You ok buddy? Wanna talk about something?

This is what I mean. This is a classic example of a condescending way of talking to people. You really shouldn’t be talking to people like this, it’s not constructive at all and just makes you seem angry and like you have nothing better to say.

Nobody here is trying to fight you. If you don’t have anything constructive to say you can just refrain from commenting.

You need help dude, going after people like this because you can’t read what they’re writing is pretty alarming.

Be russia.

Sovereign nation, not a US puppet.

Invades another sovereign nation.

“This would never have happened if the US hadn’t forced us!”

The dissonance is so extreme it’s not even funny. Do you honestly believe that russia is standing up to the US, and not controlled by the US, and at the same time that they have no choice in the matter of whether hundreds of thousands of russians should die and be maimed in Ukraine?

Either russia is a US puppet, the US orchestrated the war, and the US is to blame; or russia is acting of its own accord, and are the sole country responsible for the war starting and continuing. You can’t have it both ways.

I’ve been at some festivals where the bartering system was alive and well! People would trade beer for camping chairs or a volleyball for some duct tape. Good times :)

Not 100% true: I know some places in Norway that have unreliable internet connectivity. They have terminals in the store that will save your purchase and wire it to the bank when connection is restored. Of course, this means you can over-draw your card, but I’ve never heard of that being a big issue in those small places.

I was with you until “they should be looking east”.

No, we shouldn’t. We should be looking to strengthen Europe. If anywhere, we should be looking south, to the decent countries that do exist in South America and Africa. Despite all the issues with the US you point out (that I largely agree with), they’re still a quasi-democracy, that doesn’t regularly disappear dissidents or wipe out ethnic groups. They’ve shown that they’re volatile and untrustworthy, that doesn’t make China or russia a better alternative.

There’s always some place that’s worse. What you’re arguing for here is a race to the bottom, where everyone tries to be worse than their neighbours in order to get the undesirables to go there instead.

In essentially “the tragedy of the commons” but in an opposite sense. If everyone gets worse in an attempt to get rid of “undesirables”, you just end up with everywhere being worse, and the “undesirables” still being around. What we need is for everyone to build safety nets together. That might actually improve the situation.

What makes you call this fiction? It’s a well documented modus operandi for parts of the Soviet Union to take one example.

“Y’all better pack up and back off that there border”

– Mother Fucking Army Statement

Honestly, I kind of wish crypto hadn’t gone to shit with the whole speculation thing… It was just this fun thing where obscure websites would let you buy random shit for laughs sometimes. Then suddenly investors had to try making money off something with no inherent value and ruined it :/

GET THE ROUNDIE!

On a hard drive? I remember a bunch of people messing around with bitcoin when it was new, relatively unknown and considered a niche nerd thing. There were online competitions with money prizes where the “last winner” (eg. third place) would win like one bitcoin.

Fast forward 15 years and the stuff you mined for fun in high school and forgot about on some dusty old computer is worth thousands of dollars.

It’s completely common in most countries that some high-ranking government officials live on state-owned property. Among the reasons for this are security, and the fact that official visits, press events and other official events are held at that property.

My personal tale on this is that given that the brain contains chaotic circuits (i.e. circuits in which tiny perturbations lead to cascading effects), and these circuits are complex and sensitive enough, the brain may be inherently unpredictable due to quantum fluctuations causing non-negligible macroscopic effects.

I don’t know if the above is the case, but if there’s anything like free will out there, I’m inclined to believe that its origins lie in something like that.

I’m perplexed: How do you go from someone saying “gender is a social construct” to them being trasphobic? I got the “spot the vegan” vibes that they were trying to suddenly make this about trans rights…

I love pedantry <3 I got the “three medals per event” from some Wikipedia page, and I know they love pedantry over there as well, so maybe you should make a contribution?

We have divided a bunch of sports into “open class” and “women only” (some sports use “men only” and “women only”) because the difference between men and women is large enough that

1. Women would be unable to compete at a professional level otherwise

2. A lot of sports would be directly dangerous for women (see: contact sports without weight classes)

Nobody argues that it’s pointless to have weight classes. How is that different from having classes based on (a proxy for) levels of testosterone?

One of the best male 1500m runners today, Jacob Ingebritsen, beat the current women’s WR by almost 4 seconds when he was 15 years old. Women can be amazing athletes, and watching women compete at the top level is amazing. That’s why we need a class where they can compete, just like we need weight classes in many sports.

In 2020 there were 448 events at the Olympics, let’s round up to 450. Each event gives 3 medals, for a total of 1350 medals. The Olympics are held every four years, so that 337.5 medals are awarded in an average year.

There are about 8.1 billion people in the world. On average, 0.000004 % of the worlds population receives an Olympic medal each year.

If this were a completely random yearly lottery, and you lived for 100 years, you would have about a 0.0004 % chance of winning an Olympic medal in your lifetime.

I would count myself lucky if I won that by the time I was 50.

Well I guess that still has the same effect of removing anonymity, but if it gets more people voting it’s still a net positive. To my knowledge the US has a concerningly low turnout rate for elections, so anything that helps…

I guess what I’m most concerned about is a situation where people are forced to vote for a specific candidate, and it doesn’t really seem to me like there’s any mechanism in place to prevent that (?)

I wasn’t implying anything here, no need to be a dick about it. Like I said: I’m my country we don’t have this system.

The kind of possibilities I was thinking about were more along the lines of an abusive spouse forcing their partner to sign a ballot, someone stealing a neighbours ballot out of their mailbox and forging their signature, or some family member doing the same to other family members.

Signatures can be forged quite easily if you have access to other signatures from that person, so I was honestly wondering what kind of system they have in place to ensure the kind of things mentioned above don’t happen.

Also, I guess I was kind of assuming ballots weren’t signed, in order to protect the anonymity of the voters, and that there was some more sophisticated system in place.