Mrs_deWinter

Not to mention how it starts with

"We write in response to the ridiculous letter you sent our clients on behalf of X Corp."

They are not taking any BS. I love it.

Age of consent in Germany is a staggered system. With 14 you're able to consent under specific conditions (them being there's no exploitative element to the relationship), but still could file charge against the older person if they're over 16. With 16 the first rule still applies; from 18 on you're able to consent, period.

So for example when I was 14 I had a boyfriend, also 14, and neither of us committed any crime under this ruling. The law acknowledges that teenagers are allowed to have relationships with each other while putting every borderline case through a case-by-case hearing at court.

It's actually a really good idea, so it kinda is a fun fact.

Basically, "every opinion I don't like is a religion."

It didn't, at least not in the way you think. The headlines of the past few days show the aftermath of the last decades: industry contracts that were made in the last century and the political heritage of a generation of politicians who are no longer in power.

Coal is being phased out and that's not changing. It cannot change substantially anyway; there is only so much coal in the gound. Recent political decisions moved to keep most of it there. For technological, political, economical and industry related reasons this won't be a fast process unfortunately.

One of the roadblocks of our transition to a sustainable energy supply is how much money (and in our capitalisic society, therefore, power) the industry itself holds. Coal lobbies will work hard for you not to think about them too much. Nuclear lobbies will work hard for you to blame those pesky environmentalists. A game of distraction and blame shifting. This thread is a good example of how well it's working.

Our resources are limited. This is true for good old planet earth as well as our societies. We only have so much money, time, and workforce to manage this transition. And as much as I'd love to wake up tomorrow to a world with PVC on every roof, a windmill on every field, and decentralised storage in every town center, this is just not realistic overnight. We'll have to live with the fact of our limited resources and divert as much as possible of them towards such a future. (And btw, putting billions of dollars in money, time, and workforce towards a reactor that will start working in 10-30 years is not the way to do this, as much as the nuclear lobby would like you to think that.)

Well the launcher can hardly get any worse.

Today I found out there's no way to change the default install location. And I learned this just today because I so rarely use it. Why is this launcher such a mess. It's seriously like they're not even trying.

Oh but there are many steps missing.

You start the launcher -> it forgot your device and password, so wait for the confirmation code via mail, enter your info again, then solve three capchas

Browse the store -> except there's no functioning tag search and the shop sucks, so you need to know exactly what to buy and how it's called to even find it

Chose a game -> but there's no tabs or secondary windows, so every time you inspect a shop page and try to get back your search gets reset; please enter all your search criteria again and scroll back to the point you've been before

Start the game -> but your own library is a hot mess; click through 13 pages of huge icons representing an alphabetical order until you find the picture representing what you want to play

And then you play.

As long as you don't notice Epic all is smooth sailing. Every step of actually using the launcher is a pain though. Sometimes I forget how annoying it all is and try again. Aaaaaand it forgot my device and password again. Then I curse at my PC and open steam.

Communication about times would get so much easier, communication about schedules would get so much easier.

Except that it wouldn't. It would make communication about time a culture sensitive topic. Sure, the exact time of day in relation to the position of the sun might get lost with our current system, but if someone tells you "I've slept til 12am" at least you know it was somewhat around noon. Under your new system you'd always have to consider where someone lives.

To add:

• No visible clocks. If possible don't check the time at all while trying to sleep. Doing math at night (aka "oh no only 4 hours left") only makes you angry or sad.
• No alcohol. If unavoidable, try to be sober by the time you want to fall asleep. (Dring sooner, if at all.)
• No coffee after midday. Some bodies suck at metabolising it.
• Bedroom should be as dark and silent and comfy as possible. If there's any way you can add comfort, do it.
• For persisting sleep problems: Change position or location. (E.g. turn completely around in your bed, feet at the headrest, or sleep on the couch if comfortable.) Brains are very good at linking a location with a state of mind, and changing things around can help if the thought of your bed stresses you out already.

For severe problems it's probably always wise to check with a physician, or if there's specific stuff in your head that keeps you awake to consider telling a friend or therapist about it. To distance yourself from your thoughts is something everybody can learn and it can be tremendously helpful with stuff like that.

When remembering a stressful experience it's important not to get stuck in your thoughts.

Most people would be a bit shocked after what you've been through. Our brains tend to try to go over things a few times to get a grasp at what happened. Sometimes our thoughts become a movie of the stressful incident that plays on repeat in our thoughts. Try to think further. Remember how you got out of the situation, remember how you got home, remember how you had dinner, remember how you got to bed. And remember: You're okay, you're alright, this is all behind you, you did alright, and right now you're safe and fine.

Try to explicitly think this a few times. At the very least, this is a much more pleasant thought to get stuck on than "fuck, I'm in danger".

