I recognize that this probably qualifies as “picking holes” as he said, but his questioning of Hamas seems to be more of a rhetorical device than a sincere request for information. It’s not like things had been good in Palestine before the October 7 attack, so questioning why they did it sort of implies that it was out of the blue and not in response to decades of failed attempts to peacefully end settlement expansion and violence against Palestinians. And while acknowledging the horrors that Israel is raining down on them, is it not obvious why Hamas would still have hostages? The hostages are their only bargaining chip, and without the hostages, Palestine would’ve already been wiped off the map.

I’ve been a Radiohead fan for a long time, and I’ll continue to be, but this was an unexpectedly neoliberal take to criticize both sides and yearn for going back to how things used to be, completely ignoring that how things used to be is how we got here. That’s how time works.

I think of this quote from JFK pretty often, and it just refuses to stop being relevant, and apparently more people need to hear it. “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” That’s the reason for the attack. The reason for having hostages is “to cling onto hope for survival against an otherwise guaranteed complete genocide.” They’re holding on and hoping that the world that is watching actually does something to help them, and we just aren’t.

I wasn’t really thinking of covid. Biden made sure we got free test kits mailed to us when they were impossible to find, but yeah otherwise he just kept on course. Covid vaccines were maybe the one thing that I agreed with trump on. And he could’ve sailed to reelection if he had just let the experts talk to the people instead of sowing doubt about masks and lockdowns. If he had just sold red masks that said “trump 2020” on them, he would’ve won reelection while lining his pockets.

Biden’s first half achievements that I was referring to were things like the infrastructure bill and the chips act. Inflation cooled, shit got fixed, manufacturing started coming back, and we started investing in a greener path forward. He should’ve communicated those accomplishments much better because most people don’t really get a glimpse beyond what catches their attention in everyday life. Like egg prices. But there’s a very good reason that egg prices rose, and it has very little to do with Biden and everything to do with bird flu, culling, and supply & demand; reduce your egg use for 6-12 months and the prices will come back down.

The same strategy will not be so effective in the incoming crisis due to tariffs, mostly because trump is such a stubborn dipshit that I’m not sure he’ll ever fully walk it back. He always chickens out of the high rate shit (probably mostly as a pump and dump scheme) but he’ll never admit that he was wrong about what tariffs are and what they do when deployed the way he insisted on doing them. His whole thing is pretending to be brilliant at business, but he doesn’t know basic shit that most people know before even enrolling in econ 101, so that’s pretty damning for the knowledge of the tens of millions of people he managed to trick into believing that he’s even remotely passable at business. His multiple bankruptcies are evidence of either incompetence or maliciously fraudulent looting, and the latter is only really necessary if you’re so bad at business that you have to cheat to get ahead despite the monumental inheritance left to you.

Sorry for the wall of text lol.

I would say that Biden did better than I had expected in the first half of his term and then more or less coasted off of that momentum through the second half. The probable dementia can’t be ignored, but even without that he should’ve been doing more. He mostly stabilized shit, which is what a status-quo neolib is supposed to do, and he even expanded equitability and built framework for a better tomorrow, but he was I guess too humble to brag about it? He should’ve been holding up graphs every week and told the people “this is an improvement, and you may not be fully feeling it yet, but you will over time. I’ve expedited relief to get to you faster, but that means it’s on the scale of years instead of decades. The downside of bureaucracy and democracy and proper checks and balances is that solutions can take time, but that’s also a benefit in that any would-be malevolent authoritarian couldn’t break everything overnight. Just hold on. We’ve stopped the bleeding, and now the healing takes a little time.”

Instead, we got bounced from our hospital bed and immediately started picking at the scabs with a rusty knife. We’re fucked. Tariffs? What a fucking moron. We’ll be referring to turned-out pockets as trump flags by the end of the decade.

First time playing BG3, but I’ve played a good bit of 5e and a little 3.5e. I’m trying a monk for the first time. Way of the Open Hand. I named him Rick O’Shea. He goes up front and bounces between enemies, fucking 'em up. I can’t remember every choice I made, but I know for sure he took the Athlete feat, but that makes less sense outside of BG3. I can’t remember his level, but I’ll probably pick Mobile for another feat.

