CarbonScored [any]

??? Nobody gets blown up going to NK. And tourists frequently enter by land.

I remember them telling us covid was low risk, that it would be contained, and not to panic.

I agree a lot public health management really fucked up in a big way, and we could have handled even the initial response a lot better. But in their defense, these statements had been true of every other overblown novel contagion in the past century. In the past couple decades there have been a few diseases which were touted as the new global pandemic and they came to very little (on the grand scale, not saying they weren’t serious for the people who suffered them). I also agree the mask shit was totally mishandled.

I think it’s impractical to call for a full-blown reaction to every new disease out there. Unfortunately then reacting to stuff when it does become big will take at least some time.

Personally wouldn’t currently advise anyone to “prepare” for it in any way beyond how they should already be as standard - Just always have a few days worth of canned food, supplies and masks.

This is the argument every single election. Every time, for decades, and yet things get continually worse.

I’d argue the belief that voting for an establishment party is any kind of a long-term solution is the biggest threat. By all means do it if it’ll help a little in the short term, but the ship’s still sinking.

Things will get inevitably worse. Voting might slow that decline slightly if we’re lucky.

The only hope for any kind of improvement, to reach a slightly tolerable world, is mass action outside of voting, and that just doesn’t seem to be happening. So it’s hard to care too much.

Though I’ve not dealt with alcoholism specifically, I’ve experience with very serious relationships that were ‘good when they were good, but abusive when they were bad’. Relationships I stayed in for many years too many, because I loved her and I thought things could change. From my anecdotal experience, I don’t think there’s much you can do but tell her how her behaviour affects you, support her insofar as you’re able, and hope that can inspire change.

Past that, I just want to say make sure you take care of yourself. It’s a certain possibility that she will not meaningfully change. No matter how much you love a person, you should never feel obliged to put up with being abused, no matter how infrequently nor in what context. And doing so will help neither you nor her. Best of luck.

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura still remains my favourite to this day.

The world’s setting is centred around how capitalism and industry affects society, how it pushed aside feudalism, how racism remains endemic and easily seen as normal, how history is swept away to hide attitudes, all sorts of complex things. Early on in the story, you get involved with a strike by exploited half-orcs and the wealthy factory owner who would rather they all died. Thinking back, it was a big part of how young me started to realise industrial relations are fucked up in capitalism.

One moment (of the many cool things) that really hit me, is that there’s an entire sub-plot across the whole continent that’s never explicitly mentioned, but is entirely noticeable if you actually pay attention and listen, not to the quest-givers or the industrial leaders, but to the servants of the powerful men you meet. If you’re lucky, near the end, you suddenly realise you just… swept all these weird characters and remarks under the rug as you had ‘important’ people to talk to. I had relegated servants and whole in-game races to an ‘unimportant’ role, when actually their stories are key to a whole second sub-plot of their own that affects everything in the world.

I know a lot of that behaviour is because I’m playing to typical game design, but, I dunno, having a real moment where you think back and realise you’ve been ignoring what should have been an obvious pattern of so many exploited people, and I just glossed over it 'til that moment, it affected me.

Great, that tactic worked for you. That tactic does not work for all children, or households.

And if your children just steadfastly refused to eat rice or beans? For hours. Every day? And you didn’t have the spare time or energy to work out a cheap and healthy food solution because you have a chronic illness and you’re working 12 hours a day to afford a roof?

Not denying your experience at all, but don’t deny others’ experiences either. I’ve lived through periods of it as a kid, and seen it as an uncle; there certainly are struggles that can make that kind of lifestyle effectively impossible for hardworking and loving parents to achieve.

I grew up in a povertous household that had the exact meal you describe about 300 days out of the year. Sure - If you’re used to making your own meals, this is fine.

But to a lot of people this will still be a lot of time, thought and energy they don’t feel able to give. And a lot of people who never learned cooking skills will feel daunted by it. If you’re dealing with a lot of stress at work and/or chaos at home, you’ll easily forget to turn off the baking and burn the whole dinner. It’s complex when compared to most of these products which are “open, (optionally microwave/add milk/etc) and eat.”

Without meat or copious cheese you’ll also start running low on protein, prompting need to complicate your dishes further by exploring weird foods you’ve never heard of or know how to prepare, like chickpeas.

I agree that kind of recipe is a good and relatively easy meal in the grand scheme of meals, but unfortunately it’s just rarely that straightforward.

Because Google is more profit and ad-focused than Mozilla (though both force ads down my throat), and they are the only viable choices for browsing the web.

I long for an actual non-profit backed, open-source browser to use, but until then, lesser of two evils.

Relevant XKCD

“Every age: “I’m glad I’m not the clueless person I was five years ago, but now I don’t want to get any older.””

I’ve never really heard of alternatives, to be honest. If others are equally easy to use and work with Git, I’d do it. Taking suggestions for alternatives?

If I wasn’t a slave constantly in fear of malnourishment, illness, homelessness, police violence, jail and/or pain, I might not care so much.

The inherent (and problematic) implication in this concern is that there’s a ‘good’ way to evolve and a ‘bad’ way. While technology and medicine massively relieves biological pressures, some genetics diseases can be entirely managed, and more people are surviving to procreate, what we’ll see in the medium-long term is a major uptick in genetic diversity, some people will be massively reliant on technology, some won’t.

As we hopefully know by now, genetic diversity is a Good Thing ™. As it increases, so will we as a species have more disease resistance, be able to fill more niches, we’ll have a wider scope of bodies and brain patterns to have new and cool thoughts etc. I do think cultural and social pressures on sexual selection could be problematic, rather than a good thing, but that’ll entirely depend on how society goes.

Though honestly, I think it’s overwhelmingly certain that we’ll have the capability to alter human genetics on a large scale before any of modern evolutionary pressures become relevant. If you accept that, then the whole discussion becomes rather moot.

The association of the internet with mass amounts CSAM or Terrorist information. It’s a line that governments have been pushing ever since the internet evolved from ‘weird invention’ to ‘vague sense of threat to the integrity of nationstates’.

Are these real problems that need addressing? Absolutely. Though on a much smaller scale than gets exclaimed. And rather than the priority being hunting down perpetrators, the effort almost exclusively goes into shutting down or bugging any server that law enforcement’s whim decides. The reality is that with end-to-end encryption, most “real” criminals on the internet will be entirely unaffected, while the created laws are instead mostly used for political censorship, the ‘war on drugs’, etc.

As a line, it’s pretty much used to justify every act of censorship, privacy invasion, and restriction on the internet that satisfies a government’s awful interests.

Assuming people are using words in the way they are widely and commonly accepted to mean (I mean, just look at Wikipedia for an easy starting point) is not a bad thing?