The “pedophile” thing has always been a front for conservatives to wedge in, from what I’ve seen. They saw a real problem and then, as they always do, fearmongered and inflated it way out of proportion to reality, then started to expand the definition.

I’m old enough to remember when pedophile actually meant people trying to engage in sex with children. As in, actual children. The definition began expanding to older and older people, and expanding into fiction, fictional characters, and more.

They also started getting weird about any men being near children. I am also old enough to remember when fathers, uncles, and generally men, could be in public with kids without a woman around and without being looked at with suspicion. These days we hear countless stories of men stalked, harassed, and threatened when they’re out with kids they have every right to be with.

And that’s just the stuff that affects everyone, not just minorities and marginalized people. How the left ever got on board with this pedophile panic I don’t understand, considering conservatives have been equating LGBT with molestation and pedophilia as long as I can recall. Anyone who didn’t see this coming from the beginning is a blind fool.

I think it was the Catholic Church thing. A real case of pedophilia committed by figures generally considered conservative and right wing, which the left rightfully jumped on attacking…but then kept going when conservatives egged them on further instead of stopping. People got tricked into going nuts on it cause the right was all ‘well if that’s bad then you must condemn this…and this…and this…and this…’ with each step being something less and less real, less egregious, less of a true problem. But they’re good at stoking hate, and once the hate was kindled in people it took less and less to spread it just slightly further each time, until now we have people ostensibly on the left calling for censorship of completely fictional works and punishment of people who produce or consume them, despite no actual harm to any actual people being involved.

And that’s exactly the level of unthinking hate they want, for people to not stop and consider whether any actual harm is being caused, just condemn and punish and don’t argue or dispute the severity of what you’re calling for. Just hate, just view them as monsters, deserving of death. Even as the definition keeps expanding.

After all, what group is othered and made the enemy doesn’t matter that much to them, only that some group is hated to the point of an unexamined desire for violence and death. They can work with that, after all.

Even Trump can occasionally be right!

Don’t feel like a dick for that! That again is management’s fault!

Remember that bagging your groceries used to be part of the service and part of the price, they eliminated that job to increase their profit margins!

At least around here Walmart still bags them for me, except they now have the cashier doing it instead of a dedicated employee for bagging.

Self serve gas was actually lower priced than full service back when the transition was happening, so there was actually a reason to do the work yourself.

If it had been the same price, only I have to do the work of pumping it, damn straight I would have felt the same.

In retrospect it was a bad deal because once full service went away entirely, so did the price difference, so I’m smarter now and wouldn’t use self checkout even if they gave a discount.

To be fair, there is someday going to be a generation where that doesn’t happen (assuming humans don’t obliterate themselves first). Eventually it’s practically a certainty that we will develop the means to preserve humans indefinitely.

Not when, in a universe known to contain non-organic beings able to perform tasks like smuggling plans, a gunnery officer decided to save lasers (as though they were apparently a precious resource) and not fire on an escape pod with no life signs? I feel like that would be the most appropriate moment to stop taking Star Wars seriously.

Up until the court decided to start ignoring centuries of legal tradition that is the bedrock of our legal system and threw out stare decisis the decision was actually more secure than a specific law.

Any law codifying it can be challenged on many grounds, especially the 10th amendment. It could easily have been struck down as unconstitutional because the federal government has no power to pass a law affecting this issue, since the constitution doesn’t grant it.

Only a constitutional amendment would have been likely to survive a court willing to do what this one has done, and there is zero possibility the Democrats could have passed one.

It’s possible to. Are they? Correct me if I’m wrong, but they’re not. They’re going after Microsoft and not Google.

Not that it makes any difference since Edge is just reskinned Chrome now anyway. If it was still it’s own thing I’d be rooting for Microsoft, at least up until they start to become bigger, then I’d turn on them.

Yeah, this. I don’t understand it. Why does anyone not in the MAGA cult do anything for this man if not fully paid up front? It’s been decades since he was well known for not paying his debts and stalling as much as legally possible if taken to court to make him pay. There shouldn’t be a single person who is in a position to provide services to him that doesn’t know this!

