On balance it could be that the risks to your personal safety might outweigh the perceived increase in secrecy. To me I don’t like the idea that I’ve left a record that can be questioned if I’m getting prosecuted, but you’re right I haven’t factored in the overall risks from the alternative.

Yes, indeed. Hence the earlier, “HOW GET MONEY?” someone so eloquently asked in relation to this dead drop method. You could arrange your own dead drop for the dealer’s payment I guess, or stuff the money in to the same tree. It’s all a bit fraught, and requires you both to trust each other even more than a deal normally would. The system seems to be pretty flawed. Guess it works of you’re happy to leave an indelible record of you transacting with this person and if you trust them to actually put the goods there rather than just take the money since you’ll never see them and have no recourse.

I’d be uneasy with electronically transferring funds for illicit drugs, cash seems wiser.

I remember around 2005ish, maybe earlier, there was a company that started selling Duff beer here in Australia with the same font as from the Simpsons and a complete clone of the cartoon can design. Everyone thought it was cool and it became very popular very quickly. People were surprised that The Simpsons name would attach itself to a real life beer given it was a family show and this would be ripe for controversy. It came to light after only a couple of months that The Simpsons brand had nothing to do with it and the company had somehow managed to go through all the steps of bringing this to market and just presumably hoped they wouldn’t get in to trouble. They were very quickly made to stop distributing those beers. Weird situation.

I really don’t think giving the head of state the power to pardon is a very good idea. I used to be totally baffled how it was a thing at all but the rationale has since been explained to me. While I sorta get it, the theoretical benefit is far outweighed by the inevitable grimy reality. Like others, probably mostly because of my own biases, I find it hard to summon a great deal of outrage about this understandable if blatantly hypocritical move after so much prior abuse of the lower had already occurred, but frankly if the option weren’t even there then nobody would even need to talk about this. If the justice system of the nation is supposedly well designed and theoretically trustworthy then there isn’t the need to have the ability for it to be arbitrarily overrulled in a manner that operates very much like the monarchical tyrants the United States was supposedly foundationally opposed to.

I’m curious about the “better tech than us” claim. Can you give some more detail and context to this?

My parents have a well worn story of the time they were students and very poor and they saw a homeless guy outside the kebab shop and asked if he’d like a kebab to which he agreed. They brought it out to him and he examined it and threw it on the ground and yelled at them about something they now don’t remember exactly but they think was something to do with not wanting chilli sauce. Guessing that guy wasn’t in the best state of mind at the time, bit of a bummer for them though because they scraped together the last of their cash to pay for that and it would have been better if they could at least have eaten it themselves.

I really can’t see a downside. If they seem to be obviously homeless or they’re actively asking for help, they probably need it. Though it’s extremely unlikely that your meager contribution will be the change that suddenly allows them to magically overcome poverty and become middle class home owners with well paying jobs, that doesn’t really make them need it any less. Whatever they use the money on, it’s going to be what they need in the immediate term, be it drugs or food or anything really and unlike others this is the only way they can really get that money so they do need people to occasionally part with it. You’d only give it to them because you had it spare anyway and it’s not going to make them more homeless than they already were. If the concern is that it’s not addressing the root personal problems that put them individually on the street or the root social problems that put many on the streets, that’s completely true but if you’re serious about doing that you’re going to need more than the couple of bucks in your pocket anyway. That’s going to be concerted massive political will and financial effort and several people’s lifetimes worth of work all at the same time, besides you can always involve yourself in some way in such efforts and hand over spare change. The only times I can really think of where it makes sense not to give directly are: you can’t afford to do it, the physical circumstances of handing it over are dangerous/impractical, you don’t care about homeless people or other people in general or you subscribe to some nasty Malthusian ideas and think yourself somehow benevolent for condemning people to destitution as some kind of “cruel to be kind” doctrine in which case you’re unlikely to have given this a lot of thought anyway and don’t really face much of a dilemma.

I thought hipster was essentially supposed to be someone vapid and style obsessed at any given time. Dandies would have been hipsters by my understanding. It’s a focus on appearance and also whatever is a current trend of the times so they might also include interests or hobbies as well, the point is the term is used pejoratively because the interests or the style adopted by these people is considered surface level and inauthentic because it is primarily based upon the recency of widespread adoption of whatever it is.

