Riding your bike is exercise, so I’ll give that one a pass as a healthier hobby. Reading just depends on what you’re reading I suppose. Going to restaurants is generally looked at as a bad habit in my experience. Waste of money basically.

Regarding what makes video games special, I will say that they can develop bad personal habits a little easier than a lot of other hobbies. I think they have greater addiction potential than say, reading or bike riding. More on par with sex or gambling. They also create a temptation to oversimplify/misunderstand things about real life in the same way tv/movies do.

But yeah, overall I don’t think its a particularly bad hobby if you don’t go overboard with them.

They’re headed in that direction, but not yet. Their pop is 143 mil roughly, and the Ukrainian estimates are a little over 1 mil Russian casualties last I heard.

They could roll in with tanks, if enough pro-Russian parties came into power in the EU. The Baltic countries are not very big. Creating a situation where an Article 5 is called by a small country, but not answered, would be the ideal result.

Let’s also not forget that Putin has only done a very limited amount of mobilization so far.

This is basically what various nonprofit orgs that people can join amount to.

Like, if you join the NRA your subscription cost is going to lobbying politicians on gun issues, among other stuff like keeping the org running and paying for nice things for the head of the org.

Good lord, that’s it in a nutshell, isn’t it… Ugh.

I wouldn’t. Have to remember that a core component of trolling is making things up, so you should not take for granted that any mental illness is actually present. Imagine the troll as a 13 year old, smirking or giggling to themselves while they type. That’s the spirit these things are done in.

Anyway, bringing mental illness into it just insults people with actual mental illness, who generally behave much more maturely.

If you want to actually engage in any sort of positive way with a troll, you need to stoop to their level and draw out more engagement from them, without making it fun. We used to call this counter-trolling. Trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls … ad infinitum. This eats up some of their energy without giving them anything in return, as the time they spend engaging with you is time they can’t spend trolling other people, who might feed them more.

Or save yourself the time and just block and move on. That’s definitely the most mature thing to do.

The worst thing you can do is a short engagement that results in you acting like you’ve gotten upset and then disengaging. This is feeding them more things to giggle about. If you engage, you need to be willing to stay in it for as long as it takes to deprive them of that satisfaction. This can go for multiple days. I don’t really recommend it unless you also find the bantering process amusing.

When the Generative Agents system was evaluated for how “believably human” the agents acted, researchers found the AI versions scored higher than actual human actors.

That’s a neat finding. I feel like there’s a lot to unpack there around how our expectations are formed.

… does he think that will make more Brazilians have good feelings about Bolsonaro?

Minor quibble, but Rafale does not make a cutting-edge fighter. The US, Russia and China all make 5th gen fighters. France does not yet, they mostly make 4.5. Before long here, the 5’s won’t be cutting edge anymore and we’ll all be on to 6th gen.

You know … at a certain level, I respect the dedication. Go big or go home I suppose.

Thinking about hammering in a screw puts a very serious frown on my face…

Upvote for creativity though.

Modern war planners mostly know better than to count on everything going well.

To add to this, N Korea also has a huge conventional army, and is a very mountainous country. Lots of soldiers+mountains=very bloody to invade.

This is also why Iran is fairly safe from ground invasion. It’s like a gigantic Switzerland, which if you’re familiar with WW2 history, even Hitler left Switzerland alone despite kinda wanting to occupy the place. The cost was just too high compared to the benefits, so, y’know, may as well skip it and invade the USSR instead.

tbf, Grant was pretty ruthless in his post-war pursuit of Confederate holdouts. He didn’t have them shot, though, they were mostly hung.

The problem is that it is very hard to eradicate an idea violently. It just goes into hiding and bides its time, unless you just want to do a full genocide or something. I mean, it’s not like people stand up and volunteer for their own execution when they know certain folks are being executed.

This works, but the quicker method for me was to hold the book over my head, out of my line of sight while I focused my eyes on something a little farther away (a few feet away is fine). Then you can simply move the book downward into your field of vision while refusing to let your eyes refocus. It should be blurry, because you’re still focusing past it, despite it being right in front of your face. Then just relax and let your brain do the work.

This method got by far the quickest and most reliable results for me, most pop suddenly into view in just a couple seconds.

I think this method works best because you’re using established muscle memory to focus your eyes on an object at a measurable, consistent distance, and then just not letting them change. Removes several variables from the equation.

Not exactly a showerthought, maybe better off in a TIL, mildly interesting or history sub. This community is not for real information, though, showerthought communities are for more light-hearted and silly stuff.

Even when I see Elrond in LotR, that’s actually just Agent Smith in a funny costume.

We found them.

I was just gonna say, a squash that I cut in half, hollow out and dry is pretty low-tech stuff. Could probably use a coconut if you were in a pinch… Lot of options.

Then you should hopefully already understand the multiple reasons anecdotal evidence is a poor way of trying to understand large groups of people, which is why we use statistical studies.

The people specifically in your community, engaging with welfare resources, are in no way an accurately representative sample of a larger social class in all areas. Your specific region likely has unique cultural factors at play. The subset of people engaging with welfare have unique economic factors.