Because most people run on their personal experiences, and don’t do great when they have to think very far ahead or extrapolate and make connections.

If you’re lucky enough to be born into a conservative home that’s not bugshit crazy, and you’re lucky enough to not be TOO smart, neurodivergent, gay/lesbian/trans/etc. then you’ve probably never seen the full ugly face of conservatism because you were treated nicely.

Lots of conservatives will treat you perfectly politely…if they get to know you, and as long as you look white and clean-cut enough. As long as you give the right social signifiers, basically.

Most of my ex-conservative friends group was driven away from conservative family because we were abused in some obvious fashion, were gay/lesbian/trans, were neurodivergent, etc. We were different in ways that, ultimately, after a lot of pain, forced us to cut ties with family. (It was never our first choice though.)

But a woman who was lucky to be born into a family that treats her halfway decently won’t experience that sort of ugliness until an emergency happens and it’s leopards-eating-faces time.

And it’s VERY hard to rock the boat BEFORE something bad happens to you, when you know rocking it will have really bad consequences immediately. People don’t like to be shunned or kicked out of families, so if they’re not treated TOO badly they’ll toe the line and conform out of fear of the unknown and fear of losing everything they have and know.

I’m curious about two things. Will nesting birds or animals find this material tasty or good to gnaw on?

I always ask that ever since I learned vehicles using a more organic plastic for wiring harnesses suffer from shorts due to animals like mice nibbling the plastic because it smells tasty.

I finally realized this guy’s name reminds me of some in house menswear brand at Sears or K-Mart or some other department store that suffered and wheezed and whimpered before going out of business.

I wonder if Ukraine is having an effect on attitudes.

Anyway, I can’t speak for others, but one thing I’ve come to realize through life experiences is that the best way to resolve differences is to behave civilly and talk. BUT. I’ve also seen that there are people who do not ascribe to or live by my preferences and ideals for this. There are people who don’t value rationality, there are people who can’t be shamed or pressured by society into behaving nicely and getting along with others. Those people respect the stick, and only the stick. I don’t want to use the stick. But these people do not live by my ideals (which are to talk things out and behave civilly), no matter how I say pretty please to them, and it’s foolish to project my values onto them when I see with my own eyes that they behave and react in patterns different to my own. They respect things that scare them or directly threaten them only, and continue to misbehave if all they’re going to get for it is a finger-wagging and a scolding.

So it seems very wise to “speak softly and carry a big stick”. The military is our stick. There are people out there who will behave in the most horrific uncivil ways right up until the moment they realize you have a big stick, then they’ll suddenly rein themselves in, and you can then be civil and talk things out. But that opportunity to talk doesn’t appear unless you actually have the stick when you’re dealing with folks of that sort of mentality.

It’s very important to look at your opponents with clear eyes and see what they ARE doing, not what you wish they would do, and not what you would do if you were in their shoes. As the saying goes, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

Without laws letting child workers maintain their own bank account in their own name without parents being co owners allowed to drain it at any time, children working become money pinatas for abusive parents.

I say this as someone who would have benefitted from being independent earlier. My uncle did have me work at 14, and when I went to the bank I found he had stolen every penny, and because I was a minor I had no legal recourse to get it back.

A few years later the courts emancipated me, but it didn’t return the money he had stolen. Mind you, he was not working at the time himself and he got a few hundred from the state a month to care for me, and he spent what he stole on computer parts so he could game.

Children working only is in the child’s benefit if there are ironclad laws allowing them to keep their money, and right now there is not.

Because it’s very difficult to get things you need to live solely through barter. Many trades are very niche, and an economy that uses money allows those trades to continue being viable parts of society.

Like, think of plumbing. If everything goes well, you don’t need a plumber. But when you do…you really need it. Now imagine being the plumber who wants some bread and eggs but the farmer has no problems currently that needs the plumber’s skills. Plumber can’t eat, leaves profession, there’s now no plumber when the pipes do break.

Obviously, the next thought here might be, “Well, why doesn’t the plumber say if they get eggs and bread now, they’ll come and fix your toilet later if needed?” But that sort of re-invents credit, right? “I’ll trade 3 future plumbing problems for 3 boxes of eggs now.” If you have that, why not money?

So basically, money is very useful. It can be traded for many things you otherwise wouldn’t be able to get if you were only able to offer as barter a specific item that might be rejected by the other person you want to barter with. Money is a “universal” trade good, and it’s also easy to store (you don’t have to have lots of physical room to store your Universal Trade Good).

The BEHAVIOR of people surrounding this very useful thing can absolutely be suspect, depending on the person (greedy sociopaths hoarding wealth)–but that’s a human thing, not because money is innately a bad thing. It’s a social problem, not a technology problem. You could totally have a greedy hoarder storing up a non-money trade item too…see people and toilet paper/sanitizer during Covid.

Just so anyone reading knows…some games with Linux binaries sometimes run better using proton and the windows binaries.

Crusader Kings 3 is buggy with Linux binaries but fine using proton, while Stellaris is the reverse for me. Ymmv.

I’ve been trying to move to Linux for about 20 years, but gaming issues always sent me back to Windows.

