Do they at least get one day of shoukshouka for breakfast?

Germany gets a pizza day?

That opposing force is the sheer amount of desperation people are putting into chasing voters to the polls

There isn't an opposite manifesto because the opposition to Project 2025 is a big tent coalition of several groups that in a proper democratic system would be entirely different parties.

It's a beast with 20 heads that all have to agree to make any significant movement in any given direction, and so all that this monster can agree to do right now is to keep keeping the other guy out and hope a resolution comes in the process.

Only sometimes one of the heads decides to be a privileged little twat and not even agree to that, and then gaslight everyone else about how they all made the twat decide to let the worse guy win.

Anyways the point is someone would have to beat down the egos of a lot of big names to unite the democratic coalition enough to put out a counterproposal to Project 2025.

You probably could do it too with enough being the biggest most confrontational douche ever seen in the DNC to literally everyone until you've successfully bowled everyone else over and browbeaten them into line, but congratulations now the only thing they're more united about than The Project for All is how much they all hate you and want to ruin you so they can all go back to being the petty lords of their sub-partisan fiefdoms.

Basically every character who's worst sin is just being kinda annoying

It makes no sense to me how an annoying person can catch so much more vitriol than a genuinely malicious person.

Like "sure he murders puppies as a casual past time, but at least he isn't a bother about it!"

Defense of a country in the case of direct attack, or more complicatedly in the defense of an allied country in cases like NATO where all members consider an attack on any member as though it were an attack on them.

I will add the caveat though that not having a well funded, trained, and staffed military prior to hitting the conscription button is certainly a point in the column of incompetence if not unacceptable behavior.

I'm staying with them while on bedrest from the nastiest mono infection I've ever witnessed, but once I'm recovered I still have my own place I can get back to

I also stay the night regularly when my dad needs to leave my mom home alone for travel because she's old and has old people problems

I'm in a pretty unique situation with how my life in relation to theirs turned out though so probably not a median example of a person who crashes with their parents for occasions outside of celebrations or family trips.

You eat hamburgers, it's a similar scale comparison

Unless it's the sale of a product or service or the wage earnings or someone who worked on a product or service, it doesn't contribute to GDP, if country A made product X, it being sold in country B contributes to A's GDP

Send him to the hotel and call ahead to ask the bellhop to ask the guests to all move to the room that's numbered twice the one they're currently staying in.

Nice hotel stays make most people at least happier, plus now half (minus one) of the rooms will have opened up for the evening!

Gossips will tend to respond to outright rejection by gossiping about you instead, and being a man in a predominantly woman's field is gonna mean that gossip can get very dangerous for you and your career very quickly.

Remember, gossip doesn't have to be true to still be hot, and scorned gossips will be more than happy to exploit that to the fullest to spite you.

Don't tell them you don't care about religion and politics either, because even if you don't women have learned from shitbags to translate that to "I may or may not have been at the capital on Jan 6th and held a bonfire celebration burning IUDs when Dobbs came down, but I still want to get laid ever."

My advise, try just being boring. Contribute duds to any conversations they try to involve you in where you're uncomfortable.

Most importantly speak to a supervisor you feel you can trust to not tell the gossips and tell them the gossip makes you uncomfortable so that if the boring act doesn't work and they start gossiping on you already, there's a previous record indicating they might do that and it'll at least insulate your future career prospects.

As for sex life talk, women are under two impressions, 1, that they aren't being raunchy when they talk about their sex lives, and 2, that men do it way more and are way grosser about it.

It is entirely possible that they keep bringing up sex lives because they're trying to relate to you and extravert adopt you, so if you gently explain that you don't feel comfortable talking about sex with coworkers you might find yourself in a more open conversation about mixed signals and how you all can create a better working relationship.

Some people keep trying to talk to ya because they really do just want to be friends! That sounds obvious but trust me it's hard to actually internalize that to the point that you can believe it when it's happening to you. Missed out on chill compsci bonding time with this pretty cool dude named gabe because I didn't get that he was being so spontaneously friendly to me so much because he's just a friendly guy. I met tech wiz Ned Flanders and it didn't register to me for a solid year lol.

