Metal scouring pads are only a few aisles over. Aren’t they worried about people being able to so easily reach their expensive equipment?

No one REALLY feels the threat posed by the polycrisis. It’s all complex, intellectual worries about things that FEEL like they’re still just a little ways out, not quite here. People are mostly focused on the here and now and the very near future. The riots happen when people literally can’t feed their kids in the here and now. As long as it’s just difficult, and not impossible, people will struggle on with their nose to the grindstone. Watch for rises in unemployment. CoViD showed what can happen when millions if people find themselves with mountains of free time to use on political action. When enough people are hungry and have no job to distract them, the fires will come.

It might not have that many years left if Gary from the next street over achieves his goal.

Reading fiction and non-fiction (I assume this is what you mean by 'hard) are effectively different activities.

Reading fiction is about getting caught up in an imagined world. The stakes are lower and the expectations are lower. This makes it easier. If you miss the paragraph where a character is described as having a beard, you won’t feel the need to go back to reread when you find out they do four chapters later when they scratch said beard.

Reading non-fiction is about building new conceptual structures in your mind. It requires more attention. If you fail to understand Nietzsche’s ressentiment in ‘Geneology of Morals,’ you are unlikely to be able to understand the later concept of the ‘priestly’ morality. You will not be able to fully construct the conceptual structures the book attempts to generate.

Because of this, reading non-fiction is a process of doing whatever is necessary to get all the parts and relations into one’s mind in order to produce a mental tool and then, hopefully, learn to use it. If notes help, write them. Rubber ducking can help. Simple repetition can help. Slowing down can help. Talking to other readers (as in a study group (shoutout to @DGQC on YT)) can help. Concept mapping can help. Sleeping on it can help. Highlighting can help. Cross referencing can help.

It’s study. What helped you learn in school? Do that.

And revanced on android.

Gayness is as real as Canadianness. It’s an imaginary line someone with political power tries to tell people they have to be entirely on one side or the other of. Don’t let other people’s imaginary lines define you. Go hug your partner.

Is she the one who got caught giving a guy a handjob in a public theatre or was that one of her republican doppelgangers?

A big part of moderation is enforcing what makes you (the moderator) uncomfortable. The moderator(s) probably have not come to terms with their views on eating meat, so the question makes them uncomfortable, so they ban the discussion to preserve their own feelings.

In a less selfish view, it also probably helps preserve the community because many others are also uncomfortable with their unresolved views on eating animals and might be discouraged from participating if it is discussed. You are probably a microminority in wanting to discuss it and the number of free speech absolutists who will die on the hill of your right to talk about eating roast mareep is also a microminority. As the discussion does not really add anything to the community it costs them almost nothing to keep people comfortable.

From the last time this was asked: seek professional medical advise. It should not be painful. There are non-medical reasons it might be less than amazing, but it should not be painful.

My situation was a slightly concretized example of the OP. It sits within the OP’s conceptual space. It’s not justification.

You are now too defensive and emotional to reasonably interrogate or express this level of idea. It’s not worth my time to try to fight past that emotion. Have a nice day.

I see you are among those who are incapable of reasoning by analog.

The hypothetical is all there is when discussing a hypothetical. The metaphorical room is eternal and all encompassing because once you leave the ‘room’ you are outside the hypothetical. So, yes, you are ‘trapped in the room’ if you are going to engage in the OP’s hypothetical. If you want to deny the premise, you are trying to pretend you are playing the game but ignoring the rules of the game. In other words, you are lying, whether to us or to yourself. Don’t get pissy when people call out your ignorance of how to play, willful or otherwise.

Think that through. You are in a room with only people dumber than you. How are you learning anything? They don’t have anything good to teach you. If you try to bring new knowledge into the room, they will likely not reward you for it, and quite possibly actively attack you for it. How long do you think you could maintain your intelligent view of anything when everyone around you is dragging you down with every interaction? You try to discuss science, they call you a nerd and tear up your textbooks to roll blunts. You try spending time ignoring them to study the construction of the walls of the room, but eventually you need some company. No one can survive in complete isolation. They tell you you’re the idiot for trying so hard, for caring about these things that no one else in your world cares about. And you hate to admit it, but they’re kind of right. You can study everything you want. You can write down findings for the rest of your life about the room, but when you’re gone, they’re just going to roll them into blunts. Even if you resist at first, they’ll outlast you because you need people to maintain your sanity. They’ll wear down your values as they, without even thinking about it, use operand conditioning to get you to use their slang, play their games, value what they value, disregard what they disregard. It happens all the time.

That would be better, but better still would be to find a solution that doesn’t enable surveillance of the uninvolved. Most people trust neither their government nor corporations to not misuse or abuse the power of their data. Certain public key cryptography techniques could be used, but because companies can’t make money from it, it’ll never happen.

I mean… we do hate our lives. People who are actually content in their life are the minority.

Ascension

Wake up!

The Scribes

Wake up, Bitch

This old chestnut

A clip

An intro

The intro to a lot of songs make good repeating alarms.

It’s not free, and it has some limitations. You have to spend years in the military, risking being killed and agreeing to murder people for that money. If you’re a woman, there’s a significant risk of rape as well. Then, if you went to school before joining, but didn’t get it in writing that the military would pay for all your student debt, they won’t. Then, finally, if you survive, come out the other side in good enough mental condition to not off yourself, and go to school, your tuition is limited by certain stipulations. Depending on where/what you want to study, it might not even be enough.

If I’m the smart one, I have to do all the work I can’t trust to idiots, run the team or be on a team run by an idiot, be the most responsible according to any outside observer, and my success will still be mostly reliant on idiots.

If I’m the idiot, at worst I’d be mocked, but maybe I’d be too stupid to notice. At least the work would be more likely to be successful.

The versions of historical american presidents seen in the american mythology. The world could use a president as great as the George Washington patriotic Americans think he was.

To save time, we (as in the world of English speakers) are not on the same page regarding woke.

I think one of the most interesting questions that underlies this would be whether there is a material with correct properties to handle the mechanical forces necessary to perform mechanical computation to allow something like CNC and whether that system could then be complex/simple enough to assemble itself. It might be possible, but I don’t know enough about mechanical computing to even have a hunch.