COBOL

Well, I was surprised at the time…

The Democratic Party is an Iranian insurgency.

A work can have multiple meanings, even unintended meanings. It can even have no intended meaning.

Its creators define its intended meaning, if any. Valid interpretations can create other meaning from it.

If anyone does, make sure to check out guides like https://specificsuggestions.com/ (use filters)

I’ve found that when I’m deciding to try out something creative or artistic, I start to look for techniques in other people’s works when I might otherwise just be enjoying them on a surface level. Anyone can look at a work and say if it’s pretty or not, if it seems well-designed, how it makes you feel, but when you start to ask how an artist does that, you quickly discover techniques that you may be able to apply to your own art, your own writing. You can even look at a list of techniques [1] and then start to identify when creators are using them, and how to use them effectively. The more you experience and the more you think about it, the more understanding and the more tools you have at your fingertips. And by forcing yourself to get into D&D, you’re throwing yourself into a game that will help you develop that variety of skills, and probably into a scene where plenty of people know enough of those skills that you can rapidly learn from them, see what they do brilliantly and see what they could do better.

As for games, I admit I haven’t tried many of them but the Explorable Explanations I have tried are great, particularly the ones by Nicky Case (Parable of the Polygons , the Evolution of Trust , the Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds). I’d call these short games even though they lean strongly towards elements of education and simulation.

Rat

and the only thing that can stop them is violence at this point

There are a range of effective violent and non-violent resistance tactics. The important part is understanding that violent tactics will inevitably be necessary to complement the non-violent tactics. Violence alone doesn’t work - look at the anarchists around the 1900s who assassinated a range of kings and police chiefs.

And there’s no winning against a military force like the US.

There are plenty of countries which have resisted US military invasion. They’ve faced atrocities and been left with horrific scars, but nonetheless this view of the mighty US military as unbeatable is repeatedly contradicted by its history. And a civil war would provide a different dynamic, so it’s a bit of a mystery in my opinion. Obviously not advocating for that, and believe it or not the (whole) military is not an inevitable opponent.

Since this question is asking “should”, I think it’s fine to answer with a rational but radical answer:

• People can be useful to society even if they aren’t employed in our current economies. Retired people may not have jobs, but often still perform productive or necessary labor, like maintenance, artistic contributions, child care, historical preservation. When someone isn’t working for money, they still often voluntarily work for society!
• I believe that, generally speaking, it’s within society’s best interest, even just from an economic standpoint, to support these people even if they aren’t formally employable.
• Looking at most capitalist countries, overproduction is normal. Usable property remains empty just because an owner wants more money for their investment. Perfectly edible food is systematically thrown in bins rather than given to hungry people for free, or rejected by stores because it doesn’t look perfect (like an oddly shaped carrot). Clothes are thrown out once they’re “unfashionable”.

We have all the resources needed to support everyone, and it wouldn’t take much extra effort from a determined government to get those resources where they need to go. There’s no reason why unemployed people should be left to starve and freeze simply because they don’t have enough income. In our society, the scarcity of basic needs is artificial (‘artificial scarcity’).

Automation is seen as a bad thing, a threat, because workers in society are threatened with starvation if they don’t have the income needed for food, shelter, medicine and perhaps basic luxuries. But if our political economy were first-and-foremost based around society’s needs instead of profiting, and therefore we used our modern technology to automate the production of these basic needs and distribute them, then suddenly automation would mean free time and easier labor!

The simplistic ‘left-right’ spectrum isn’t particularly useful when it comes to something as complex and location-specific as politics, left-right is really just vibes in the end. You’re on the right path by comparing policies, and it helps to understand the different contexts they’re in (e.g. US red scare culture), along with the similarities you mentioned.

I think this exercise could be fun and deepen you/our understanding of politics, but at the end of the day, different cities have different material conditions (circumstances) which means the same policy may make sense in one environment but not the other. I think an insightful exercise would be to compare the DSA to your country’s main demsoc parties (PvdA/GL?) and figure out the main differences and why they’re different.

I don’t see the point in trivializing a serious, potentially life-threatening allergy just because another tick-borne disease (also prevalent in the same country) is worse. Plenty of excellent reasons to complain about the US and its citizens, but this post is pointless and petty.

I wonder if it was a romance scam.

There was a person last year going around to websites posting a whole bunch of hastily-made .onion single-page scam websites that essentially just say “Pay $10 to this bitcoin address for the service”. They’d post a series of links, like:

Facebook hacking:

http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14h3kjfu4.onion/

Love potion spell

http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14hfspopd.onion/

Mystery box

http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14fine9ffewh.onion/

[…]

Not only are many of these scam services played out and pretty obvious, like pretending they will hack facebook accounts for $25, and not only were many others ridiculous like a love potion spell, satanic spells, a “mystery box” that you pay $10 to find out what’s in it, but their shotgun approach of listing them all in a single post makes it obvious how fake and desperate it is. I’d be amazed if anyone fell for it, but they kept hand-posting these for months until site owners manually blocked them.

It should show up fine in a mobile browser.

It’s just a flat-colored version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vector-based_example.svg

Now the noob is using wepb for a bunch of rasterised vector graphics with 4 or 5 flat colors, and he’s wasting more disk space than before.

I just tested with this image:

Default GIMP WebP export settings (90% quality): 88.8 kB

Lossless WebP mode: 85.6 kB

Default GIMP PNG export settings (compression level 9): 189.8 kB

So I don’t trust this claim unless you have some evidence.

In fact, it should still be the default unless you need something it doesn’t support or really need to reduce file size.

I disagree. It is wasteful (we’re talking ~30% savings with lossless WebP or JPEG-XL) and widely misused, which matters at the massive scale of the Internet with technically inexperienced people making up plenty of those images.

Tor Browser (daily driver) because I really hate surveillance capitalism. I have fallbacks but rarely need them. Can recc LibreWolf and Ungoogled Chromium.

wut?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok#Corporate_structure

and most of them are globalists and most of the globalists wear tiny hats

That’s not the situation, and using codewords doesn’t hide that you’re referring to jewish conspiracy theories. Western governments aren’t supporting the zionist regime because they’re occupied by ‘globalists’ or because they’re jewish. Jews frequently are anti-zionist and zionists frequently aren’t jewish. Governments support the regime because it’s tactically useful for their imperialism in the Middle East, which is rich in resources and an important land trade hub, among other things. The US especially benefits from having a strong military power in the region to threaten the surrounding countries.

As for globalism, that’s really just the inevitable end result of capitalism once it can no longer grow in its own country, it must seek other markets to expand into or exploit for labor, either through military force (e.g. Opium Wars for forced drug trade, war in Iraq for oil acquisition), economic pressure, cultural power or diplomatic power. Global imperialism is driven by economics, whether leaders feel like conspiring or not is largely irrelevant to it because at the end of the day they can’t survive by ignoring economics, by material factors, which demand them to either give up their position or expand into foreign markets globally.

I care more about where they are spent. My local government is spending it far better than my federal government. If it was half my income and was spent in ways that lower the cost of living and improve quality of life, then I’d have no problem with that.

If I get a tax cut, I think, cool, at least I choose where this money goes, because I actually do give some to non-profits that benefit society. Tax amounts are not something which determines how I vote, I gloss over it in the news, it’s just incidental that the anti-worker parties want to raise my taxes and spend them in worse ways.