Shit was crazy, random conservative shock jocks and mainstream conservative politicians all over the world were losing their minds over this kid it was hilarious. It was so funny watching them just fucking PR faceplant over and over again when all they ever needed to do was just shut the fuck up about it and wait for her to disappear from the news cycle in time as she herself said she fully expected would happen. I’m pretty sure her continuing relevance is at least in part because of the Streisand effect generated from a whole international cabal of right-wing old men desperately trying to destroy this child and fucking losing hahaha.

Good old klapaucius:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:! I wish there was some use to me still remembering that word today.

WTF!?

NES is a good one, it was juuust about part of my time in that a couple of people I rarely saw had one and I loved playing it with them when I did seem them, but really that’s because I didn’t at the time have a games machine or a computer so anything would have been good. I’ve played a few of the games and they were alright, pretty good. I got an original NES console with several games as an adult and was super excited because it’s so classic and retro and I found that much as I love owning it, I really couldn’t stand playing it for more than a few minutes. The games are just, kinda boring and they feel very, incomplete. They suffy some of the same problems as the Atari games I played just to see what the time period was like, those Atari ones in particular feel very unfinished, like someone thought it’d be interesting to try making a game, had one attempt, made something like a sort of prototype and then got bored and just shoved it on the market and moved on to a different hobby. The NES games weren’t as bad as that, but there was a similar feel of lack of consideration for the actual player. To me, it the NES kind of represents when games were starting to get good, which I think would annoy a lot of people that were gamers for a long time before that, because it’s always annoying when younger people make these proclamations totally ignorant of the time they’re speaking about, but in my head at least that’s what the NES generation represents. It’s the starting point of what was to come, with some flashes of brilliance and a lot of meh and even the really good bits aren’t as good as their later more refined iterations.

Yeh, this is a weird question. Kid has to know he’s going to be accepted by his own Dad and still be able to make up their own mind on things. Hopefully when they’ve more fully developed they might sway a different way but acceptance from their Dad shouldn’t really be conditional upon it.

But when he took the red pill he was relegated to eating a bowl of snot as his only food and living in a hellscape and had to fight a never-ending war whilst still having to regularly go back in to the matrix he was supposedly escaping. I mean I guess, great, for humanity but it doesn’t make picking Linux sound like a great time if you’re going to use that analogy.

Economics really isn’t my strong suit so the fact that the outcome is surprising or confusing to me isn’t entirely unexpected but I have to say that outcome is actually kind of surprising. I would have thought the theory for how the tariff was supposed to work was that the 20% increase in price seen on the ground for foreign made washing machines owing to the cost of the tariff being passed on to the consumer would mean that the domestic producer of washing machines could expect to look more attractive on the shelf than the foreign made ones for being cheaper. The domestic manufacturer could also afford to be cheaper in a way that’s easy for them to achieve because they don’t face the artificial increase in the cost of making and selling their washing machines. This would mean they had the opportunity to sell more of them than their foreign competitors resulting in higher profits. If they saw it as an opportunity to raise prices by 20% without being punished by their competitors, wouldn’t that eliminates their natural advantage? Seems they’d be leaving money on the table. I would have thought the more likely outcome you’d see would be the domestic company essentially raise prices by something more like 19% so that they still get to profiteer from the chance to raise prices without penalty in the marketplace and unlike their competitors keep that as profit rather than put it towards paying tarrifs, but still be cheapest on the market meaning increased sales. You’d see a double benefit from their perspective. I mean that would still completely suck, everyone would be paying 19% more than when they started, but you’d think you’d see some of the intended desireable effects of the tariff in this one simple example of the washing machines, ignoring other factors.

Thanks OBAMA!

Do you ever find that sometimes when you intervene in to other people’s conversations to pull out some of your best absolute cracker lines like “why don’t you google that?” that people just don’t react properly at all? Like you’d expect an appropriate response like some light cheering and maybe lifting you up on their shoulders and handing you a medal and at least a couple of trophies. You know, something befitting of your incisive and insightful contributions, and instead they just kinda stop talking to you? That’s so weird huh?

Is it true they can hold on to a charge for decades? I was told that but it seemed unlikely.

You deadly seriously didn’t know if they were talking about the Pacific Ocean? In a post about someone who has trouble speaking clearly, in a reply clearly establishing you were aware there were writing errors, zeroing in on a word well known to be accidentally substituted for the word “specifically” by some speakers. You deadly seriously didn’t know?