You strike me as a bit of an introvert so I'll add, uncomfortable but tactful conversations now can save you exponentially more awkward and embarrassing ones later.

Slowly dying out as our descendants evolve into divergent races and species and stop being technically classifiable as human.

People who think doom is upon us really don't understand just how hard it is to kill all of us, it would take a confluence of several extinction level events at this point to completely wipe us out just because of how resilient we've made our society to collapse factors.

We're gonna live, we're not gonna escape living with the world we've made as easily as just all dying because of it, and someday one of your descendants is gonna regard you the same way we do the savannah apes that figured out how to walk upright to get a better vantage over the tall grass.

As for what our descendants will evolve into, honestly, it's gonna be a much more designed process as we continue to master gene editing tech. I could genuinely see several branches just being different "forks" of the base human body plan that try to resolve "design flaws" like disconnecting the respiratory and digestive systems or restoring partial water breathing or fully activating our potential for bioluminescence.

I think 40k is on to something too, the practice of the mechanicus of augmenting their bodies with tech to the point of even enabling their own brains to perform mass data analysis akin to a binary computer will be where a lot of folks end up too.

In fact I believe that the moment a "third hemisphere" implant to the brain is successfully developed will be the actual singularity point for humanity rather than the development of an independently intelligent artificial being. Unlocking the potential of human pattern recognition in harmony with binary number mastery would instantly change so much about how people even understand the world let alone interact with it that predicting beyond that point is more an experiment of speculative evolution than of more standard futurism.

As for immediately, I believe we're a lot closer to a solar punk world than anyone's really comfortable with accepting, because doing that means giving into fatalism means them having personally failed a goal within reach instead of "just accepting reality."

That's unlikely since they'd still be Japanese most likely

Nintendo's especially strict content creator and fan game creator practices stem from Japanese Copyright law encouraging IP owners to be waaaaaaaay more aggressive about protecting them than in most other IP markets.

Like I'm pretty sure the concept of fair use isn't legally recognized in Japan.

I've said before, what's needed here is an independent org or maybe even multiple that can provide certification that pieces of media were created without the use of generative tech, and then open up companies that publish anything missing the cert to lawsuits from the public.

Verify then trust publishing would go a long way to contain misinformation in general, not just deep faking and other generated content.

I wonder, does raising pork on a fishing diet change its taste?

Nah just get the work certed, it'd be available for anyone, it just needs to pass the "No AI was used at all" test, and that can be done by giving creative software tools the ability to sign files whenever AI or screen shotting tools get used in their making

I think the approach of providing software tools the ability to grant the cert if no AI tools are used will be the way to really spread the practice, can even work with them to create a cert mode that just doesn't even present those tools to the user in the first place.

The next step would be getting publishing sites to use the cert or signature as a check that either blocks the upload or more leniently get a visual marker that indicates it was not made with generator tools.

Plus checking for the cert also eliminates the crisis of teachers having to outsmart GPT to avoid their students cheating on takehome essays.

Part of it is that America just has an insane amount of resource richness even compared to historical empires of it's comparative influence.

Let me try to explain it in agricultural terms. America is a nation of immigrants, and yet a common phenomenon is an observed disconnect between what Americans consider local cuisine from a given country and what people from that country today consider average cuisine of their culture.

This is because those immigrants were the tired, the poor, the hungry masses yearning to be free. The cuisine they brought was the stuff people would make to subsist as peasants, notice how many different varieties of "take this basic grain as a filler then layer on bitsins and fixins to give it flavor and nutrition." Meanwhile in the home country, cuisine culture continued to be defined by the elites who had already been defining it. What's really interesting is that the cuisine brought by the poor, did not stay pauper meals.

This is because America as a country is so packed to the gills with farmable land that ingredients considered a rarity for sheer cost in "the old country" were abundant to the point of being cheap. American serving sizes are so big because they were pioneered by people who were thanking god that they could be that big. Chop Sui literally was just "whatever you can throw in the pot, serve it up!", tacos and sandwiches were invented basically to maximize the flavor and nutrition of expensive fresh ingredients on limited supply, Pizza has roots as the equivalent of a street pretzel in NYC.

