Exactly. The Dems have plenty of dedication to maintaining the status quo and fucking us all over, that really isn’t the issue.

That Hitler fellow is really into ruining everything for everyone, but bless his cotton socks, he is trying very hard!

I like these normal length dashes you used

Happens to a lot of (most?) people, including us late bloomers. It is okay, honestly.

Took me two years to get over my first relationship. When I ended my last, abusive, relationship of ~6 years (on/off), I literally sat down and told myself that I wouldn’t be able to love or be loved by anyone again - It’s a cliché, I knew that at the time, but I honestly believed it. Every day for like a year, I was plagued with the simple thought “I am broken”.

Eventually that feeling just… faded. I joined a couple local groups, and not much later I met a hecka cool person and we hit it off.

It’s a very personal thing and it’s honestly okay to grieve a relationship for years, don’t feel bad about it. Just don’t close yourself off to the world because of it, either. In my case, spending time with people is often very helpful to renormalise and let the social bit of your brain know that all is okay, but it still takes time.

I don’t care - stop using long dashes. It’s a useless character and the less you use it the easier it is to discern AI slop without even having to think. It’ll only be a year or two before ChatGPT stops using it, so don’t undermine a very cool and assuredly temporary useful discernment tool.

A normal length dash does everything you want. You know why nobody knows em-dash existed before? Because nobody ever noticed you using it and everyone reads it as a normal dash.

You can have your em-dash back in a couple years.

The Ark, too, had this as a plot point. A rich guy shot aerosols into the atmosphere that incurably poisoned a huge portion of the population. Both scarily plausible honestly.

I suspect the line should read “carbon dioxide emissions”.

I love original Oblivion, and I surely hope the remaster is an improvement. But this is true self-flagellation.

Either someone just trying to self-justify a purchase they fear wasn’t justified, or just bootlicking. My response would be that piracy is the only incredibly fair price.

But the US doesn’t have the kind of centralised strategy or funds to stockpile enough anything to sustain an actual war with China.

By gleefully engaging in mercantile trade, China has made the US dependent upon it, and the US just can’t start a war it could begin to win. Nor would the bourgeois class want to tolerate it for long because of how much it cuts into their own profits (which is clearly why they’re giving up on tariffs now).

This describes Reddit as a whole honestly. I log onto that website maybe once a week and everywhere is same posts on repeat every time.

Sure, but I’d bet that negligible time shaved off its lifecycle is less than the energy added by the nuclear explosion. The increased energy and outward force may even increase its lifespan.

That’s dependent on the nuclear pile going critical, which I assume it would, but actually working that out is… some ways beyond me, and highly depends on the missile design/explosion time/what you count as “increasing sun energy” versus “exploding next to the Sun”, I guess.

Yep. Beef tomatoes are watery nothingness. Cherry or plum tomatoes are really tangy and strong, like red.

Too much credit honestly. Westoids actively celebrate people who commit genocide elsewhere.

Surely nuking the Sun only makes it stronger?!

The point is, even if there were septillions OF septillions, the chances in my example are STILL basically zero. My example wasn’t about specific numbers, but to exemplify how something seemingly likely (like ‘life exists elsewhere’) might actually be mind-bogglingly near-impossible. Just because I shuffled a specific card order once, doesn’t mean it will (or realistically can) happen in all the universe for all of time ever again.

Nobody can know what’s outside the observable universe (and for all intents and purposes, nothing outside the observable universe really “exists”).

As far as we can (possibly ever) know, there are not infinite planets. Though it’s a philosophically attractive idea, there is no evidence to suggest it’s true.

All true, though even “detecting signals” isn’t so unambiguous, there was that hoohaa about ‘regular radio signals’ that turned out to be pulsars. I’m not sure I’d take a radio signal shouting prime number sequences as proof beyond doubt.

Interesting point about finding past life, though. If we could find any proof that life even did once exist, we could actually start calculating probabilities of life out there.

There are not an infinite number of planets, (in the observable universe, there are roughly 20 sextillion, which is why I chose that number) so I’m afraid not.

It really just… isn’t. All our knowledge of statistics and probability are practically useless when faced with one, singular distinct data point and no understanding of how life started.

We’re not talking about farcically artificial stakes; if the probability of life appearing on any given square meter of any planet, every second, was, say, the odds of shuffling a specific set of cards. Then, even given 20 sextillion (2*10²²) planets, an optimistic 10³³ seconds until all stars and planets are gone, and 10¹⁴ square meters per planet, the likelihood of life appearing once, anywhere in the universe before heat death is still practically zero.

But that’s all a guess. So long as we don’t know the likelihood of life starting, we simply cannot have a ‘default assumption’, it makes no sense. There is an altogether plausible reality where we are the be all and end all of life in the universe.

Reminder that it’s very easy to cover stuff in your trolley with bags. It’s often easy to just throw stuff through the checkout, look like you scanned it, and wait for an employee to unlock the till because they’re overworked. You can even leave stuff on the scanning platform so it doesn’t get weighed, and staff are unlikely to pick up on it.

Also an important reminder that at least in the UK, shop staff have no authority to ‘check your receipt’ or any bullshit. Any random basket checks or whatever, you are completely in your rights to ignore them and leave.

Very few shops will permit their staff to ever forcefully detain people, but legally speaking, shop staff can only detain you if they can argue reasonable belief you have committed a crime, unlike for police, just suspicion is not enough. No matter how qualified or SIA-certified a security guard is, they have no more rights than normal citizens. If they forcefully detain you and you committed no crime, you can sue for assault, wrongful imprisonment, damages, distress, etc. (compensation is usually in the thousands).

Under no circumstances do they have a right to forcefully search you, they have to call police for that.

Police can detain you for any reason, but they cannot search you without reasonable grounds. They cannot legally enforce nor perform a random search without reasonable grounds. If they do, sue. (obviously they have lots of get-out clauses, but there are also many successful suits for this kind of action, so it’s not a fruitless endeavour)