Ignisnex

Last night, my wife and I ordered Chinese for Valentine’s Day. Cost $100. Tried to tip the delivery guy a $20, and he turned it down lol. He then gave my cat a temptations treat, out of a freshly opened bag he had in his pocket. Dude was amazing!

I put some gel drops on my eyes, and could have sworn it was the Orcs Must Die logo

Matters little, word order does.

I still get frost on the inside of my double paned windows up here in the great white north. No joke, windows are engineered to hell here

UK leading by example then. But riddle me this, how often is a firearm needed for an officer doing their everyday duties? Traffic stops, patrols, responding to calls. How often is it explicitly needed to be actively carrying a loaded firearm to a inherently non violent situation before having assessed it? I honestly have no idea. Is the expectation in the US that you’ll just get straight up murdered for doing your job? Is that how you guys live?

A more reasonable use for a firearm has never been stated. Random people roll up to your house and murder your husband. Clearest case of self defense there has ever been.

UK police only carry a baton and pepper spray my dude. Last I checked, they weren’t hurting for recruitment.

Right? To be fair, they used some of the nicest portables I’ve ever seen. Two portables to a class, windows, a semi permanent foundation, plumbing, HVAC hookup, networking, the works. I had to install WAPs in the drop tile, and it was not the worst thing I’ve had to do there.

In our town, one of the schools was just built 5 years ago. They built it without classrooms. Not a single one. They had a gym, common areas, admin offices, IT infrastructure (office with a server room became the councillors office and the IT guy needs to ask permission to use it lol), bathrooms and library. They designed it so it could be made entirely with portables. From the onset.

Of course, hence why I said that it’s not possible to convert incarceration time into money. Removing agency is to remove possibility to proceed however one sees fit. Likely he would have been financially poorer off, but life isn’t a measure of worth by dollars. Only the most degenerate among us think that bigger numbers in various accounts equates to a good life.

So, I get where you’re coming from here, but $25 million is still an enormous amount of money objectively. Obviously there isn’t really a way to convert 44 years of incarceration into an equivalent financial denomination, but if we think about earnings that could be had in that time, $25 million by far covers it.

If this guy were to have a job paying $100k a year for his whole life, he’d be making well in excess of the average, and still only have about $6 million total earnings by the time they retire. Let’s double it and assume he was making $200k a year for his entire working life, that’s still only half the amount he was awarded. So this amount paid could be said to cover a lifetime of high pay, plus an equivalent amount in damages, plus a little extra on top for good measure.

That is nuts. And so complicated! Healthcare here is far from perfect (and getting worse all the time!) but at least it’s not that. How hard of a concept is it that if you’re unwell, you just go to any hospital and get treatment? Good to know that I’d just straight up die in the states though.

So I’m trying to follow the misery in this thread, but I don’t know what “in network” means. Is there some sort of intranet that hospitals and insurance companies use to bill each other? I don’t get it.

Everyone seems to need instant gratification in every aspect of life. No one seems capable of thinking for more than 25 seconds into the future. The pervasive culture of "Fuck you, got mine", and the rat race to the almighty dollar. I don't get it, it's sad, and it's the driving force behind not wanting children. The world sucks, and I want to reduce suffering.

Precisely! That's the sound of a good photon wall!

None of the buildings mentioned need gas though!

I heard that while reading it. Like when someone says "Good news [everyone]!" and it sounds like the professor Farnsworth. God I haven't thought about that episode in ages.

It's a little out of order, but I just wanted to mention that I don't disagree with you, and I don't find your tone dismissive at all! Further, I have no intention of convincing anyone of anything specifically, just raising points of interest. We're just having a fun little back and forth!

Misinformation and falsehoods are as old as time, absolutely. What is new is the lack of trust in the authoritative bodies that would typically provide that ballast of truth, to measure against. People distrust the government (and if what I've read about the history of US politics is true, there might be something to that). They don't typically associate government information with "good" information as they would have in the past. Even official publications are not immune, as per my previous example with vaccinations. Lastly, I believe you and I have the ability to search something and find a suitable result to cut through bad information; at least better than most. Passing the "smell test", if you will. We take that for granted. The vast majority don't realize how to find information effectively. They may search "vaccines cause autism" as a question, but that may very well return many fringe articles with that exact string in it, providing validity to the statement where none was before.

Basically, the game is rigged. We've figured out how to navigate those waters with a reasonable amount of success, but it's a skill we've invested in. Most people do not possess that, and are unwilling to acquire it (those same people that will put in a support ticket before trying literally anything to resolve a technical issue they may be encountering). For them, the information bounty we are enjoying is a minefield of confusion.

Verify it against what? Additional information of dubious quality? Case in point, the whole "vaccines cause autism" thing. That finding was published by Andrew Wakefield in Lancet and cited everywhere. Only thing is that is was debunked almost immediately, but people kept citing the publication.

My point being that few people have the gumption to check sources, and if they do, fewer still are going to keep tabs on them more than once, or verify the validity against… yet additional sources. Every step in the process has the end user trying to determine if what they are reading is true, against other information they don't know is true.

To your point, more people have access to information than ever. Good and bad. Look at all the crap around COVID. You have medical professionals releasing studies and vaccine, and some douche named Q saying "Nah, it's poison. Drink bleach instead". Obviously this is an easy example to differentiate what's good and bad info. But people still tried bleach. Countering good information with a malicious, self serving narrative seems to be as easy as saying "That's what the establishment wants you to think", and people fall for it all the time. In huge numbers. Over every little piece of bullshit that gets published somewhere. Politics are a huge centre of misinformation and disinformation, making it very challenging to pick out what's not total crap. And that's the point.