Das Mann means the person and is gender neutral, the English word “man” which comes from it also has a gender neutral sense. It’s more archaic, but it does exist

Aren’t situations like that precisely what the second amendment is for?

In a sane world, the company you sue would have to pay your legal expenses in addition to the compensation they owe you…

I want one but with a frame like R2D2, and it will communicate through a series of beeps and boops. Maybe binary or ternary except the bits are determined by tonality, with modulation to express emotion. And maybe little extendible arms that can fix space ships and hack battle stations and zap enemies and

I mean I’ll fully admit that I don’t know the intricacies of Gen Z humor. I’ve heard some of it, and there’s a lot about it that I don’t understand. It can be amusing with the sheer volume of absurdism that it contains. I used to despair over “not getting the joke” until I realized that in many cases, there’s nothing to get. It’s just absurdist buffoonery channeled into shitpost-tier memes.

Maybe they do have elements of dark humor that I haven’t picked up on, but if so it’s very different from millennial dark humor. A lot of the shit we used to joke about would not fly these days, and in many cases it’s with good reason. You’d be labeled a psycho if you tried.

I was actually just thinking about this earlier today, but I would go back further. Kill Leonidas, the Greeks never unify against the Persians, who claim all if Europe and allow local cultures/religions to self-govern. Celtic civilization thrives in western Europe, Gothic civilization in Northern Europe, all the other early European cultures never get replaced by Roman and later Catholic hegemony.

In fact, Catholicism never exists either because Jesus was born in a Persian Levant where he is promptly recognized and deified as a god-king instead of being crucified, whereby he imposes socialist utopian rule where bigotry, hypocrisy, cruelty, and greed are basically the only things that aren’t allowed.

Persia, reaching the Indus Valley civilizations and the himalayas, has early contact with Buddhism which merges with Zoroastrianism and Christianity into a syncretic religion where do-no-harm and relieve-suffering are the supreme axioms.

When the Mongols reach them, they’re welcomed with open arms, who then convert readily to this altruistic faith. As Buddhism spreads into China it carries this cosmopolitanism with it, and as they’re never colonized by the British they face no humiliation or embarrassment, there’s no need for a cultural revolution to undo the harms of capitalism, no need for a communist revolution because socialism has already spread from early Christianity on the wings of Persian tolerance.

Basically, world peace that will never be destabilized.

I mean, I’ve always said that the population is a real problem with no good solutions. People are uncomfortable talking about it because there are no good solutions, but that’s no reason to pretend it doesn’t exist. But people act like even mentioning it is the same as proposing or supporting an unethical solution.

Too many people are too brainwashed into that “do everything right now and fix everything right now because problems cannot be accepted” mentality which I blame on capitalism and the fast-paced modern lifestyle it imposes.

People treat me like I’m the one who’s wrong for being okay with a slower pace of life, for being okay for acknowledging problems without insisting on an urgent need to solve them all right now. Sometimes we need to just accept that there are problems, sometimes we need to stew in those problems because nothing can be done about them. But that’s so taboo these days that people won’t even consider it a possibility, they can’t comprehend someone who thinks like that, so they assume that I mean “no, we must solve these problems even though the only solutions would be evil.” That’s not what I mean at all.

In effect, it becomes taboo to even mention uncomfortable problems with no good solutions. Everyone wants to pretend they just don’t exist. That’s precisely what allows fascism to sneak in. People want to pretend everything is okay, and they’ll crucify the messenger who says “everything is not okay,” every time, until it’s too late and there are no messengers left, but the things they were trying to warn about have already become the new reality.

Some people get upset when you mention climate change. Some people get upset when you mention overpopulation. But these aren’t separate or mutually exclusive problems. They feed on each other, compound on each other in a feedback loop. They crash into each other violently.

Just as the world is struggling to maintain the balance of its delicate ecosystems, we’re increasing the load we’re placing upon it. That in turn accelerates the demise of those ecosystems.

Land becomes uninhabitable, glaciers melt and rivers dry up, sea levels rise, storms become more violent, coastal areas flood, rains become sporadic and erratic, arable land decreases, swaths of the globe bake. These things destabilize populations, give momentum to dictators, create resource wars, ethnic cleansings, displacements of people, mass migrations. People then coalesce in the most habitable regions, whose infrastructure and resources aren’t ready to handle the influx. This creates local pushback and empowers more dictators. All while powerful people accelerate global warming to try and mitigate the symptoms it’s causing, instead of addressing the underlying causes.

