My thinking here doesn’t have to do with being polite or individual instances of hurting individual feelings. It’s really easy to fall into the trap of thinking on this case-by-case basis, but the world doesn’t just consist of you and the one person who has a 0.001% chance of getting their feelings hurt by one interaction.

It has more to do with the fact that when you put toxic shit out into the world you are actively making it worse. For example, every time someone who’s “not a racist” makes a biggoted joke actual biggots get a little bit more bold. And every time someone conflates being considerate of the implications of their actions with having a small penis toxic masculinity gets reinforced a little bit more.

It’s like littering, no single person does much harm by themselves but the cumulative effect is pretty bad. So, I’m not trying to put you down or verbally joust you. I’m trying to make sure a place that I care about, --this community-- remains a pleasant place for everyone. And since we’re both here, and we both dislike misogyny, we probably have pretty similar worldviews and we probably care about this place a similar amount. I hope that means we can work together instead of fighting.

To that end I want to say that I’ve tried to be polite and diplomatic. If I’ve come across as smug or something then I’m sorry. And I realize that the person that initially replied to you was a bit of an ass, but that’s no reason to take it out on me.

If you just called them “a dick” maybe that would be comparable, as it stands it’s more like calling someone “a fatass”.

And if my comments are long it’s less because I take umbrage with a specific phrase and more because I take umbrage with the idea that you can somehow dictate the implications of your speech based off of your intent. If you want to argue that the phrase “small dick energy” isn’t a big deal then be my guest. I honestly don’t think I would disagree, at the very least there’s far worse things going on right now.

But when someone points out that something you said can have unfavorable interpretations thinking “wow how dare they try to psychoanalyze me over a single internet comment, they should know that’s not what I meant” isn’t a good attitude to have. Once something leaves your mouth (or the tips of your fingers) it exists independently of you, and it has all sorts of implications and effects whether you want it to or not, especially when you’re talking to strangers. This is something I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self.

EDIT: it’s true that sometimes people can go too far in grabbing the worst interpretation of something they can, running with it, and deciding the person needs to be punished for that. But this isn’t an example of that.

The thing is that whether that guy was trying to “decode” you or not, a person’s intentions don’t determine the effect that their actions have. Furthermore, just because something is a commonly used phrase doesn’t mean it’s good.

If you didn’t mean to bodyshame people in general, then that’s great. You’re probably a cool person. But if someone says “hey please stop punching those innocent people” you can’t say “oh don’t worry, it doesn’t count because I was trying to hit someone else, I’m going to keep punching them and it still won’t count”.

The popups and auto play videos are just embedded directly into the page now.

US auto-domination isn’t even the result of market forces though.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of laissez-faire policy or capitalism in general, but government funded highway lanes are no more capitalist than government funded rail tracks. The current situation in the US required enormous government intervention to establish, in the form of the forced seizure of property to make way for highways, hundreds of billions of dollars (inflation adjusted) to build those highways, mandatory parking minimums for new construction (to store all the cars from the highway), government subsidies for suburban style development and later on tax schemes that resulted in poorer inner city areas subsidizing wealthy suburbs, and zoning laws that made it illegal to build a business in a residential area (which worked together with anti-loitering laws to make it so that if you didn’t live in a neighborhood you had no “legitimate” reason to be there. It’s not a coincidence this happened in the wake of desegregation.)

Similarly fossil fuel production in the US actually receives direct government subsidies at the federal and sometimes state level (some of which have been in effect since 1916).

Now, we can get into the weeds and talk about how government action is actually a necessary part of capitalism and the intertwined nature of power structures and so on and so forth, but it’s important to remember that there’s nothing inevitable or natural about the mess we’re in right now, as some would have you believe. It required conscious planning and choices, as well as tremendous effort and tremendous injustice to get here.

I don’t know about the wine or cheese but I have to disagree with you on the bread thing.

There are people that make multigrain, wholegrain, sourdough, etc bread based on medieval recipes and while they’re not wonderbread they’re also not unrecognizable as bread to a modern person and they’re not terrible either. There are even people who buy the grains and stone grind it themselves to make it more authentic.

The SSN system is one of the more moronic things the US does, which is really saying something.

Google image search says the picture came from this site which claims it’s Tsimshian.

I don’t think I would have brought a new person into the world during any of the other time periods you mention either.

Huh ?

What information are you trying to convey by quoting that sentence from the article?

You can buy sodium ion cells online right now. It’s not the next phase, it’s here.

Star Trek isn’t woke enough these days.