My favorite 5e character I ever played was a high wisdom, low intelligence human cleric. He would occasionally do a stupid thing that came back to bite him, but he would learn from that mistake and not do it again. He would also relay metaphorical farm wisdom to the party, always formatted as “Pappy always said…”
E.g. “Pappy always said never milk a cow if you ain’t brought your bucket.” Meaning don’t start shit before you’ve figured out subsequent steps. Don’t try to pick a tough fight and then realize you’re out of spell slots lol.
He was a cleric of Helm but somewhere along the way he was convinced to serve another god instead who had pretty much identical goals in mind (idr the details) and I think his name was Pyxis or Pryxis or something. Idk, the cleric could never get it right so he would call him Pixar and he was like sure, fine, close enough. Anyway, so for flavor, Spirit Guardians was always Toy Story characters flying around.

Not to be overly morbid, but what’s the point in saving up for retirement if the job is killing you? Financial security is important, but so is your mental health. And based on your general field, I don’t think I need to explain that stress has real, quantifiable consequences. I wouldn’t be surprised if reducing your stress level actually raises your ability to do some stuff for yourself that you’re currently finding pretty impossible. Less stress at work might give you more energy to exercise, cook healthy meals, better maintain your home, etc.

You might need to adjust some of your “extra” spending to make it work, but if that’s the only real sacrifice in the switch, I’d say make the switch. You’re obviously unhappy with what you’ve got or you wouldn’t be looking at other options and asking the internet.

FWIW, I’m in my mid 30s and changed careers ten years ago. I was a chef and loved what I did, but I had a boss that completely killed my passion to grow or even sustain. I literally got a raise when I quit for a job scrubbing toilets. I found my footing in power plants and now I’m an operator in-house. It’s never too late to make a change. You’re never in too deep. And in many cases, it’s gonna take a step down before you have a chance to rise up higher. Never stop learning and growing. Cheers and good luck :)

I know you phrased it as “losing” here, but it still made me think of that moment in Firefly when somebody refers to Mal having fought on the wrong side in a battle, and he says “May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one.”

When a person has convictions and is put at a certain sort of fork in the road, they would rather do anything else before ever seeing themselves transform into the sort of person who would take one of those paths. Some would sell their souls to survive, and some know that their cause is worth several times more than their souls are worth, and the bill comes due at some point.

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.

Why always with the clickbaity headlines?

Because it gets people to click. Duh. So thanks for saving us the click and reducing their site traffic with your comment.

Big if true. They are claiming a lot of things, which would be exciting if I had any reason to believe that they’re anything more than claims, probably to juice investment. Sodium ion battery tech is infamous for being heavier per kW such that it’s less ideal for EVs, last for fewer power cycles such that it’s less ideal for EVs, and the cost savings to switch just hasn’t been enough to justify. Here, they’re claiming comparable energy density, 2.5-5x the power cycles, and under 10% of the cost compared to lithium ion, all without mentioning how they’ve managed to achieve all of this. I want this to be true, but I’m not jumping for joy until I see them actually selling this product that they claim will exist at this price that they claim it will be.

I would’ve been on board with sodium ion tech for home battery solutions connected to smart power management on a market adjusted power plan before ever seeing a breakthrough like this. Imagine subsidizing your home power needs with a battery during the hot summer day and then charging that battery overnight at 2am when there are minimal power needs on the grid. That application doesn’t really care about weight, and if you could just call somebody to come swap out your batteries every couple years, then the power cycle limit doesn’t really matter either. As for cost, early adopters of the idea could inject the capital for these companies to scale up production which would drive costs down. Suddenly, 20 years from now, who the fuck bothers to have a gas/diesel backup generator at their house anymore? Now if these claims turn out to be true, every home and business could utilize this plan.

The question you’re asking is actually very complicated. Pretty much every for-profit media company will have a bias to the right since their goal is to profit today and survive to profit tomorrow. Lowering the taxes for the company and for the wealthy who own large portions of the company are obviously something that the company and the people running the company want, and the platform of the right is consistently to lower taxes on businesses and the wealthy.

