They never said that everybody has a right to drive. The reality is that, at least in the US and similarly planned countries, cars are priced like a luxury and treated like a necessity by the powers that be. Anything that isn’t driving a car is an afterthought.

I mean, I’d personally rather see an anime girl themed desktop than those weird statues rich people sometimes have in places like on their coffee table that are stuff like a woman in the boob + butt out pose with no limbs or head. That shit is just creepy looking. I know it’s supposed to be reminiscent of broken Greek and Roman statues, but why do they always have to be posed and objectified like porn stars? At least with the anime girl, I know that I’m talking to an otaku rather than Hannibal Lecter.

I think it’s also the speed and number of connections leading to the topic change. I think many neurotypicals would jump from the carnival to the rodeo, or to the bee story, but they wouldn’t jump all the way to wondering about wasps from talking about the carnival in one go.

From the outside, the topic change is so different that neurotypicals can’t follow the connections.

Yeah, my personal experience is the opposite where I find myself having to outright block people because I generally don’t have an issue until outright blocking them is needed.

It would be great to have a “mute post/thread/comment” option that just stops any reply notifications for that specific item of yours. That way you don’t have to select specific people to mute/block and it doesn’t affect anything outside of that one specific comment of yours.

And I’m the opposite. When I block someone, it’s because I’m sick and tired of that one person in particular and never want anything to do with them ever again. And for my own protection, I don’t want them to be able to see me or interact with my comments ever again, regardless of whether I’ll see that interaction or not.

The block feature is wonderful for this. I’m starting to use it liberally when I just can’t be bothered to deal with someone anymore. I don’t know if there’s a mute user function as well, but that would at least let them yell into the void instead of being blocked outright.

The Republican party is a cult - especially the cult of Trump. All these grifters selling hate to conservatives have made it that much harder to convince them when they’re wrong, and the odds of them doubling down on those beliefs when they are challenged get more and more likely the deeper in they are. There’s a point where it becomes almost impossible to pull people out of a cult and there’s largely no line that they won’t convince themselves that it’s okay to cross.

I think that’s where we’re at and have been at for quite a while. Republicans convince themselves that they’re the good guys fighting the good fight against whatever the party tells them is bad, and believe that their bigotry and hate is justified.

The trick is to get an entire neighborhood in on it. That way you can schedule shouting matches in the front yards of the houses neighboring the open houses as well.

A lot of these minorities also always think that they’re different because they’re “one of the good ones” and will reap the same benefits.

My friend told me once about how people in cults have a sunk-cost fallacy to the cult’s beliefs that makes it harder to get them out the longer they’ve been in.

People are more likely to double down on their beliefs when proven wrong because they’d have to admit that they were wrong and so were all the things that they did following those beliefs. And nobody likes to admit when they’re wrong, because nobody wants to believe that they’re the bad guy.

Fox News legally can’t call themselves a news station anymore because of how little of their programming is actually news. It’s always been an opinion broadcast, at best.

There’s also the fact that many of those houses have sat vacant and have been left to rot for many years, meaning that plenty of them need to be demolished and rebuilt before they can be lived in. Small towns have been dying for decades as suburban sprawl consumes ever-increasing amounts of land and bleeds our cities dry of tax revenue, forcing them to continue making more suburbs to pay off the previous ones.

I would assume that figure takes into account not just how many homeless there are, but renters and home prices vs wages as well. There isn’t a single county in the US where a worker with the average annual wage can afford to buy a house at the average price range in that area, for example.

See also: anything that challenges the status quo and/or my worldviews.

Because they think that one day soon, they’ll own the boot and be the ones doing the stomping.

Republicans never consider themselves to be poor, they’re just “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” who are gonna make it any day now. Just you wait, any day now they’ll win the lottery, or get an inheritance, or…

“Quiet quitting” would be 37 or even 38 in your example. Basically doing what’s in your job description, but nothing more. Setting clear work/life boundaries where you aren’t accessible to do work for your boss/manager outside of working hours (even if they just want you to answer some emails while you’re on vacation or whatever), and not doing stuff that you aren’t qualified for/isn’t in your job description and that you aren’t getting paid extra to do.

People have started refusing to let companies expect more than they’re paying for, and it’s pissed them off, so they’re calling it “quiet quitting.”

Unfortunately, the “used intelligently and responsibly” part is why people dislike AI - they don’t trust companies or people to use it that way (and for good reason based on the results so far).

Plus, it’s not gonna put everything back into Pandora’s Box. What we’re in is a societal and cultural arms race where AI is just another escalation that’s being used by both sides.

Also, resistance to air pollution isn’t as crucial as it once was due to better emissions technologies.

Tell that to the recently defunded EPA…

Everyone who disagrees with you is a bot, probably from Russia. You are very smart.

Where did they say that? They just said bots in general. It’s well known that Russia has been running a propaganda campaign across social media platforms since at least the 2016 elections (just like the US is doing on Russian and Chinese social media, I’m sure. They do it on Americans as well. We’re probably the most propangandized country on the planet), but there’s plenty of incentive for corpo bots to be running their own campaigns as well.

Or are you projecting for some reason? What do you get from defending Putin?