And if it helps: Either distract yourself or tell someone what happened. Both are okay. Just don't stop at the scary part when telling the tale, always think and tell about it to the point where you were safe again.

After I got diagnosed with some weight related shit, I turned my entire life upside down, am at a much healthier 150 lbs (68ish kg), and feel so much better, both physically and mentally.

Something disillusioning from the field of psychotherapy research: Our best, most interdisciplinary, low-threshold therapeutic strategies allow people to, on average, lose and hold the loss of up to 7-10% of the weight they've started with. Which isn't even enough to get most people out of the obesity range. What you've been through is exceptional. By far most people will never manage to lose that much, not even with professional help.

To put it this way: If we look at obesity like a mental disorder it's one of the hardest to overcome, harder than depression or anxiety.

I get why so many people share your opinion on this, I just feel like it's missing context. Because sure, physiologically its possible for a depressed person to "just go out more" or an anxious person to "just stop breathing so fast" or an overweight person to "just eat less and move more", but this is such an oversimplified way to look at how humans work and why they do what they do that is simply stops being correct. Every now and then you'll meet someone who managed to do all this just like that, but for the vast majority it's an unrealistic and unfair thing to ask.

Obesity is a chronic disorder and will continue to be until we get better treatments.

Sounds like you're still salty for at first thinking it was an energy company and getting publicly corrected. You had no clue what Volt was when you first complained about it.

We have Karl Marx on the canvas, we have the anarchism star, we have info material on climate change and veganism, we literally have legal texts, we have LGBTQ+ statements and flags, not to mention the multitude of national flags and symbols - and you didn't take offense with any of them. The canvas will always, in part, display political stuff. And what we did was just another logo. No slogan, no content, no call to vote a specific way.

You tried to grief with your 5+ alt accounts, we played fair. At the end our logo came out pretty nicely. And you will just have to live with that.

As for “deniers” , I dont think people questioning all of this are deniers, they are simply asking legit questions. Remember, this Climate thing has been being pushed/sold to us for like 60+ years now.

If you deny 60 years of research how are you not a denier? The only people with doubts at this point have no clue about science, sorry.

We gave up on reusing glass bottles in large part because they were not sanitary. Every boomer has stories of finding cigarette butts in their soda and beer.

I live in a county that almost religiously reuses glass bottles and have never heard nor experienced such a story. Seems like someone figured out how to sanitize them.

This idea of "actually, all Germans secretly think this way" is a common excuse of modern day Nazis to justify their increasingly brazen behaviour in public. Just so you know whose talking points you're reproducing here.

Pretty telling how you started griefing before you even knew what it was. There are soooo many logos on the canvas man and you're dead set on trolling a handful of people who want a tiny bit more cooperation and collaboration on the world stage.

I could even understand if Volt was in any way a powerful or extremist party, but you clearly have never even heard of them before.

That's honestly good to know, thanks!

Although it is kind of telling that in order to use their launcher without getting a stroke your best bet is an alternative launcher. Still, I'm going to have a look at Heroic. Would be a shame to never touch all those free games just because Epic sucks so much.

Hey, at least you're answering OP's question.

Eh. Humans have (confidently and incorrectly) assumed such causal links for millenia. There's thunder, so there must be a thunder god. There's a sun in the sky, so someone must have put it there. There's people, so someone must have build them from clay.

What we could conclude logically: There is something - so something, somehow, once began.

That's it. It's also kind of recursive. It's factual, but there isn't anything meaningful inevitably following from this.

And everything else is an assumption.

You can say "I chose to believe that this somehow was a someone." You could decide to believe that there was a personal entity as a single cause for all that is. Someone who had somewhat of a consciousness, who willingly and deliberately created everything. You could assume that this someone was eternal and all-powerful and therefore later on or even until right now still alive/active. You could speculate about this entity being interested in creating a specific planet with a very specific ecosystem. You could ponder whether this entiry would be interested enough in one species within this ecosystem to watch, influence, and even hold something like a relationship with them.

A bit far fetched, but sure. You wouldn't be the first one to assume all these from a simple "There is a cake".

Where I live you call an ambulance.

At the end of the war literal children were being drafted. Are you seriously arguing that we should kill a 13 year old because he got a threatening letter and followed it's instructions?

Weird source, they absolutely identified the person, and it was Abu Sitta. He was the reason the conference had to be stopped.

edit.: I've looked for a somewhat decent German source to share and found something interesting. The Palestine conference was banned because a speaker named Abu Sitta wanted to hold a speech, who is banned from political activity in Germany. This guy is specifically pro Hamas and said, if he was younger he would've participated in the Hamas attack himself. At the same time this other person was banned from entry into the country, also named Abu Sitta. I'm now left wondering if this Schengen ban was mistakenly issued and meant for the other guy.