Imagine if someone took the NYC pretzel, moved to a land of unheard-of plenty unseen by human eyes thus far, and decided to spice that pittily ass bread and salt with choice of topping by loading that shit with the most unimaginably luxurious ingredients they could conceive of because that shit is all cheap there. That's the story of Pizza. That's what happened to basically every peasant food culture that made contact with the US and its because American resource richness is just that unprecedented for anyone who isn't from America already to conceive of.

Stalin once stated that WWII was won with, "British Intelligence, American Steel, and Soviet Blood.", but America wasn't just a factory for the world, the American kitchen put into that war just as hard as the American foundry, arguably more, America's first casualties of the war were the merchant marines who faced U-Boats head on to run food aid to the British public and anywhere else they could slip past the Nazis.

We got so much shit we will literally give it to you for free sometimes

That is how 4% of the world population ends up sitting on 25% of its GDP

I have no mouth yet I must scream

Don't worry, if Kyiv's getting nuked, so are all the rest of us, so you'd have found out long before you had time to read about it! :D

More seriously, someone's really gotta figure out how to attack the nuclear arms specifically. Putin is making it obvious that the world will never be safe if there's even the remotest chance some lunatic could gain the ability to fire those things.

It would have to be the fastest military operation ever conducted in human history, but if it worked, it would save the world.

Looking at the current conduct of the russian military, you're not exactly giving me higher hopes for our ability to let anyone have those

That's not how GDP works

Edit to elaborate, GDP is calculated based on final goods and services, outsourced work exclusively counts towards the GDP of the country that work is done in, and only affects the GDP of another country when they buy what the first country made, but the outsourced work still happens in country A, so country A gets all the GDP created by selling finished goods, and all the GDP of the work done on unfinished products within their borders.

Basically, the US isn't sitting on everyone else's money, it just genuinely makes and sells that much shit

As a kid, CD documentaries about constellations and astronomy

Modern day, video essays about the lore of soulslikes and random media I've gotten sucked into

Totally Not Mark has a community discussion vid from when he had to deal with this personally because of all the manga video essays he'd been doing that got copystriked.

I think that's what people really ought to fear about our future. Once there are enough of us, once we've spread out widely enough, horrors and disgusts the likes of which we speak of in hushed tones praying we never find ourselves even adjacent to them will be cut loose into the universe.

Until we develop means of consistent and viable FTL travel and communication, we're going to all live with knowing that any heinous act we can possibly imagine is not only playing out somewhere, but the victims of it were probably bred for the purpose of making the show as enjoyable as possible for whatever freaks arrange for it.

Even when we regain the proper footing of being able to enforce basic rules of prevention of the worst things we can imagine, the sickos will always be finding another remote world, another star at the fringes where justice can't reach reliably yet.

We will live in a universe of untold prosperity, and yet also one of an eternal game of whackamole against the worst kinds of us that could ever exist, and some that can't yet but will come into existence with what we learn going forward.

Even colonizing the solar system, we will regularly see headlines that force us to ask if we are doing enough to protect others, if everyone can live like kings while some are made to be the victims of Caligula, or of Pol Pot, or of Jim Jones, or of any of the other depraved madmen of history who made those underfoot their playthings for the worst impulses that not even the call of the void dares give an ear to.

I was lucky and my parents were able to get me one of those ceiling projection globes that makes the shadows in your room look like a night sky in a forest clearing, been thinking a lot about inspirations from growing up because I was able to find one of those rare actual starter homes we've all been told of in myth and legend and have started to hype myself on all the ways I get to make it mine

Yeah no the rest of the series outlines that he basically turned himself into a slave of fate and condemned humanity to having to suffer milenia of tyranny under a self appointed god king before they could achieve freedom.

Also that self appointed god king is a sandworm human hybrid that considers himself to be filling the role of a predator in an ecosystem oversaturated with prey animals.

I don't know what it is but it seems almost universal that animals will give in and be pacified by da good scritchies

Maybe predator animals are just so angry because they're constantly itchy! Lemme go check!

