I’d happily pay $20-40ish for a quality textbook. I have many times before. It’s when they want to charge $300 and give almost nothing to the authors that I have a problem with. Extra scummy when they make a new edition that’s just barely different enough you can’t use it for class because the practice problems don’t match or give you one time use online codes that render it worthless for resale.

They let us use them for all my college math classes.

They really don’t help much at all if you don’t understand the math, and if you do understand, you don’t need the calculator most of the time.

I just use brown kraft paper and some basic ribbon in a color appropriate for the occasion. I think maybe $15 in materials has given me a solid decade of gift wrapping and I haven’t even gone through half of it yet. Costs basically nothing on a per gift basis, and I get way more compliments on my wrap jobs than I did before I switched to using brown paper.

You could probably ding them for fraud, but as others have said, this is fake.

For the voters, they really don’t believe it. I have conservative family members. Everything is always “Oh that’s just bullshit cooked up by the crooked Biden crime family” “Oh he didn’t mean the words he said very clearly, what he really meant was blah blah blah” followed ten seconds later by “I like him because he tells it like it is”

I just don’t get it. What makes this guy seemingly have a force field that can make people deny their own eyes and ears? Ignoring morals here, just thinking with those patterns would give me a cognitive dissonance aneurysm.

This can’t be overstated enough. There are huge swathes of the USA where the only stores within half an hour are dollar general or gas station convenience stores. You literally can’t eat healthy on those sources, and the nearest actual grocery store could be an hour or even more away.

Kinda hard to eat well when just getting the ingredients would take half a days time.

Hell, I’m in a city and if I didn’t have a car my only options in walking distance are a convenience store and a couple fast food places. Nearest grocery store is a 12 minute drive or a 3 hour bus ride if the bus even shows up.

Surprisingly no, not that I’m aware of. If they have, it hasn’t made the news.

It’s quite steep and smooth in person, it would be very hard to climb. Probably impossible without ropes or mission impossible suction cups.

Yeah it was a terrible concert venue and sports arena other than being a novelty shape.

Pretty much everyone in town loves the bass pro shop and we’re much happier to see it in use than abandoned like it was for so many years.

They have a duck accelerator inside that fuses antiducks and posiducks together as a source of unlimited power.

The Luxor is ever so slightly bigger I believe.

I live 5 minutes from this. AMA I guess?

The Memphis pyramid was a sports arena and concert venue in the past, eventually the city built another venue that wasn’t shaped stupid so it sat abandoned for a decade or so before bass pro bought it.

I grew up with gmod idiot box and dane cook bits animated with stick figures.

I think the kids today are doing just fine, at least on the memes front.

Correct assessment. Absolutism in political systems is unproductive and leads to poor outcomes.

I am familiar with marxist theory. The problems lie in what you just said. As Marx said, it is the natural progression of a society that has progressed through the stages of capitalism and entered post-scarcity. People who advocate for other channels of achieving communism are misguided, as post scarcity is a pretty hard requirement and a lack of that aspect opens the mechanisms of resource allocation up to exploitation. And unless you can somehow stop shitheads from being born, someone is going to be enough of one to take advantage.

Even the OG natural progression of society version of communism has issues. For one, you still have the shithead human problem. There’s always going to be people out there who want it all, and they’ll exploit whatever they can to get it. Communism, being stateless, doesn’t have particularly good mechanisms for dealing with that.

Communism is an definitely an ideology. Literally first sentence from Wikipedia: “Communism […] is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology…”

But yeah, it’s kinda suspicious that every nation scale attempt at communism has ended in failure or a system that is decidedly not communist, whether through internal strife or external influence.

Hint: communism doesn’t work in practice on scales the size of nations. The ideology is too fragile and susceptible to corruption and outside influence and you end up with shit like this.

Before anyone says “it’s not real communism” that is the point. It’s useless if it’s too weak against other ideologies to be properly implemented.

Then why don’t we let kids who can beat Super Mario Bros in their sleep (and thus from your perspective have demonstrated the skill required to learn how to drive) drive cars?

Well for one they can’t reach the pedals or see over the steering wheel, and the safety systems in the drivers seat are built for adult sized humans. I totally believe the average 10 y/o possesses the mental capacity to operate a motor vehicle though. I was riding dirt bikes around town at that age. Now, their risk assessment abilities might be off, but I’ve seen plenty of people way into adulthood that don’t seem to have those abilities either.

Buttons and dials aren’t cheap. Even in economy cars it probably costs the manufacturer a few bucks for each one, accounting for the switch itself and all the trim that goes with it.

It only takes a handful to outweigh the cost of the typical LCDs used in car systems.

For about 3-4 years. I switched after sway added support for per-display VRR which xorg cannot do still (and probably will never be able to do due to core design limitations)

On AMD it’s been better than Xorg for a couple years now in my use case. No more tearing and latency issues, any games that don’t play nice have worked fine with gamescope.

With HDR support finally on the horizon it’ll be able to completely replace windows for me which I already barely use.

The only issue I regularly encounter is programs handling windowing strangely. Some programs like to switch themselves into my active workspace under certain circumstances which is mildly annoying but just requires that I press the hotkey to put them back where they belong a couple times a day.

Fwiw, some of the lowest crime areas in the USA have some of the most lenient firearms regulation. New Hampshire for example had something like 27 total homicides in all of 2023, including ones not involving a firearm. Most of those were domestic disputes. The crime rate there is absurdly low even when you compare it to the small wealthy European nations everyone likes to circlejerk about. NH has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the USA, and allows carrying without a license and no registration or anything needed to purchase.

I know that’s just an anecdote but it does beg the question of whether guns have a causal relationship to crime rates or simply a correlation. I am inclined to believe it’s overwhelmingly the latter and only a sprinkle of the former, based on the research I’ve done.

To extend that, gun control is worse than useless if what you care about is saving lives and reducing crime. The effect is minimal at best, and performative more than anything else. Every tax dollar and minute we spend on gun control could have a far greater payoff if we directed it toward addressing the root causes of these tragedies. Instead we just use guns as a scapegoat, pass restrictions on them, then pat ourselves on the back while kids continue to grow up in crippling poverty and adults are left with no support systems to turn to when life shits on them.