Even though you're right in that glutamate is a neurotransmitter, eating it doesn't affect our brain chemistry at all. It can't pass the blood-brain-barrier. Which is relieving since basically every food group contains it and flooding our brain with that would lead to violent epileptic seizures and certain death. Not insomnia.

And melatonin isn't a neurotransmitter but a hormone.

So maybe you do in fact sleep better when avoiding specific food groups in the evening, but your explanation certainly isn't correct.

Just putting this out there since glutamate is such a highly misunderstood molecule surrounded by many misconceptions, this one being a very common one.

"Meaningful", as in, "even if I alone do it this will somehow stop climate change"? Not possible, very obviously.

Meaningful as in "if everyone would adapt that mindset we'd be half way to the solution" - there are many, many options. Vegan diet, fuck cars, use public transport, buy local, vote green (or the closest approximation available), support sustainable companies, less consumerism in general, change your electricity provider, get politically involved, social activism, convince your friends and family...

Pick and chose as many as you want and can and you start becoming part of the solution.

I'm in the EU, using Vivaldi, and have the delay since yesterday. It's not on every video though. Seems like UBlock and YouTube are fighting each other every time I open a new link.

If an unreliable login, a bad storefront, tedious store pages, and a less than user-friendly library aren't enough to call a launcher worse than the competition, what even would qualify them as a bad product?

I mean sure, my PC doesn't crash nor goes up in flames when I open Epic, but that's about it.

Insane. Thanks for sharing.

I absolutely agree that "Trans rights are human rights" shouldn't be political. It should be absolutely out of question to doubt it even for one second, but here we are in the 21th century and people are still being prosecuted simply for their way of existing. So while the existence of LGBTQ+ people is simply a beautiful fact of life, our ability and will to publicly create and celebrate a representation of them IMHO is inherently political. It is a way for (a / our) society to repeatedly signal to each other how we want to live together. As seen by the fact how uncontested the flags and statements largely were. I'd love to see 9gag try that.

:(

The thing is, he wasn't even a psychologist.

You're stupid for what you're doing. Physical harm isn't the only form of serious damage we can do to each other and this should be apparent for everyone having lived this life for more than 5 minutes. You can absolutely destroy a life without even touching a person, and by the nature of society being a common agreement on how we want to live together you absolutely shouldn't be free to do so.

Psychologically that would be a desaster. People would wear themselves out in an instant, and in 6 months top we'd have a world population suffering from clinical depression.

Ahem. Oops.

But in a way that's a good example for what I meant. You and me communicate time both in reference to the time of day, not a virtual time of the planet that means something else to everyone depending on location, and you easily could spot my mistake.

So let's just say I did that on purpose.

And what would it take to stop those corporations? Individual actions. Be it voting in an election or with your wallet, it's our society that continues to not only allows those corporations to exist but to grant them every right to do so. The only alternative to a social rethinking would be the violent overthrow of capitalism and an authoritan installation of some alternative. And nobody could seriously want that.

Your mom broke the garage. That was absolutely irresponsible of her, not you, you were trying to help out which is really sweet.

And I mean what was the goal here anyway? Even when running late the 3 seconds it takes to start a car will hardly make any difference.

But fake meats don't hurt anyone at all, not even indirectly. With your other examples one could argue that it's desensitizing to the real thing. But eating seitan instead of meat is a conscious decision that probably even reinforces how unethical it was to begin with to kill an animal for this.

It has been thoroughly debunked.

It has not. Greetings, a psychologist.

That's the idea of soap, yes. It's how we get lather.

Did you seriously look at the FAQ of the vegan society, picked something that confirmed your preestablished opinion, and ignored the sentence right before it?

Here, let me show the whole quote:

What does it mean to be vegan?

A vegan lifestyle involves living a life that is more compassionate towards animals and the environment. The precise definition of veganism is:

"Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude – as far as is possible and practicable – all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."

You just have a very superficial view of veganism. Just ask yourself this: Why abstain from animals products? What is the intention of a vegan lifestyle? You've claimed that a nuanced application would have "made a religion", but the opposite is true. It would be a religion if we'd blindly apply a rule of conduct without any considerations. Which we don't, as you will see all over the vegan society's website. Just check what they write about animal products in medication. They are absolutely clear how a vegan lifestyle should work: "As far as is possible and practicable." An important principle that practically every single vegan out there knows and lives by.

How I feel does not make reality real.

Nice Freudian slip you've got there. How you feel, indeed, does not make your reality real. You keep claiming it's a scientific fact while rambling about something no professional in the field would ever agree on.

At one point you've learned about one aspect of measuring (purely physical) development - the tanner scale - and decided to forever discard everything else. Keep rest assured this is not how the world or science actually works.