I hate fire department robots. Those bitches can get fucked.

I hate police robots. Those bitches can get fucked.

Contabo is cheap but has some weird quirks. I pay about five euros a month. My server got mysteriously rolled by two days and they denied anything happened to it. I restored from backups but it was odd.

I initially thought this was Wikipe-tan. The design is quite similar.

We already have that. In many parts of the developed world, you can get a roof over your head at a homeless shelter free of charge, and soup kitchens will give you enough calories to prevent you from starving to death. You’ll just have to accept a much lower standard of living.

I agree with you on that. Intelligence isn’t a stat point that someone is assigned at character creation. It’s the result of the educational opportunities and support that they had access to growing up.

I don’t think anyone has ever argued that nobody would ever be productive without pay. The concern is that not enough people would choose to be productive if they didn’t have to.

There seems to be a correlation between doing productive things for fun and higher intelligence and education. There is also a strong correlation between higher intelligence and holding left-wing views. Hence, the people posting these types of memes think that everyone would do what they would (be productive for fun). But ask some more… average intelligence people, and you will find that they’ll tend to say if they could just chill and play video games or scroll TikTok all day, that’s all they would do.

Could we continue to feed people even if work was made optional? At our level of the tech tree, probably. But people don’t just want to be fed, they like having computers and video games and houses and running water, all of which take a stupendous amount of labour to create and maintain, and I’m just not convinced that we could subside off volunteer labour for any society bigger than a few hundred people (which, not coincidentally, also tends to be about the maximum size of a left-wing commune)

The Polymarket rules are not laws. “Oops I broke the rules you caught me lol, looks like my crypto wallet’s banned now so I’ll have to make a new one in 5 seconds”

“It’s not gambling and it’s not an unregulated securities market. Think of it as a bribe to encourage political insiders to spill their secrets.”

I don’t live in Seattle, but the Costco locations near me also regularly have long queues. That rarely happens at other filling stations. There isn’t a shortage of gasoline currently; it’s just expensive.

Many things can be true at once. Is it true that Steam controls a dominating share of the PC gaming market? Yes. Is it true that when a company enters such a market position, that they can use that position to engage in anti-competitive and anti-consumer behaviour? Yes. Has Valve actually engaged in such behaviour? No.

The collection of texts today known as the Bible were not written at once. There’s actually a lot of interesting history about how it came to be, but the short of it is that there were a multitude of maybe-canon Christian texts floating around during the early period of Christianity. These texts were written decades or even centuries apart, and often falsely attributed to authors who did not write them. There was also the Septuagint, a Greek text which was a translation of various Jewish scriptures, many of which now form the Old Testament.

The early Christian church decided which of these were deemed to be canon and which were non-canon. The canon texts were compiled together to form what is now the Bible. Everything else that was deemed not canon is called the Apocrypha. Many of these texts were also deemed heretical or blasphemous to read, publish, or teach by the various ecumenical councils.

Each Christian denomination has a slightly different version of the Bible depending on which decisions and ecumenical councils they accept.

The most interesting difference would be the Bible of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also known as the Mormon Church), which has an additional text called the Book of Mormon. That was written in the 19th century by a guy named Joseph Smith, an American religious leader who founded Mormonism. According to Mormon theology, it contains the revalations he received from God about various other unknown saints who lived in America and other holy happenings which took place, making the US a second holy land of sorts. His group travelled to the western United States to find their own promised land and establish a Mormon theocracy (they were successful; it’s now the US state of Utah).

There’s no historical evidence that any of these texts were intended to be read as anything other than religious scripture, but keep in mind that in Biblical times, people seemed to have had a really difficult time differentiating texts written by people having fever dreams versus actual genuine accounts of observed events or legitimate attempts to write scripture. If you want a fun time, you can read some of the Apocrypha, which are often similar in style to the canonical gospels but are slightly… weirder. The line between religion and insanity was not so easily found back then. Regardless of their authors’ original intent, the Apocrypha certainly can be read for entertainment in the 21st century.

I think there is a line to be drawn between what is theoretically better and what is meaningfully useful.

It is realistically not useful information for an attacker to know what country you are from by observing your UTC offset. It’s simply much easier to guess this information by observing your other behaviours. For example, the text and time of your post is already leading me to guess UTC+5:30 as the time zone in question. But again, knowing what country you’re from is not really useful information most of the time, as even if my guess is correct, that narrows it down to a whopping one-eighth of the human population.

Can’t believe Portugal is nearly the same size as Portugal

The definitionition of “American” is pretty flexible. If you move here, live here, and want to consider yourself an American, then you are an American. Some loud zealots may say otherwise (typical in any country) but most Americans literally do not think about this at all.

I’m pretty sure all cultures adapt and learn from other cultures. That’s just how human culture develops. Vietnamese takes on French favourites resulted in bahn mi and Vietnamese coffee, both of which are very good. Poor Hongkongers wanting to eat like Brits resulted in Hong Kong’s famously weird “Cha chaan teng” food and Hong Kong-style milk tea. And, of course, Europeans went crazy over Mesoamerican chocolate and created a cornucopia of confectionery products made from the cacao bean.

Well, colonialism did bring tomatoes and potatoes to Europe.

I think the joke is that Americans like to adopt foods or cooking techniques from other cultures, then change them to fit local tastes. This is how a lot of “traditional American” foods came to be. There is also a stereotype that American cultural practices (gastronomy included) are “not real” or that American culture as a concept doesn’t exist because it comes as a fusion of cultural practices from other countries. The meme is poking fun at people who may hold that belief.

People also have a habit of describing the American versions of things to be “not real”, even if it never really claims to be. For example, fettuccine Alfredo in the US is an adaptation of fettuccini al burro (a real Italian dish), but is described as “not real Italian food” because it isn’t actually eaten in Italy. Or that orange chicken is “not real Chinese food” because it isn’t eaten in China. Which, to be fair, is true, but most American diners are aware that Panda Express, Olive Garden, and Taco Bell aren’t accurate representations of food eaten in China, Italy, or Mexico. They’re Americanised versions of food inspired by Chinese, Italian, and Mexican cuisine.

Americans associate the orange colour with cheese so it’s more cultural than practical. Other than the fact that some cheese being orange and some not being orange helps tell apart different varieties. For example, bright orange cheese is usually young cheeses that are used to make sauce or for sandwiches. Duller orange cheeses or slightly brown ones are expected to have a more sophisticated flavour (e.g. aged longer or smoked).

This is false, due to contaminants our air is legally considered dairy in Europe, and thus the average American actually consumes twice this quantity daily