background that would expose you to that stuff.

Like in a file?

Bitwarden already syncs between PC and phone.

People reading along here should note this person is trying to turn blue states purple, they admit it with their own words, and they are appealing to morality to lure suckers in.

As if nobody but them is a moral person

Bullshit.

But a lot of us have religious triggers planted deep, yeah? That if you toddle along with the person claiming they are of virtue, maybe you’ll be a good person too?

Anyway.

Vote like your hair is on fire, because if assholes like this fine upstanding “moral” person has their say and causes blue voters to stay home, we’re gonna be fucked, just as we were before. They’re trying the same tactic that worked before even to give us Trump. And why wouldn’t they? It worked.

No state is “safe” from flipping.

Also note that playing with voting demographics is why a lot of the anti-abortion laws are being pushed…to cleanse purple states of blue voters by driving them out. So when you see anyone encouraging you not to vote because a state is safe, understand it’s part of an effort to flip states from blue or purple to red.

Nah, you say it to sap unity and make people stay home from voting.

Your vibe is the same as the girls who say they bluntly “tell it as they see it” in their dating profile, but anyone with any relationship experience knows that means they’re completely willing to make things toxic as fuck because they’ll just vomit their selfish so called truth anywhere without caring about consequences or how it destroys, because it serves some sort of other motivation for them.

Using words to encourage people to embrace hopelessness and not vote is a propaganda technique to put Trump back in the Whitehouse, and him being there weakens the nation so immensely and catastrophically that it’s extremely attractive to cash and weapons poor enemies to plop someone in front of a cheap computer to spread propaganda to attempt to destroy a nation from within. People who can’t fight the US with military might will use words instead.

In short, your words are not neutral. You’re either what is called a useful idiot, an ordinary person who swallowed outside propaganda whole and does the work of other interests here, or you’re a knowing perpetrator.

I hope people here use whatever skills they picked up in English class however many years ago to think about not just the exact words of the poster I’m responding to, but why they posted this thing at this moment, their motivations beyond what they claim they are, and the effects of an appeal to truth on a reader and how that can influence perception even when the thing said isn’t actually necessarily true or contains such a small flake of some truth that it is effectively turns into a lie when put beside the bigger and more vast and complicated truths.