When has the government failed to protect your or family members?

Just so I’m clear, you think I’m not allowed to care about others? I’m not even allowed to care about my own safety until my family has been attacked? Wild take. I’m glad society isn’t comprised of people like you. I care about others as well as my family. Most people aren’t murdered and raped and assaulted each year. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care about murder and rape and assault.

Queer people don’t have to be ugly and fat. What an insane take. It’s not “queerphobic” to be unattracted to people. It is homophobic (and queerphobic) to tell people what they’re allowed to be attracted to.

I called them unattractive. You called that a flaw. Maybe it is. Like it or not, people prefer attractive characters in PvP hero shooters. See the outrageous success of Marvel Rivals which launched just three months after Concord. You seem to be taking this very personally. If you’re more attracted to fat, lumpy, and sexually ambiguous people, more power to you. You just don’t represent the vast majority of people who play these games.

When you consume high cholesterol foods, you’re likely going to have high blood LDL. That’s just physics.

No, that’s not how it works. Please read the paper I cited. That’s like saying we can breathe water because H2O has O in it. Human bodies are very complex. A strict diet can reduce LDL by around 8-15%. Nowhere near the dramatic decline you indicated. LDL is mostly determined by genetics, with 40-60% heritable. Other causes are related to genetic mutations, excess weight, and metabolic issues like diabetes. Less important factors include menopause, age, hypothyroidism, and certain medications. You likely had a comorbidity. From the paper:

Conclusions: In typical British diets replacing 60% of saturated fats by other fats and avoiding 60% of dietary cholesterol would reduce blood total cholesterol by about 0.8 mmol/l (that is, by 10-15%), with four fifths of this reduction being in low density lipoprotein cholesterol.

You think we have to be attracted to morbidly obese and ambiguously sexed people in order to be accepting? What kind chronically online take is that? People are allowed to find others unattractive. In your race to be the very virtuest of all, you’ve accidentally looped around to intolerance.

I struggle to think of worse examples in the AAA space. The colours weren’t just badly complemented, but intentionally violated colour theory. Their skills had nothing to do with their aesthetic or stories. They were just kind of thrown together without any care. Why was Baz, the bulky man, given ninja-like skills? None of the characters were attractive. One was morbidly obese. Almost all of them were gender non-conforming. And the biggest sin of all: none of them were cool. They were all lame as shit. You must know all of this if you’ve been following the story and criticism. It’s fine to disagree and in many instances there is room for subjectivity, but this was one of those rare examples where we can all come together to objectively declare these characters a train wreck.

Rail is very expensive to build, operate, and maintain. Rail is far more heavily subsidised in Europe than air travel and it’s still more expensive. It also doesn’t respond well to changes in demand. Tracks can’t be easily moved. Flights can easily be redirected. As technology and efficiency improves, flights become cheaper every year. Not rail, however, because most of the cost of operation and maintenance has nothing to do with energy efficiency. This gap will continue to widen. Further, rail has an inherent logistical limitation: all cars share limited lines. They are all limited by the slowest car. They are all stopped when an issue occurs with another car (or tracks). Planes can fly around damage to the network.

Flying receives far lower subsidies and infrastructure spending than rail. The EU subsidises air travel (including said avgas tax exemption) to the tune of around €30–40 billion annually depending on what you include and what you consider to be a “subsidy.” Using similar criteria, rail is subsidised to the tune of €40–75 billion per year. So rail gets a lot more investment despite it serving 16% fewer travel kilometers per year in the EU than air travel.

Thanks for the suggestion. Antihistamines help when symptoms are caused by histamine or histadine rich foods. Some people have overactive mast cell activity or produce too little DAO. You could also try DAO supplements. Which antihistamine works for you?

If the government won’t protect citizens they have the right to protect themselves.

I’m not American and I don’t care how much you like or dislike the NRA. Your comment sounds like authoritarian bootlicking.

Siri is such a mess I see no other way than buying something like Anthropic or partnering with a competent LLM. If this were to work it would require using Gemini for voice recognition and not just passthrough like they’re currently doing with ChatGPT. The experience is awful.

Good. An armed society is a polite society. Guns are the great equaliser. Larger and stronger people aren’t free to assault smaller and weaker people as they wish. There are societies like Singapore and China where crime is punished so severely that people don’t need personal protection. Sadly, today, that’s not how most of the West is run.

That’s very impressive. Dietary factors generally account for a very small proportion of blood LDL. Your diet must have been very poor and you likely have some known genetic mutations which greatly exacerbate the issue.

For me this is a case of picking the lesser poison. I have IBD and FODMAPs give me major issues. This means most fruit and vegetables, plus dairy and wheat, cause major issues. Meat, including red meat, is one of the few foods which don’t cause me intestinal pain, bloating, and diarrhea. Studies indicate a not insignificant proportion of the population have issues with FODMAPs, and they also tend to fare much better with meat.

Such a comprehensive example of poor decision making at so many levels. From the decision to charge for a PvP hero shooter in a saturated market of free PvP hero shooters, to spending what appeared to be tens of millions on marketing, PR, and CGI cut scenes, to the worst character designs in living memory. It’s clear they did zero focus group testing on those characters, or if they did, they ignored all feedback. As is so common now, everyone involved in the fiasco is going to be integrated into future projects and destroy them too. They’ll learn nothing and keep doing it.

The UK has been arresting people for saying offensive things for a long time. It’s just that most of the victims were on the right, and most people on the left were cheering for it. Now that the laws are being used against their side and their causes, they’re sad and outraged. It’s a tale as old as democracy: people don’t care until it materially affects them. Every time we give up rights or give governments more power, no matter how justified we think the cause today, those powers will eventually be turned against us.

I can confirm the 2023, 2024, and 2025 Model Ys all have indicator stalks here in Norway and Denmark

Skoda is part of the VW group, which was found guilty of cheating emissions standards. The environmental damage caused by this is nearly incalculable, but studies indicate 1,200 people dill die prematurely as a result in Europe alone, and 60 in the U.S. They estimate that 2,600 more deaths could have been prevented had VW fully recalled and retrofitted all affected vehicles by 2017 - but they did not.

Hyundai has also been found to be cheating emissions standards, and were found to be using child labour in Alabama.

I’m sorry but if you think a Nazi salute or political donations are worse than child labour and killing thousands of people, I think you need to realign your priorities.

Lastly, Musk clearly doesn’t support tariffs:

Musk said he offers his advice and has been on record voicing his opposition to tariffs.

If you would join me in not buying from VW or Skoda, we could send a message to these companies that killing people and using child labour is wrong.

This is hilarious. Re-read my comment and what you just wrote. You don’t understand what the sentence “the infrequency of an event does not determine value or importance” means. To use smaller words, it means that just because something happens infrequently, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care about or plan for it. Accidents happen infrequently, but they’re a big deal when they happen. An event can still be important even when it happens infrequently. You argued, above, that because something happens infrequently it’s not important.

7% of the population have a “dark triad” personality, meaning they’re high on sociopathy, machiavellianism, and narcissism. Many people out there don’t care about causing pain and harm as long as they’re not personally impacted. This is why any judicial system must account for these people with strong deterrents and harsh punishments for crimes like this. That’s the only thing they respond to.

It’s the Curb Your Enthusiasm humour which gives me a major case of fremdschamen. I can’t watch comedy where people are the butt of the joke. Just makes me feel bad for them.