5434a
1mo ago
Can't offer any input on my end, I was unaware there were different versions and I'd rather avoid seeing any spoilers by reading up on the changes.
5434a
1mo ago
"I shat my pants recently. I was pretty bummed about it. But after reflecting I realised that the need to buy a tub of White'n'Brite Max Stain Remover provided an infinitesimal benefit to the institutional shareholders of Big Chem Industrial Synthesis Corp, and by losing control of my bowels I'd helped contribute to a faceless pension fund supporting wealthy retirees and their fund managers. The total happiness in the world increased, so whatever!"
"I have a tiny excuse for a penis and I get off by pressuring my wife into having unprotected sex with other men, but even I wouldn't violate by proxy the sanctity of a hotel's lost property cupboard. What if that scarf belonged to a real man with a raging trouser truncheon? OP should have waited until half a dozen virile rugby players could watch him shivering outside his own bedroom window, begging them to let him rent his date's panties to wear as a comically ineffective neck warmer. It's pathetic."
"My ADHD made me so late that I ended up taking a bike I'd found dumped in the canal because keeping my date waiting was giving me unmedicated anxiousness. When I arrived he'd been waiting for me outside getting cold so quick as a flash I went into a hotel reception and pretended to be the purse inspector. When I came out to give him the £400 I'd conned out of some woman's husband he was gone, and so was my bike! Twitter, AITA?"
5434a
1mo ago
You can't make a display of enlightened magnanimity out of shitting in your own pants.
5434a
1mo ago
Score specializes in photographs of women with large breasts, either naturally larger or augmented. Voluptuous features busty women who have had no breast augmentations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Score_Group#Magazines
Marketed with the strap line "All Stacked All Natural".
5434a
1mo ago
How narrow are your goalposts? Does it need to be on a par with Shakespeare's sonnets to qualify or is anything more intelligent than Love Me Do good enough?
There's a certain ceiling as rap is based on simple loops and unpitched AAAA BBBB rhyme schemes and the further you go beyond that the more you risk a counter of "that isn't rap".
Stan by Eminem is a fairly easy example of something that surpasses the guns, drugs, whores and gold stereotype without having to reach for a laboured meta analysis that the guns and whores are a reflection of those artists' social environment akshually and are being held up as an ironic means to confront society's hypocrisy ("I was only pretending to be a violent greedy thug!"). On the other hand a vast amount of rap genuinely is wilfully degenerate so I can understand why so many people condemn it and write it off wholesale.
5434a
2mo ago
I've never used a Kindle, the Nook is my first and only e-reader and jail breaking it was the first order of business. If I couldn't sideload pirated files and had to view (spits) ads I'd have stuck to acoustic books.
Those features are so essential that I take them for granted and so forgot to include them in the OP. Is there a reason you haven't jail broken it? I only did a quick search but it seems doable.
5434a
2mo ago
Little by little my Nook ST is beginning to wear out so I'm thinking about what I should look for when it's time to buy a new one. What are some of your must have features / biggest annoyances / missed opportunities in e-readers?
It's table stakes but I still love having an instant dictionary. Instant translation would be nice. Instant wikipedia would be good too. The more quick-look-up reference resources the better.
I like the idea of bookmarks and highlights/margin notes but I don't use them as they're not well implemented, for example when moving books between devices and different software. That raises the issue of software and hardware. Call me old school but I'm a firm believer in removable local storage as a means to preserve data should the device fail.
Not once have I wanted to install additional apps. I also don't particularly care about having a fancy OS/UI since I spend 99.999% of the time inside the book, not outside. I guess that audiobooks could be a relevant feature but I never listen to them and it's a slippery slope to podcasts, music, and just using a fully featured tablet. Ideally there would be a read-out-loud feature that used the ebook as the source rather than a separate audio file, and I imagine it's not far off if it hasn't been done already but again it feels like that would require a much more powerful device for only marginal benefit.
5434a
2mo ago
You've predicated your scenario in adversarial terms. Are those the only terms in which you can think about this?
No, and I showed as much by offering post-scarcity as another way of thinking. However scarcity along with defectors and adversaries are perennial elements that don't go away through wishing it were so. You recognise that people can be perverse, greedy, wilful and psychopathic (and worst of all it's often to their limited benefit to be that way). How are we going to stop them depriving others of resources or compel the dispossession of what they have deprived others of without resorting to force or the credible threat thereof?