I can’t think of a single thing built in the last century that will still be there in a thousand years. We may still build some cool stuff, but none of it is durable anymore it seems.

Your answer to ‘can anyone provide actual evidence’ sounds like a very wordy ‘no’ and a transparent attempt to distract from that.

Is this meant to be sung to the cadence of one of Tom Bombadil’s songs? I dunno why that’s just what felt right when I read it.

The funny thing is he might be the one in the right, if we examine with logic.

A mayor probably has no particular skills or abilities to help personally in that sort of situation, and if he was doing his job correctly in the past, then everything in his power to do would already have been done. The appropriate experts are ready. Emergency plans are in place. There’s backup plans, and backup plans for the backups, all carefully considered and planned by the best people the mayor could get to do them in the past.

But humans are weird and have stupid ideas, so we want to see the mayor in his office, giving interviews, or even better, at the site of the disaster, helping. Except the most the average mayor is likely to do in an emergency situation is get in the way and be a distraction.

That’s the sad thing - your city’s mayor may or may not have done a good job, I have no idea, but the average mayor will definitely be attacked if this happens and he doesn’t make a show of ‘helping’.

Contingency plans. Yeah. Sure. I don’t think there are any that most of us can make. There aren’t any countries I could move to that would be any better I don’t think. I’m too old, I don’t have degrees, my only job qualifications aren’t particularly in demand because the training for them is fast, and the only family connection to citizenship elsewhere I had is insufficient because it’s too many generations removed from me.

I suspect the cast majority of people who would be even worse off than me under another Trump/Republican administration are in just as bad if not worse a position.

When the technology gets there, this will be amazing. I’ll be able to sit down at the computer and say “make me a mystery detective RPG in the style of Sherlock Holmes but set on a cyberpunk styled city on a space station like the Citadel from Mass Effect” and I’ll get just that, generated exclusively for me with a brand new story that fits the themes I asked for.

But that is gonna be a couple decades or more I expect. I dearly hope it happens quickly so I can live to see it, but it’s not going to be in the next ten years, that’s for damn sure.

They don’t say it, they don’t even acknowledge it themselves, but they view this in the same way a credulous middle ages individual would view making a deal with the fey. The right set of words, the right incantation, will grant you power over them whether they want to acknowledge it or not.

That’s the mental image they have. If you ask them how these secret laws are enforced and what actually obligates the judges, police, government, etc to follow the rules, they won’t admit the magical thinking, though they will babble and make up nonsense that sounds, to them, like genuine explanations but is in truth gibberish.

At the end, though, that’s what they’re doing…they’re chanting mystical incantations that will bind the Queen of the Faeries to their will and prevent the fae from doing harm upon them or impeding them.

But they don’t even take the cautionary parts of the tales to heart, for even if you should succeed on pulling one over on the Faeries, they are wily and patient, and someday they will trick you into giving up the protection you thought was unbreakable. Just as even if they actually managed to stumble upon the correct legal maneuver, it is likely the system will be back to get them one way or another.

If I had to choose between global high speed internet access, and ground based astronomy, I’d pick the Internet every time. I’d completely blot out the sky forever if that’s what it took.

We don’t need ground-based astronomy to learn about the universe, I’d rather encourage more space-based astronomy. Or build some observatories on the moon if you really want to build on a solid space body.

However, Starlink is a for profit company run by Elon Musk. I don’t really want them doing it, because they’re not going to provide unlimited global Internet to everyone. So as the guy said, the idea is good, but Starlink is bad, although it is currently the only such option.

First I even heard about this game was a comic talking about it’s unattractive characters. I looked it up out of curiosity to see if this was an exaggeration like it has been with some characters like Aloy, and…ehhh…mostly true.

One of the big draws of these types of games is cool character designs people want to play. This game definitely doesn’t have that for me. Overwatch quickly pulled me in with cool character designs, this one…does not.

That article reminded me of that politician who said women’s bodies would prevent pregnancy from rape. Clearly he had so little contact with women he confused them with ducks.

Roaming the earth means roaming all - or at least a very significant portion of - the earth, not some very isolated region. So I would say yes - if some tiny population of mammoths was still alive in some limited area at this time, they were not ‘roaming the earth’.