Leftists have a big problem with purity testing. It’s why they never seem to be able to accomplish anything. Instead of joining forces with other leftist groups that share 95% of the same views, they shit all over them for not being 100% aligned.

If they’d suck it up and work together they could actually be a political force and get some of what they want, instead of infighting constantly and accomplishing nothing.

It’s the biggest thing turning me off of leftist ideology. I agree with a decent amount of what they want, but as soon as I say something like “Maybe market economies solve real problems and are suitable for some situations like consumer products” I’m basically turbo hitler to them.

Coke keeps running ads because that’s how they keep the brand as a cultural staple. They aren’t trying to sell more coke right now, they’re making sure that people in 50 years will still be buying it.

For the voters, they really don’t believe it. I have conservative family members. Everything is always “Oh that’s just bullshit cooked up by the crooked Biden crime family” “Oh he didn’t mean the words he said very clearly, what he really meant was blah blah blah” followed ten seconds later by “I like him because he tells it like it is”

I just don’t get it. What makes this guy seemingly have a force field that can make people deny their own eyes and ears? Ignoring morals here, just thinking with those patterns would give me a cognitive dissonance aneurysm.

This can’t be overstated enough. There are huge swathes of the USA where the only stores within half an hour are dollar general or gas station convenience stores. You literally can’t eat healthy on those sources, and the nearest actual grocery store could be an hour or even more away.

Kinda hard to eat well when just getting the ingredients would take half a days time.

Hell, I’m in a city and if I didn’t have a car my only options in walking distance are a convenience store and a couple fast food places. Nearest grocery store is a 12 minute drive or a 3 hour bus ride if the bus even shows up.

I saw someone drown in a pool when I was 11. I noticed there was someone sitting at the bottom of the deep end, told the lifeguard who hadn’t yet noticed, but it was just barely too late. Later learned they had experienced a seizure and sank.

I mostly just remember how pale they were, and being annoyed that pool time got axed for the remainder of summer camp. I never felt much about it. Shit happens, people die, just the way it goes.

Correct assessment. Absolutism in political systems is unproductive and leads to poor outcomes.

I am familiar with marxist theory. The problems lie in what you just said. As Marx said, it is the natural progression of a society that has progressed through the stages of capitalism and entered post-scarcity. People who advocate for other channels of achieving communism are misguided, as post scarcity is a pretty hard requirement and a lack of that aspect opens the mechanisms of resource allocation up to exploitation. And unless you can somehow stop shitheads from being born, someone is going to be enough of one to take advantage.

Even the OG natural progression of society version of communism has issues. For one, you still have the shithead human problem. There’s always going to be people out there who want it all, and they’ll exploit whatever they can to get it. Communism, being stateless, doesn’t have particularly good mechanisms for dealing with that.

Communism is an definitely an ideology. Literally first sentence from Wikipedia: “Communism […] is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology…”

But yeah, it’s kinda suspicious that every nation scale attempt at communism has ended in failure or a system that is decidedly not communist, whether through internal strife or external influence.

Hint: communism doesn’t work in practice on scales the size of nations. The ideology is too fragile and susceptible to corruption and outside influence and you end up with shit like this.

Before anyone says “it’s not real communism” that is the point. It’s useless if it’s too weak against other ideologies to be properly implemented.

Buttons and dials aren’t cheap. Even in economy cars it probably costs the manufacturer a few bucks for each one, accounting for the switch itself and all the trim that goes with it.

It only takes a handful to outweigh the cost of the typical LCDs used in car systems.

I wouldn’t call it defeatist, nuclear should never be more than a stopgap to 100% renewables. if anything, it’s awesome that we’ve gotten far enough with renewables that switching to them entirely is now a viable proposition. It sucks that we spent so much time dependent on fossil fuels when we could’ve been using nuclear, but the past is the past and the future is bright.

I will say, small modular reactors might have a place in the energy mix. They would be fantastic for more isolated grids where stability is difficult to achieve with 100% renewable energy. Think small island nations or remote areas. Also would be good for emergency and disaster recovery scenarios. We (as in the USA) also already have the supply chain to build them somewhat efficiently since we use them on our aircraft carriers. Just needs some tweaking to work well on land and for the regulations to loosen up to make it economically feasible.

Sure, if we could snap our fingers and have a bunch of nuclear plants it would make sense. But the tech is all ancient, and the regulatory structure is oppressive. It will take decades to build out the amount of nuclear capacity we need and cost inordinate amounts of money, and we’ve already passed the tipping point where renewables are the better choice.

Just as an example, it took us 14 years to build a single reactor in the Vogtle plant costing over $30 billion dollars. We’d need massive reforms to the regulations and supply chain for building reactors to bring those numbers down and that just won’t happen fast enough.

Even China, who is the world leader in nuclear power these days is slowing down building of new reactors in favor of renewables, and they do not have the regulations and supply issues we have in the USA.

A few years ago you would be right but we’re just about there, especially once sodium ion batteries become more mature which is definitely going to be a “next few years” thing, not a speculative maybe it’ll happen someday thing. There’s also ways to store power other than chemical batteries, like pumped storage hydro.

As someone who was vehemently pro nuclear, unfortunately we missed the boat. The time to invest heavy in nuclear was 50 years ago and instead we did the opposite. Renewables have caught up and nuclear is so far behind that it makes zero sense to build any new reactors when we can just build out more renewable power gen and battery storage for less money and without the whole nuclear waste handling problem.

From what OP wrote, they aren’t total strangers given he knows she likes comics. He sounds fairly young so I’m guessing she’s in his social circle or someone from school. If they were total strangers or just met for the first time, then yeah I’d say it would be a good idea to strike up a casual conversation or two before asking them out. You just really don’t want to develop strong feelings for them before you ask them out. It’s a recipe for pain if she says no, and can make things pretty awkward if they’re going to have to keep seeing each other regularly.

It’s a good idea. You may want to plan a second activity like lunch or a walk in the park as well.

And just be direct. Something like “Hey, do you want to go on a date with me? We can grab something to eat and go to the comic store.”

If she says no, don’t push it. Just say okay and wish them well.

I too was terrible at talking to girls. I still am but my girlfriend doesn’t seem to mind lol

Whatever you do, just don’t try any pickup artist or smooth talking tactics. It’s gross and cringey, doubly so if you don’t have the confidence to pull it off.

I would also disagree with a lot of the other comments, if you want to date this person, make it clear you want a date. Don’t try to do the be friends then turn it romantic thing. It can work but not when you already know you want to date them.

Nixos is great, but unfortunately I can’t use it at work. I have migrated my home server infra to it though and plan to migrate my desktop the next time I have a free evening.

You can take the quotes off too big to fail, they literally are. Their only competitor in the world is Airbus. Boeing going bust would be catastrophic to the global aviation industry and doubly so for the USA.

That said, I wanna see Lockheed step up and do a commercial plane. Gimme a jumbo jet that breaks the sound barrier and has a radar signature the size of a credit card pls.

Why ansible? It’s the best tool I know of for configuring systems when tyou can’t build a premade image. I’ve tried puppet and chef but really like not needing any agent on the target system despite the pain of YAML syntax.

I had family members who told me the vaccine was going to kill me and various other stuff they heard from Fox News and similar.

They all caught COVID at a party in 2021 and died. Seriously. It’s awful what all this conspiracy crap is doing to people. It costs lives and affects everyone around them.