Kiki

Same, but in my line of work (programmer) it makes me look like a damn savant. "How did you know how to do X?" "Oh, I vaguely remembered something from reading the API docs 2 years ago so I just went and looked it up again"

If they did it deliberately and I could prove it, I'd rent a billboard across the street from where they worked

normalize this type of stuff as basic human decency

When human communities were smaller, there was the idea that you'd "run out of town" people who broke the social contract - if you lived in a small town and were known as a cheat or a thief it was more likely that people would just stop dealing with you than having police show up. It's hard to stay in a place if no-one will work with you, socialise with you or sell you stuff, so you'd typically move to another town and hopefully learn your lesson.

This is obviously a double edged sword; it's just as easy to end up excluded from society through no fault of your own, but there is definitely something to learn from this. You don't owe space - physical or virtual - to people who aren't going to use that space considerately. Society at large is too big to deal with problematic people this way anymore, but in your social circles or smaller groups you can absolutely tell people that if they aren't going to play by the groups rules then they don't get to play at all.

It wouldn't be out of character for Trump to fuck over a friend/ally of he thinks it would get him an advantage in something he wants

What's stopping you from learning to mod BF1 today? Why do you need some magic AI to make this happen?

I'd say the only ethical way to be a residential landlord is if you are renting out the only house you own because you aren't in a position to use it as a house - say you've brought a house, but had to move somewhere for a few years for work and intend to move back at some point.

The moment you own 2 houses, you are profiting from a system that only works because of inelastic demand - you could have put your money into the stock market and made it do something productive, but instead you are collecting rent, making it harder for others to meet their own basic needs, and profiting from a speculative bubble

Always was

shrug if you think you can run 100 ft faster than concrete can fall 30 during an earthquake so strong you can't stand then more power to you I guess

Having lived through a major earthquake - if it's a brick or concrete tilt-slab building, you are way better off inside the building. The risk isn't so much some random piece of something falling off, it's the entire facade of the building coming down on your head.

The years start coming and they don't stop coming

LLMs are a muse, not a fucking oracle you absolute strawberry plant

The major supermarket chain where I live has a "shop and go" system. You get a battery powered barcode scanner that you take round and scan items before you put them in your trolley, then hand it over to an operator at the end. They can download the list of items to the till, then you pay and leave.

They have a "random spot check" system where sometimes they pick a few random items out of your trolley and check that they are on the list. I'm imagining that some people get away with theft, but it's probably not a lot more than people who are going to steal normally anyway

I don't have a good answer to your question, but to me "white" as an ethnicity makes about as much sense as "Christian" does as a religious description - they both cover such a wide range of backgrounds and beliefs to be essentially useless. Do a Catholic, a baptist and a modern evangelical actually believe the same things beyond how they frame those beliefs?

To my mind, same goes for ethnicity - "white" can mean anything from the baltics to western Europe to north America, and to my mind, is kinda racist. It lumps people from as diverse places as Ireland and Russia together purely based on appearances. I get "black" as a self-selected descriptor of people who do have a big cultural touch-point in common - our ancestors were enslaved, brought here against our will, and we still feel the impacts of that even if our ancestors themselves were from a wide background.

I guess "white" is an easy antonym to "black", but then that still comes back to a racist tint - "we are white because we aren't Them" - and lumps in people who have nothing to do with the lasting impact of slavery in the US into this "oppressor vs oppressed" false dichotomy.

The MAD doctrine aims to make the intentional use of nukes in war unworkable, but in doing so makes their accidental use due to mishap, misunderstanding or miscommunication much more likely, and the more people that are party to the MAD doctrine the more likely accidents are.

You don't need to look very hard to find examples of cases where billions of people would have been killed if not for people choosing to ignore doctrine even when the information they had at hand said that they should use their weapons

Pretty sure that counts as a hate crime against the English

In the first world, we have employee protections that mean that a) pulling stuff like this in the first place is illegal and that b) bragging about it on social media means that when you get dragged in front of an employment relations tribunal, your lawyer caves their forehead in with their palm and tells you that you owe back pay and penalties

Being on the hill must have been rough. Have a friend who moved to the city a few years ago and was super excited to find a bit of bare land up on the hill with a great view into the estuary to build a house on - explained why it was bare, didn't seem to deter him.

It's interesting how the geography affected things - another friend had a batch in Akaroa on the other side of the peninsula that barely felt the quakes - theory being the peninsula is a dead volcano, so it's mostly really spongy basalt that effectively acted as a dampener and absorbed most of the energy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christchurch_earthquake_(disambiguation)

One in 2010 that did a bunch of damage but only killed 2 people, but then triggered a significant aftershock in February 2011 that was much more destructive - partly because it was shallower and closer to the city, but also because lots of buildings had been damaged but not fully repaired.

Can't speak to others' motivations, but my wife had to "keep the peace" with her grandparents by seeing them on Christmas, even though they were awful people who took pleasure in bullying and belittling her mum. If we didn't show up on Christmas for an hour or two and put up with some snide comments and a few "I'm only joking don't be so serious", then her mum would have to put up with months of full on abuse.

We didn't need substances to cope with it, but I can totally see how people might feel like a drink or a toke with some family they do enjoy socialising with could make it easier to be with family they don't enjoy spending time with, but feel obligated to to avoid hurt feelings.

For whatever reason my mother in law didn't just cut contact and leave them to die alone in their crappy little house surrounded by their hate and resentment and friends who also couldn't stand them. Thankfully they are dead now, so we don't have to put up with them.