I disagree. The margins seem thin enough that people fed up with either party can absolutely ruin them in the swing states. If you were to disagree with one of the parties, you could absolutely give them a signal by not voting. Preferably such a person would also make very clear why they refuse to vote for a party, because otherwise it’s indeed just lazy and empty.

Again, I think that people who do so are shooting themselves (and everyone else) in the foot. But I can see their motivation.

Same. At some point I became friends with pretty religious people who were also some of the most intelligent and nice people I had met. My beliefs that religious people are just dumb people who cannot understand the complexity of the real world kinda fell apart then.

I returned back to my pre-teen opinion, still an atheist but with compassion for other people’s beliefs. No need to constantly force my opinion into it or needlessly be a dick because we disagree. I’ve had many interesting discussions since then with very religious people. I still don’t fully get it, and to me it still reeks of indoctrination, but I’ve accepted that it’s fine to disagree.

I agree that people should’ve voted, but I disagree with this one-dimensional line of thinking. I can see the argument that by voting for the democrats their current behaviour and this fucked up system as a whole is warranted. It’s not as simple as “why not vote, it costs you nothing”. By voting this horrible “democracy” is legitimised and the democrats and the system will not change their approach. The US deserves a democracy that actually allows for representation instead of this duopoly of garbage and more garbage

I’m not American, and I don’t agree with these people either, but I don’t think that calling them lazy and ignorant makes any sense. In the fucked up democracy of the US it’s clear that the only way to get what you want for the coming 4 years is to vote for the least bad candidate. At the same time I can definitely understand that if you view both candidates was horrible, though one way more horrible than the other, you would feel conflicted about voting for either of them.

Let’s do a thought experiment. Assuming both candidates are still roughly equally “popular”. If both candidates wanted to start a genocide, but one would want to kill only 50% of the amount of innocents that the other would kill, how would you vote? Would you vote for the one who is overall the less bad option, which will in turn make you give your vote for something horrible. Or would you abstain and signal that the democracy as it currently stands has lost your confidence entirely, even if it means that on the short term the consequences might be way worse?

Not voting actually costs the democrats something, and should (if they want to win next time) force them to think how to better represent you next time.

It’s fucked up that your democracy came to this. It has become an annoying game theory dilemma instead of voting for the candidate that you actually believe in. Our system here in the Netherlands is certainly also not perfect, since we have too many parties and too long coalition negotiations, but at least I feel like it represents people way better. Anyone can start a party and capture seat if they represent a large enough niche.

Yeah this is kinda a point. People like this colleague seem to have gotten stuck in a highschool bully mindset ans never moved on. All of their jokes are about people who are different, their whole status seems to be based on their “masculinity”. In my experience this is the largest portion of homo/transphobes here in the Netherlands. People who aren’t violent or outright hateful, but rather just pushing outdated jokes and viewpoints and then getting annoyed by all the “woke bullshit” when they get called out.

My tactic so far is to not fully attack back, but rather staying friendly while showing my disappointment with this behaviour unless it goes too far. Most of these people are otherwise decent, and in my opinion may be swayed by someone “woke” who doesn’t go “full crazy sjw” but does call them out. Making a joke about minorities is way easier of you don’t know anyone well from those groups. They’re not crazy Trump voters, so they may still be steered in the right direction

I’ve had a colleague say that tea is “homo water”. I’m aro/ace, but most of my colleagues don’t know that. Similarly a straight colleague of mine got mocked for wearing pink (but not feminine) shoes. After some of these incidents we’ve kinda started pushing back against this nonsense by deliberately triggering these people and calling them out, which has worked so far.

Oh yeah absolutely. I’m a programmer and I see so many companies and recruiters etc use Cyber instead of Cybersecurity. It drives me absolutely mad, but these type of people drive me mad anyways. It’s probably the same crowd who ruined AI by overhyping it into its grave, the same crowd who were hyped by web 3.0 and the whole Blockchain craze, and probably all those other dumb crazes before it.

Still, this cyber thing seems to permeate everything, and I’ve heard people using the term who I otherwise respect. For me it’s a quick way to instantly become very sceptical of whatever follows the term

I update whenever it is convenient or pushed. On Android it’s not really a decision that I make, it just updates whenever it feels like it and so far I haven’t disagreed very often. On my desktop I update Arch pretty much weekly, and Windows as little as possible because it wants to restart during the updating process and will probably just pull in more spyware. My Ubuntu laptop isn’t used often, so it doesn’t get updated often either. I also sometimes use some Fedora machines, which I also don’t update too regularly.

Ubuntu and the multiple Fedora machines under my control also like to start unattended updates at the worst possible moments, which regularly interrupts my attempts to update or install stuff. I prefer to turn that shit off at every opportunity. I’d rather just get a notification that it wants me to update in the DE or terminal

I agree, but I’ve gotten less annoyed by it over the years. When I was young it really didn’t make sense to me. Money can do literally the same and is way more versatile.

However, now that I’m trying to survive this adulting thing it does start to make more sense, even if I still don’t like it. If someone gives me money, it ends up on the big pile of money that’s constantly flowing around. Give me 20 euros and it just adds 20 to the number in my bank account, which will eventually end up being used on groceries, bills, mortgage, etc. if you give someone money as a present you don’t want this. You don’t know what to give the other person ans you want them to choose something nice for themselves. But buying them part of their groceries or a part of their bills isn’t exactly a fun gift. You want to “force” them to buy something nice, something that they want to spend money on instead of need to spend money on. A gift card does this.

Then again, giving me physical money would also do this. Or asking me to say when I bought something nice with it. When people gift me money I tend to tell them where it went and that works way better than gift cards imo.

I obviously don’t agree with them, but my assumption is that it has to do with maturity/innocence. An unborn child hasn’t done anything wrong. They’re full of opportunity and have a whole life ahead of them. A criminal sentenced for death has I some way done something very wrong. They’ve had their chance and failed.

Yeah you’re running by default but it can easily take an in-game hour to get anywhere. When you’re done with the plants or animals you have to race to get to the shops in order to be there before closing. Especially the blacksmith

Maybe I’m doing something wrong but Stardew Valley stresses me out way more than many other games. There’s so little time

It’s usually off unless I expect to be back relatively soon. Startup times aren’t an issue nowadays

Wait overmorrow is correct English? We have “morgen” and “overmorgen” in Dutch which is tomorrow and overmorrow respectively, so I always missed an overmorrow in English. Is it actually commonly understood or will people look at me like I’m a weird foreigner when I use it?

Oh this is useful information, thanks!

Forgot the number, but one of the most common Logitech ones. Right now I’m not even getting past the first hurdle though, which is getting Assetto Corsa with Content Manager and mods to start. I spent a few hours on it and then decided that I had better things to do with my time

Both. I’d prefer Linux because it respects me as a user, but unfortunately too much stuff constantly breaks to fully convert. The moment I can play Assetto Corsa with all my mods using my wheel in VR I’ll consider fully switching. Many other games already work though, so I’m slowly converting to using Linux as my default and Windows as the exception instead of the other way around.

(I use Arch btw)

Exactly. I used to think like this when younger, but I now see how stupid this mentality is. Basically anything we care about as humans is “non-productive”. Music, art, video games, musicals, movies, sports, etc. just because I don’t care about something doesn’t mean that it’s not important to someone else.

Not really. It’s just as irrational. Why destroy something because you lost a video game? I’ve been frustrated before due to a game, but never anywhere near frustrated enough to destroy something that I paid a lot of money for and am very happy with. At most I’ll slap my desk or something, but that’s nowhere near hard enough to have any effect.

And Julia!