It’s all predictable. Scholars have been writing about this for decades. I remember reading about it in the early tens, long before we crossed the event horizon. People were warning about this every bit as much as they were warning about global warming.

It’s something that needs to be discussed. That doesn’t mean we need to enforce birth limits, or kill masses of people, or let them die by famine, plague, and war. But throughout history you can see that whenever the population began to strain the resources of the land that contained it, these things happened and the earth found ways to restore some balance.

People don’t like to think about that either, because they think we’ve conquered nature. We haven’t. We depend on nature, and we always will. Only now, there’s nowhere left to run. No new lands to expand to. No more new frontiers.

And the destruction is unprecedented, existential even. This is the first time we’ve strained the planet to the point where it itself might collapse.

And yet we still keep carrying on, pretending that’s not an issue.

Unless we find a way to colonize an earthlike planet, or a moon that contains water (maybe borrowing some oxygen from a gas giant like Jupiter), then I don’t see any ethical solutions to the population issue until the planet takes it into its own hands and we bring about our own extinction.

But even if we move to another planet or moon, isn’t that just a new place to exploit? Wouldn’t the population just keep growing, until it eventually strains those resources as well? Or would we be bringing life to an otherwise barren wasteland? Is that a moral quandary, or our inescapable destiny? Is that the purpose of life, to expand into new realms, just as the earliest microbes came to earth from far, far away?

Should we harvest iron from mars and use it to build space colonies at various lagrange points? Would that be exploiting the resources of mars, or is it just a dead planet with no claim to what it holds? Regolith from asteroids, hydrogen and oxygen from Jupiter. Are these resources there waiting for us to take hold of, or do they belong to something else? Can an inanimate object like a planet truly have a claim to those things?

Cutting to the core of the question, is it worth it to take advantage of those resources if it means saving the jewel of our solar system, the earth where life abounds (at least for now)?

In some cases I’m sure that’s happened and that’s terrible, but let’s not pretend it was every marriage that ever happened until the twentieth century.

It was probably more common among upper-class where people married for alliances and influence. And there may have been / still be some cultures where it’s more common in general to have arranged marriages, but most of those these days at least require the agreement of both spouses. Not all, unfortunately, but the only way to stop that would literally be to colonize the whole world and enforce our own enlightened morality, and that would be hard to justify.

Trading a truck for a wife is wild though

The rock in this photo looks like the rune essence from runescape, which you can take to altars to turn into runes

Is that why in the past women would marry men 10-20 years older than them? Theoretically the man would be established in a career and have the financial security, and the woman would have the health and energy for childbearing.

I’ve heard the argument that it’s sexist or predatory or whatever, and often people say that 18-20 is still too young physically and carries risks. But if what you’re saying is true, then it contradicts that

Careful, someone might call you an ecofascist for acknowledging that obvious reality…

Penny for your thoughts

That’s exactly the one I thought of!

Nah I’m still taking the rune essence

Okay but can you imbue the stick with rune energy? Didn’t think so

Username checks out

🦛

Are there open-source alternatives, or any DIY projects?

I’ve seen 3D printer files for the case. What else do you need besides some wheels, some circuitry, a battery, some lidar or ultrasonic rangefinders, a microcontroller, and some code?

Doesn’t seem too difficult if you know how to solder and can find instructions. The hardest part would be programming it, but if the code already exists…

Same!

I’ve even chased friends away either because they got tired of me doubting their sincerity when they say nice things, or because I got tired of annoying them by doubting their sincerity when they say nice things. Either way, I couldn’t deal with the constant anxiety of “I don’t know if I can trust you because you’re not openly insulting me.”

Some people might think I have a humiliation fetish. I don’t. I’m just extremely insecure and humiliation is what I’m used to. Like a comfort zone almost. It’s familiar territory, unlike affection or admiration. I’ve ended relationships because I couldn’t understand why or how a person could genuinely like me for who I am, so I thought it must be part of some plot to destroy me.

Yeah, true