Are you that cheap?

You are in a contract with the government. Maybe an involuntary one, but still a contract. This contract gives you rights and benefits, but also obligations and responsibilities.

When the government does not uphold their end of the contract, or changes it to essentially only obligations for you and no benefits, then it becomes extortion. Still not exactly theft, but closer to what you mean.

However, the vast majority of people get benefits that far outweight the costs of the contract. Safety, transportation, education, utilities, etc.

Nah, nobody will believe that. You have to be subtle. Just invite a journalist to the groupchats with his homies.

Fun fact: Android is one of those Linux variants. It is, however, so highly modified, that we usually don’t really call it ‘Linux’ anymore. But the core components of Android are most certainly Linux components. So in a pedantic way, way more people directly use Linux than you would think.

It is a unitless measure, since you divide income (euro) by price of goods and services (euro).

Here are some places where people had the same question, and the answer was seeds every time:

https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/g5fb9v/when_i_cut_open_my_eggplants_that_have_been_in/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskCulinary/comments/w2ccxb/what_are_these_tiny_black_seeds_in_my_eggplant/

https://www.reddit.com/r/vegetablegardening/comments/16m4til/eggplant_dots/

https://www.reddit.com/r/foodsafety/comments/1iv7qb4/eggplant_had_dark_spotsseeds_safe_to_eat/

Note that random reddits are not a source of reliable information. However, OP is certainly not the first to notice such spots, and it is not marked anywhere as dangerous. It is also notably absent on any sites about checking whether your eggplant has gone bad.

It is so similar to QUERTY, that I just shrugged when I accidentally ordered the wrong 15 euro keyboard. So technically I also use QUERTZ, but I still tell my PC it is a QUERTY keyboard. Fun times when someone attempts to use my PC and gets confused.

For once I’m glad my fellow Dutchman haven’t colonized this thread yet, and instead we get a German invasion.

The “rationale” behind such atrocities is always based on emotion, not actual reason. Usually fear. Analyzing why you feel that fear, and whether it is justified, will help to avoid falling into such logical fallacies.

Ignoring the fear, and dismissing it as illogical will not help anyone. You have to acknowledge the emotion, and analyse it. Allow it to exist, but avoid acting on it before analyzing it.

In fact, acting on emotions, especially on fear, will often result in such atrocities. Since it is fear, not reason, that eliminates compassion.

Ps. I like the discourse. Please don’t see my comments as a personal attack. Even if neither of us changes their oppinion, understanding the other is valuable.

But understanding, predicting, and reacting differently on emotions are all learnable, and very rational.

For example: don’t punch the TV when you are angry about loosing a game. Instead realise where the anger is coming from. Probably frustration, but why are you so frustrated when you loose? Some frustration is understandable, but what causes so much frustration that it turned into violent anger? And can you predict what actions or circumsfamces may result in that frustration or and anger (e.g. alcohol consumption)?

The most rational fictional species I know, Vulcans, do not lack emotion. Quite the opposite. But they have learned to control their emotions.

But when we tried to get grandma into such a state of being taken care for, it was suddenly considered abuse (by her definition).

The word love would not disappear. Its meaning would just shift to something that feels off when you mean a specific type of love. What you whisper in the ear of your lover in bed, will be different from what you tell your kid when they go off to school. But when talking about the amount of love you have to give, the old word “love” will still be used, since that is usually about any kind of love.

I would split the word “love” into unique words for different kinds of love.

Reddit was a decent solution, till it enshitified to make money. Before then, it was already flooded by the masses. Clearly their method worked fine. Not perfect, but at least fine. So I don’t see why the masses are the problem. I personaly put all the blame on the need to make money of a vital piece of digital infrastructure.

The tricky part, is that we also cannot put it in the hands of a government, since it can become a tool for propaganda. So the EU hosting something like reddit, would also create a conflict of interrests. I’m curious if we can find a good solution to this problem.

Large beer containers are “rare” for the same reason large soda containers are rare: carbonization. If you store an opened bottle of beer for a few hours, it will go flat, killing part of the taste with it. Beer is even worse in this regard than soda. You want to finish the whole thing in one sitting for beer. Very few people consume 2 litres of beer in one sitting. … But … Every single self respecting bar has beer from the tap, right? That stuff doesn’t appear magically. It comes in kegs. You can buy those kegs from a wholesaler, or from the internet. These kegs work by inserting CO2 to pressurize it. So you will need CO2 tanks and a system to pressurize the whole thing. Not super hard to get, but not something you find in your supermarket either. But if you consume enough beer, it can absolutely be worth it to buy a tap, CO2 and kegs instead of bottles.

Most people here are taking the moral high road or talking about the current state of society. Lets look at game theory instead to get some fundamental understanding.

Consider a game with 10 players. Each player has two options: be charitable or be selfish. If they are charitable, they add 3 points to the collective score. If they are selfish, they add 2 points to their own score. All players decide at the same, and afterwards the collective is evenly divided among all players. So if all players are charitable, everyone ends up with a personal score of 3. If everyone is selfish, everyone ends up with a score of 2.

If you are the only selfish person in the game, you score a jackpot. You get a total score of 4.7.

Now consider the idea that you play this game over and over with random players, accumulating score in each game. If everyone is always selfish, no-one will score higher than 2. But if you, individually are never selfish, you never score higher than 3.

If we consider all players to follow the same strategy, then we get an optimization puzzle for individual score. How often do you randomly choose for selfish? Instinct and DNA, but also culture and social norms create a common recipe in humans for how to make this decision. So while reality is more complex, we still act anough alike to get some wisdom when applying this assumption.

But it turns out that we don’t play these games with random people, but we are grouped by our strategy for choosing selfish or charitable (e.g. grouped by culture). And the groups also compete. If a group does particularly bad with their global score, they will be removed from the game (conquored, culture changed, etc). So not only does your choice for selfish or charitable need to optimize for personal gain to get a survival edge within your group, it also needs to optimize for survival of the group. A group with only selfish people will never thrive.

Hence, in this simple example, randomly doing good can be good for the survival of your DNA and culture. Real life is much more complicated, but a similar balance of interests may be at play. After all, evolution means that life is constantly competing with itself, yet it also benefits from working together with itself.

Whether you feel survival of your DNA and culture are relevant, is up to you. But when entire groups exist that don’t feel like that, they tend to go extinct.

Well, not controlling your Z, and just being awake whenever, won’t help you either. A good nights rest is vital for the brain.

And you might eventually die, after you have become a fallen empire yourself, and get stomped by some next level crisis, while the AI empires are less than useless. I consider this a plus though. Eternity is a very long time, and boredom is a very strong emotion. No game could keep me entertained for eternity.

I recommend buying potatoes. Not for eating, but for planting. Preferably before you lock yourself in for a few months. And along with it, a book on how to farm your own vegies from the library.

Allow me to take some worry away: Pornhub is canadian.