The wild thing is the way that the right has shifted in the past 30 years or so. Politicians would stir bigoted voters up with dogwhistle rhetoric while maintaining some level of deniability so that non-bigots would also still feel okay voting for them. This all changed with trump. Suddenly, it was possible to say the quiet part out loud and still get elected. Rather than using mild bigotry as a tool to get into office and then make bank off of bribes and carving out loopholes and conduct insider trading, now moron bigots themselves are running and winning, and they don’t actually know what to do or how to do it, so they mostly just shitpost and grandstand because they don’t actually know shit about governing.

We’re now coming to a point where these companies are hopefully starting to realize that the right is so bad at governing and so damaging with their shitposting that they’re actually hurting these companies’ bottom line. I wouldn’t dare call Democrats “the left” because they’re factually a center-right party; the Democrats were posturing to be a sane, safe, profitable alternative. Like it or not, Biden steered our economy back in the right direction, and Harris would’ve continued on that track while also letting these companies continue to amass wealth. Media companies who saw the forecast and reported with some bias towards Democrats are absolutely not left-leaning. A real left-leaning media company would not be structured like a corporation or traded on the stock market. A real left-leaning media company would be advocating to eradicate the systems as they are and remake them with equity in the foundations. We live in a very right-wing America, and any positive reporting of capitalist America, or gentle criticism of small details of the colonial capitalism of America needs to be understood as right bias. Every time somebody puts the stock market or companies or government contracts or “the economy” over feeding the hungry and housing the unhoused and treating the sick, that is right bias. RATM hit on this perfectly in Bulls On Parade:

Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes
Not need, just feed the war cannibal animal
I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library
Line up to the mind cemetery now
What we don’t know keeps the contracts alive and movin’
They don’t gotta burn the books they just remove 'em
While arms warehouses fill as quick as the cells
Rally 'round the family, pockets full of shells

TL;DR: the litmus of whether your news is biased to the left cannot be determined by whether they nudge for the center-right or the far-right candidate.

AaaaaaAAaaaaaaAaaaaAamen

Excellent. Idk if you have deer or similar stuff in your area, but be very vigilant. If you lock up your rear tires and fishtail, just keep your tire locked. If you let off the brake while not perfectly straight, your bike will violently realign and you’ll get bucked off.

Overall, I recommend these motorcycle safety courses to all drivers. It pushed me to be much more actively aware while driving.

I find it helpful to try to quantify the time I’ll enjoy with a thing before I buy it. Or maybe there will be some amount of cost savings if it’s a tool. You could do both with a motorcycle.

Unless you get a shitty Harley, it will almost certainly be more fuel efficient than an ICE car/truck, so if you plan to commute by motorcycle at all, there is some cost savings there. That will probably offset the cost of registration and insurance, and maybe regular maintenance, so not really a net gain, but at least pays for itself to some degree.

So after approximating the cost after those savings, then you can approximate how many hours per year and how many years you expect to enjoy the thing for. Divide the cost by that number of hours. Would you pay that hourly rate for the enjoyment you expect to get from it? If so, buy. If not, don’t buy.

There are obviously some abstract things to factor in too, though. Would you make friends through your motorcycle? Do you enjoy working on stuff so in addition to the riding do you plan on doing aftermarket work on it? Is there a bucket list aspect to this?

I can tell you that, as a former motorcycle owner, I would probably not get one again. They’re super fucking dangerous, almost entirely because other drivers are fucking morons. It’s impossible for me to ride without being on edge with the assumption that every other driver is actively trying to kill me. At this point, I would only get one as a fun time to ride once in a while, and the upkeep isn’t worth it for that. Even an electric one would be hard for me to justify for myself because of insurance, registration, and ride gear.

That all being said, there are considerations that you and you alone will need to apply to this decision. I just strongly urge that if you do buy a bike, you wear all recommended gear. Never shorts. Never sandals. Never without a helmet and jacket. Dress for the slide, not the ride.

They mean more “bored of life” than “bored in the moment”.

Used habitually, it can be a pacifying kind of drug. You’re unhappy with things, so you get stoned to get a little escape. If you didn’t have the out of that little escape, you might be more inclined to make choices and put in the work to make lasting changes.

On the other side, shrooms makes you uncomfortably confront the shit that you don’t like about yourself and neural pathways get a chance to reroute, so you can kinda give yourself the kick in your ass you need to see the problem and make changes.