I tried again after hearing about how proton and steamdeck have made it so much easier for most games and it’s true. Been exclusively on Linux on my gaming rig since about September. The only one I couldn’t get working was oddly a little simple indie game, it lagged badly while stuff like No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk ran fine.

Microsoft is pushing this at a very bad time, because you CAN game on Linux now.

Does it turn into a gryphon when it grows up?

And would the fiber from its cocoon be considered fur or silk?

Yeah, I’ve had such an easy time of it that I’m actually surprised when a game doesn’t work in Linux now too. Which is a reverse of how it used to be.

I switched from Windows to Linux in the last year.

There are sometimes odd things to configure, but it’s no more difficult than the windows XP era was.

It is much much easier than Linux used to be due to Steam, and I find I more often have problems with smaller indie games than big ones.

I’ve been playing Cyberpunk, Baldurs Gate 3, Stellaris, No Man’s Sky, Crusader Kings 3 no problem. Plus many others.

I tried to game on Linux for many years with wine, but it was Steam that actually made it feasible for me .

The typical American household would need to spend $445 more a month to purchase the same goods and services as a year ago, a report from Moody’s found.

Like in a file?

Bitwarden already syncs between PC and phone.

There’s a number of people who might have stayed religious if their religion actually focused on helping people and wasn’t full of hypocrites.

This is awful.

People reading along here should note this person is trying to turn blue states purple, they admit it with their own words, and they are appealing to morality to lure suckers in.

As if nobody but them is a moral person

Bullshit.

But a lot of us have religious triggers planted deep, yeah? That if you toddle along with the person claiming they are of virtue, maybe you’ll be a good person too?

Anyway.

Vote like your hair is on fire, because if assholes like this fine upstanding “moral” person has their say and causes blue voters to stay home, we’re gonna be fucked, just as we were before. They’re trying the same tactic that worked before even to give us Trump. And why wouldn’t they? It worked.

No state is “safe” from flipping.

Also note that playing with voting demographics is why a lot of the anti-abortion laws are being pushed…to cleanse purple states of blue voters by driving them out. So when you see anyone encouraging you not to vote because a state is safe, understand it’s part of an effort to flip states from blue or purple to red.

Nah, you say it to sap unity and make people stay home from voting.

Your vibe is the same as the girls who say they bluntly “tell it as they see it” in their dating profile, but anyone with any relationship experience knows that means they’re completely willing to make things toxic as fuck because they’ll just vomit their selfish so called truth anywhere without caring about consequences or how it destroys, because it serves some sort of other motivation for them.

Using words to encourage people to embrace hopelessness and not vote is a propaganda technique to put Trump back in the Whitehouse, and him being there weakens the nation so immensely and catastrophically that it’s extremely attractive to cash and weapons poor enemies to plop someone in front of a cheap computer to spread propaganda to attempt to destroy a nation from within. People who can’t fight the US with military might will use words instead.

In short, your words are not neutral. You’re either what is called a useful idiot, an ordinary person who swallowed outside propaganda whole and does the work of other interests here, or you’re a knowing perpetrator.

I hope people here use whatever skills they picked up in English class however many years ago to think about not just the exact words of the poster I’m responding to, but why they posted this thing at this moment, their motivations beyond what they claim they are, and the effects of an appeal to truth on a reader and how that can influence perception even when the thing said isn’t actually necessarily true or contains such a small flake of some truth that it is effectively turns into a lie when put beside the bigger and more vast and complicated truths.

Oh, there’s young racist fucks too.

I was out doing some outdoor work last week, and I’ve basically the skintone of a vampire so I cover up, so I had a big unstylish fishing hat with a neck protector on. And some kids from the local junior high mocked me in terrible Spanish as they walked home. (And by terrible, I mean I could identify how bad it was and I haven’t had Spanish classes in 20+ years and never was fluent in it and I could still tell it was bad.)

I’m not even Hispanic, but it made me mad enough with it happening just one time that it hurts inside to know similar stuff happens on a daily basis to other people. And some of it totally comes from young racist fucks.

Yeah. My eyes got WIDE open about the “function” of third-party candidates in the US after I saw in hindsight (because isn’t hindsight always clearer?) Jill Stein’s role in a prior election. They’re basically there to shave off just enough votes from one of the major parties to tilt things one way or another. Easy for 3rd parties–no matter of they’re crazies OR if they actually have legit policy stances that really should be considered, such as climate issues–to be turned into agents of chaos. People working the USA’s political system from the outside work BOTH sides–the right and the left, pretending to be either one to sow discord as it suits their goals. The more division the better, for them.

I really want various ballot initiatives to succeed in changing how voting is done in the US, so you can safely vote for the candidate you actually want without handing the election to the worst candidate. Voting would be much invigorated if you could vote for someone with pride and enthusiasm instead of, “At least they’re not XYZ” which is what has to happen now working within the rules our system has for us.

Here and there, a few states have implemented better systems with various flavors of ranked choice and such for their state elections, so they’re not stuck in a two-party horror show for local elections at least, but there’s a lot of hard work that has to be done before that gains enough momentum across many states and towns and smaller localities in the US that it might be feasible to change the way voting is done on a federal level.