BillyClark

Lately, when I read the news, I occasionally get this urge to go build a house at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and just live there. Now I have a straightforward way to scout out a good location.

I’d say I should go to any old pole of inaccessibility, but I have this sneaking suspicion that whenever I showed up at Point Nemo, for example, I’d find a crowd of people there.

Despite my being an outspoken member of c/fuckcars and my repeated professed hatred of cars, I technically don’t actually hate cars. They can have agricultural uses. Like if you own a large farm, and want to go check something or do maintenance, a car or truck would be a valid tool to do that.

What I hate is that people use cars to transport themselves around when there are other overall better, yet slightly less flexible alternatives. And that this decision to go with that style of transportation has so many horrible ramifications.

But anyways, when I drive somewhere, and yes, unfortunately, I’m currently forced to live in a situation where I must drive, I am not some weird ball of road rage, projecting hate at all the cars. I just generally hate the situation.

If it’s “natural” grass, as in, the grass is native to that area, and it doesn’t have to be watered or manicured, then it won’t have zero benefits. But I imagine you’re talking about lawn grass, which despite being alive isn’t particularly natural.

I don’t know about artificial turf, but I imagine it’s not great for surface water. Does the water get soaked into the ground properly, or does it generate runoff?

Soak into the ground means surface water is slowed down. It means surface water can make it down to the water table.

Not soak into the ground means quick moving runoff that can strip nearby land.

With house foundations and roads, and even lawns, and so on, we keep reducing the area where water can properly soak into soil. Our soils suffer. Our water tables suffer.

Considering the news I heard recently about a Reno power plant dropping all of their customers so they could provide to a data center, maybe they just want more of any type of power plants so that they can keep their lights on.

The only thing wrong in this comic is the implication that Melania would let Donald touch her hand in private.

Pretty sure Republican leaders follow a rule: Obey the rich people who bought you.

And Republican voters have a different rule: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Well, it depends on the actual settlement, but surely the worst thing for Krafton is if the game doesn’t sell.

I think if they’re forced to continue paying the fired devs based on sales, then the advantage of buying the game is to help the devs, not hurt Krafton.

Forum rules should be public, and it’s generally better for everyone if they’re specific, too.

When I report content, it’s better when the report form gives me a list of stuff to choose from, and I can check off the box.

When moderators remove content, they should have the same experience. It makes things easier for them.

Users who read the rules don’t end up getting upset about wasting time having their content that they worked hard on removed.

I don’t think it’s a good experience for users if moderators even appear to be power-tripping, and that’s often what it looks like if they are moderating without rules.

The exception that I think most people would agree with is that when the rules are specific, you can get trolls who specialize in barely not breaking the rules, while tricking other people into breaking the rules. So, good moderators do need a little discretion, but I think most of their moderation would be easier with specific rules.

That’s baffling. If he’s really 2% body fat, all of his fat must be in his second chin. I think he’s supposed to be strong like the world’s strongest man competitors who are noticeably fat, but they wouldn’t have 2% body fat. If Fisk is 2% body fat, then if you saw him naked, he’d have one of the most bizarre looking bodies. All fat around the head and hands, and absolutely ripped everywhere else.

Also, I’m not sure that cows are really all that fat in the first place. They’re more big than fat.

Here’s the relevant quote from the article:

“You can’t earn a billion dollars,” Ocasio‑Cortez said. “You just can’t earn that. You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that.”

James Blitch, huh?

We should start using the word “blitch” to mean a person who will go far out of their way to do the right thing.

Honestly, unless we change our electoral college and the way that Senators represent people, which are things that we should totally do, we should break up our most populous states into smaller states. I would say that should be our first goal for new states.

States with large populations ironically have less proportional representation in the Senate, and they have fewer electors, per capita, in the presidential elections. In other words, in populous states like California, Texas, and Florida, the voters have less representation than if they lived in Wyoming.

Plus, the Senators and electors are generally winner-take-all, which means that, if you compare to a multiple state solution, the minorities in those states are essentially disenfranchised completely.

So, with such a large discrepancy in population between the most and least populous states, countless voters are getting screwed under our current system.

The only people who benefit from large, populous states are people who are leaders of some sort in those states. The governors of Texas and California have power over many more people than the governor of Alaska. Wealthy people get more if they buy a state politician in Texas than in Vermont.

It would make more sense to split some states up and maybe merge other states together until there is at least some pretense that each state has a similar population.

I suspect that blindness changes the rules and expectations by quite a lot, so most of my advice would fly out of the window.

However, I do personally have a problem with remembering names, and so I have one bit of advice that I think is relevant.

there’s no polite way for me to say “hi, who are you again?”

My advice is that, if you think you have, say, a 60% chance of getting their name right, just say that name. If you get their name wrong, they’ll probably correct you, but if you’re anything like me, when you think it’s 60%, the odds are actually much higher.

That is actually what I do, personally, as a person who is bad with names. I realized that I used to mentally punish myself when I messed up a person’s name, but conversely, when somebody else messed up my name, I didn’t care and immediately forgave them. Basically, I was holding myself to an insane standard that I didn’t hold anybody else to.

So, instead, if I think I more likely than not know the name, then I say it. I’ve only had one person get upset with me in all the time I’ve been doing this. It’s a person who I used to run into fairly frequently, like once every couple of months, but I seemed to have a mental block on his name specifically, and I simply couldn’t remember it no matter what I did.

My only other advice is to be careful about letting people know you can identify them by odor. It depends on the odor and the person, but some people could probably be offended by that.

For most people, their own name is one of their favorite sounds in the world. If my friends didn’t call me by my name, I wouldn’t think we were as close of friends.

If you know somebody’s name, it’s really good and normal to greet them using their name. Even if you only say their name during the greeting, it will improve relationships and moods with just that. It’s so important that I would even recommend that you “fake it 'till you make it” in this case. Even if it feels awkward, start greeting people in person by saying something like, “Hi Steve,” or whatever similar greeting feels comfortable to you.

You can use people’s names more that that, but it’s a skill how to use names without being too weird. So if you’re not used to it, start with greetings.

I’m mostly concerned with the unnecessary fuel consumption, so in that light, I think it would make the most sense to send them all in a single sailboat.

They should all travel on the same plane.

At first, all I could see was their profile pictures and the 4.2K likes, but because of the red lines, I now see the important part, the 185 likes.

Article says the current decline in violence started during Biden’s tenure and the trend continues in Trump’s tenure.

Crime rates are complicated and there will need to be a lot more analysis before anyone should say it was due to some specific politician or policy, but I suspect that regardless of that, we won’t hear the end of this from certain politicians and propagandists for some time.

There are ways to mitigate these things.

If there are things that you want to remember, you can use strategies to help you remember. For rote memorization, there are all sorts of mnemonics. You can find ones that work for you. There are techniques to help you remember names, for example.

And my favorite method to remember something that needs to be done is to assume you’ll forget it and do something that makes it much harder to forget. The example everybody knows is the bookmark. Most people won’t remember the page number they were reading, so they put a bookmark in, and don’t even try to remember. You can do similar things, like if you don’t want to forget something for work the next day, you can put it inside your work shoe.

Forgetting something that you want to forget is probably the harder thing. But I think mindfulness meditation helps. A lot of times, the thing that you want to forget is something that you’re intentionally thinking about, despite what you say you want to do. Mindfulness meditation can help you just let go of those thoughts.