TNG had Picard give a speech to a person from the past about how the Federation was able to accomplish so much only because society stopped being oriented around the accumulation of wealth.

Discovery had a character praise Elon Musk for being a pioneer.

To be fair to Discovery I think that was written before Musk had completely (or at least publicly) gone off the deep end, but even at the time I thought it was extremely stupid to have a character praise an early 21st century oligarch in the same sentence that they mention actual inventors and engineers.

If the tank were made of a carbon fiber composite it would make it a little less scary. CF’s high strength and brittle failure mode mean that the tank would “open up” on a seam when ruptured, but would stay mostly intact. Additionally CF’s low density would mean that any small pieces of shrapnel that were created would have limited penetrating power and range.

Still I’m not sure I would want to stand next to it. At 10,000 PSI a small hole (or opened valve) in such a tank would produce a gas stream with enough energy to seriously injure or kill you (leaks in 4000 PSI steam lines can cut your flesh and create gas pockets inside you). The entire tank letting go all at once would surely create a shockwave that would obliterate you.

Maybe their management shouldn’t be consolidated but their funding absolutely should be, into a single country-wide fund. The districts should then be paid an equal amount on a per-student basis.

You might say that this doesn’t account for differences in the cost of living between different areas. I say that it’s all the better that it doesn’t, because if the funding is set such that it is sufficient to fund education in the most expensive areas (and it will be because these areas have the most political power), the relatively increased funding will allow the poorer areas to catch up.

That article seems ai generated.

Those aren’t purely technological solutions though (except in the loosest sense of the word, where any non-hunter-gatherer behavior a human engages in is a technology), as they involve changing the way people live.

The electric car is a mostly drop-in replacement that fits in fine with the existing car centric suburban development model. The transit, cycling, and pedestrian oriented city involves changing how people think about their lives (many people in the US ask how it’s even possible to get groceries without a car) and even changing some of the ways we structure our society (the expectation that the cost of housing will increase forever, or even the expectation that housing should be treated as a commodity to invest in at all, as well as many other things to do with the intersection of finance and landuse).

To give another example inventing new chemical processes to try to make plastic recycling work is a technological solution to the problem of petroleum use and plastic waste. Reducing or eliminating the use of single-use plastics where practicable is a non-technological solution, because it doesn’t involve any new technologies.

In principle I’m not opposed to new technologies and “technological solutions”. However you can see from the above examples that very often the non-technological solution works better. Technological solutions are also very often a poison pill (plastic recycling was made to save the plastic industry, not the planet).

In practice I think we need to use both types of solutions (for example, massively reduce our plastic use, but also use bio-plastics anywhere we can’t). But people have a strong reaction to the idea of so-called technological solutions because of the chilling effect they have on policy changes. We saw this with the loop and hyperloop. Rather than rethinking the policies that lead to the dearth of High-Speed rail in the US and investing in a technology that already existed a bunch of states decided to wait for the latest whizz-bang gadget to come out. And it turns out this was exactly the plan. The hyperloop was never supposed to work, it was just supposed to discourage investment in rail projects.

Star Wars is Dune for people that love WWII and samurai movies.

Dune is the Foundation series for people that like mushrooms more than math and have weird ideas about women fueled by angst over their wife divorcing them.

The problem with that style of blocking is that it goes both ways.

Someone can post ignorant shite and block anyone who would give them pushback, then when other people look at the comments they think “wow I guess everyone here just agrees with this”.

I guess I’ve always viewed making a post as standing on a street corner and shouting, not meeting on the side of a street with a group of your friends.

I guess it depends on if you view “subreddits” as communities, that is groups of people that you choose to associate with if you post there, or if you view them as topics that you want your post tagged as. A lot of social media sites take the latter approach, but reddit used to take the former, as did old style forums. It might just be from me spending more time on those kinds of platforms, but I do think the “community” approach is better.

If you want to dual boot I suggest getting a second hard drive (a little SSD maybe) and installing Linux on that. Then you can select what OS to boot through the BIOS

It’ll be way easier and less risky than trying to install Linux alongside windows on the same hard drive, and it’ll also stop windows from screwing with the bootloader when it updates.

No, you’re still right.

The US has had two major parties for the entirety of its existence. Occasionally one of those two parties collapses and is replaced by another one, but even during these upsets it is always one of the old major parties (the one that didn’t collapse) that has their candidate elected.

Furthermore, if you take every third party + every independent and combine all their congressional seats the most they’ve ever held was 36, and that was in 1833-1835.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election#Popular_vote_results

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_States_Congresses