Immediately mauled by bears

Republicans, universal gun care and state mandated child control, but only after you've suffered 9 months against your will to bring them into this world if you even survive the experience.

Weren't the 70s and 80s the peak of violent crime in the US? Including armed violent crime?

I dunno how much I'm about to date myself with this one but I still remember the heartbreak when my favorite squid shaped silly band snapped after I'd used it enough, whoever designed those was either a complete idiot for designing something that breakable for children, or a maniacal genius for designing something that would need to be replaced that often for children.

Either way, child targeted advertising should be completely illegal, that's just hitting the parents with emotional blackmail.

I feel like schemes like this warrant a law that you're failing your fiduciary duty as a company owner and can be sued by any of the stakeholders for it if you can't prove failure to at least break even is due to genuine misfortune. Not even gross incompetence, that should just get you sacked with a dunce cap on top of having the company broken off and sold to a bidder that isn't hellbent on stripping it for parts.

That or company owners are only allowed to draw funds from the company's profits and funds coming from anywhere else, including from layoffs and corner cutting, are seized at 150% the value stolen and the company owners involved get treated as though they had committed embezzling so long as the books can indicate that the executives and owners drew more in compensation than was recorded as profit.

How good would recycled paper hold up as a plastic alternative?

Because right now plastic is running ads about "trust us guys we'll crack this soon we promise!"

Well it can certainly involve being a piece of shit

I guess pursuing the question much further is necessarily going to take us to the big one, "what happens after we die?"

And there's only so many times I can deliver the punch line "lots of things that just don't involve us anymore." before I start to feel like a "that guy" about it.

If the executives could have just had less pay, yes, cutting someone off from their entire livelihood is theft. Especially if there wasn't even cause like criminal behavior or inexcusable misconduct.

And I think it's perfectly fair to just assume executives are lying about everything they say since *gestures wildly at all the everything since as far back as Smedly Butler.

I refuse to believe that there isn't a secret containment plan that all nuclear powers are coerced into agreeing to that basically gives every other nuclear power the right to intervene and secure the nukes from paramilitaries and terrorists in the event of state collapse.

The only reason I would presume NK isn't in on it is because everyone's agreed by now that if they fall it's gonna be a race between China and South Korea for who can press a legitimate claim first.

My take is that the afterlife comes in three phases, yes phases because as much as it gives the fundies a hard-on there's literally nothing humanly possible to do that could justify a permanent state of the worst torment imagineable.

Phase 1, atonement, you do the hard work for the souls you've harmed in your life to forgive you and release the chains that bind your soul.

Phase 2, forgiveness, you do the harder work of forgiving what wrongs have been done to you. Those chains hold you to your material existence, and you have to let go of them to be ready to move on.

Phase 3, reunion, the veil behind which no eyes may see. All you'll know is that by now anyone you haven't met yet from your life has done the soul rending work you have and walked beyond it. They're on the other side, and they're waiting for you to join them, what that'll look like, probably some 4-D amalgamation of every heaven or paradise or state of eternal bliss ever foretold by human words, and yet also none of those things, because not only do we not understand it, doing the hard work of being forgiven and doing all the forgiving is what it takes for you to be ready to understand it. I think it is what specifically god spoke of when they said they are both and yet neither of human binaries, and incomprehensible in their true essence to the human mind.

Looks like they're getting ready for whatever play they intend to make against the gangs and are trying to keep exacts on the hush hush to avoid the gangs being able to make preparations.

They're called gangs in print but it's worth remembering that these organizations have military training and equipment at their disposal far exceeding what you'd picture when someone says the word "gang", at this point it'd be more accurate to consider them warlord bands.

Don't pet dogs that are on duty, you're either gonna distract them from their jobs and dat makadem sad, or they're trained as serious doggo security and you'll be risking getting chomped

It's because they want to remove the political goals some of these groups have from their public narrative.

Which, you can debate how underhanded doing something like that is, or how good or bad based on what those narratives are.

Rust is to programming languages what a drunken orgy is to a night out.

That is to say, you have no idea where all these new tattoos came from have a head pounding migraine afterwards and some the hell how you learned how to use Rust as an end result.