Like yourself I'd prefer a more humane system, but appeals to humanity pale. Addressing this problem is a prerequisite for forming an alternative.
5434a
2mo ago
Ownership is possession that is maintained via power, whether that is de jure or de facto, de jure just being de facto by formally distributed means. You can't create an alternative because you can't nullify possession.
Set aside legalities, if someone has possession of a piece of property and doesn't want anyone else to have it what are your options for taking it from them? Overpowering them. If you successfully overpower them and take possession yourself, how meaningful is it for the first person to say that they "own" that property while it's in your possession and they lack the power to deprive you of it? They could say that they're the rightful owner, but without a greater power to grant, recognise and enforce those rights they're not worth the paper they're not even written on.
I'm not a poli sci nerd but surely this has all been covered centuries ago. Hobbes, maybe?
The only plausible alternative I can think of is something like gay luxury space communism where there's such abundance that the value of material goods has come down to basically zero. Even then certain things can't be replicated, such as standing space at the top of the Eiffel Tower. At that point your faced with the problem of assigning that limited resource, and no matter what system or philosophy you come up with it will rest on you having the possession of that resource to enact your preferred method and defending it from others who would deprive you.
5434a
2mo ago
those that wield great authority or wealth would be held to a higher standard of morality
What's the deal with the people I've seen around here saying that the elite should have greater licence?
Seems like on the one hand there's the argument that they're our betters and should be exemplars of virtue, on the other hand there's the argument that they're our betters and they should be enforcers of virtue because even if they fail to embody the same virtues the rot of the masses is a worse outcome than the transgressions of the elite.
Presumably it's a reaction to the feeling that they're neither exemplars or enforcers and have allowed standards to decline at both ends of the social spectrum. That then raises the question of whether they wanted that outcome and used their power to achieve it or whether they were either powerless or too unwilling to use their power to prevent it.
That's pretty much why I chose it, I like reading the seminal pieces of genre fiction to see how they compare to their popular depictions.
Unfortunately the subsequent Bond films slowly regressed closer to the mean and I gave up on them entirely after watching Skyfall.
5434a
2mo ago
Middle and upper class have more money to spend on means such as gifts, concealment, etc. More opportunities too as the same resources grant greater agency. The only defecit is in motive as they potentially have more to lose.
5434a
2mo ago
I think the cutter was new as unlike everything else in the tool case it was spotlessly clean and wrapped in what looked like a factory applied shrink fit rubber cover that unavoidably tore a little when I carefully took it off, so I assume it was its first outing. Good tip though, I probably wouldn't have thought of that. Any suggestions for a non-dedicated cleaner? I've got isopropyl, mineral spirits and a degreaser that I use on my bike chain.
5434a
2mo ago
Had my first go at using a (borrowed) router today. Need to rig up a ghetto method of deflecting the dust as my lower half looked like a pine-y snowman and there was practically a radiation style shadow behind me after profiling one small piece. Good results otherwise after one quick test piece to better dial in the motor speed and pace of cut to avoid the unanticipated scorching. Far more productive than my one attempt at making a round over using a file but like most power tools despite it's undeniable productivity and accuracy it's not a "nice" tool to use.
Found some crafty YouTube ideas for converting it into a router table too but that's for down the line when I own my own, for now I'm just interested in getting this project structurally finished before the end of the month.
5434a
2mo ago
What is a pajeet? Urbandictionary has it variously as a slur which could refer to Canadian Sikhs, north Indians, Hindus, Indians in general, or any South Asian.
5434a
2mo ago
It will probably come in helpful to equip one of those old computers with dual NICs so that you can experiment with different ways of managing network traffic.
5434a
2mo ago
Does the list include some words that don't even exist?
Yeah, I remember doing well on previous vocab quizzes posted here but there were some suspicious head scratchers in this one. It's not so much that I wasn't sure what they might mean so much as even as a native speaker I'd never seen them before. Didn't stop and check though.
5434a
2mo ago
Dickens' Selected Short Fiction. The latest piece was a satire of British rail train refreshment staff extolling the noble and unchangeable tradition of consciously and deliberately providing the worst food and service possible.
It's amusing to come across these small social insights from history that continue to be relatable.
5434a
2mo ago
"I want this on a t-shirt!"
Then people started trolling with images from Disney, Nintendo and worse https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-want-this-on-a-shirt-bot-bait
It's Valerie.
I'll try to remember to check Scott's post about the edits after I've finished.
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