hunger is a very strong motivator, what can i say.

And these people will gladly “starve to death”, either to “own the libs” or because they have bought so deeply into the lies and propaganda that it has become a critical part of their being and the cognitive dissonance of trying to learn the truth would be more painful than said starvation.

Fact-free ideology is one hell of a powerful drug.

I have an apostrophe

Scottish/Irish?

some companies see it as a SQL injection hack and sanitize it.

Which kind of apostrophe?

A straight apostrophe, fine - that can and does get used in valid SQL injection attacks. I would be disgusted at any input form that didn’t sanitize that.

But a curly apostrophe? Nothing should be filtering a curly apostrophe, as it has no function or use within SQL. So if you learn how to bring that up in alt codes (Windows, specifically), Key combos (Mac) or dead keys (Linux), as well as direct Unicode codes for most any Win/Mac/*Nix platform, you should be golden.

Unless the developer of that input form was a complete moron and made extra-tight validation.

Plus, knowing the inputs for a lot of extended UTF-8 characters not found on a normal keyboard is also a wee bit of a typing superpower.

A line break is a non-printable character. So it would only work in the scope of electronic storage. The minute it hits other media, the line break character is subject to how that media handles it’s presence, and then it is lost permanently from that step forward.

Plus, many input forms make use of validation that will just trim anything that isn’t a character or number, removing the line break character.

I hope republicans/conservatives have to learn their lesson the hard way around.

You are banking on people who have likely never picked up and read a single book after high school, and who likely read at a fifth grade level or less, to learn?

Especially when they have proven themselves to be such gullible rubes and suckers, uncritically swallowing everything the alt-right says like a herd of sheeple?

Buddy… you sound as reality-avoidant as they are.

They were never a thing in Europe.

Not really a thing in Canada either. Bought a reasonably midrange ($600k) brand-new apartment back in 2006, it didn’t come with it. Also have never seen it in any other house that I’ve visited, except for the wealthy. And by that, I mean in a house that you would normally pay $4-8 million for. Which is certainly upper middle class where I am, but not overly wealthy.

I would consider the latter to be depraved indifference, but the former to be maliciously genocidal.

Of the two, the former is much, much worse than the latter. And with everything being a spectrum of some kind, the former is much further along the path to being evil than the latter.

With that said, there is no single person pushing all the buttons in Israel; as such, I am sure there are people in the Israeli command structure that represent the former much more than the latter, and vice versa.

But if there is one characterization I feel is wholly appropriate: on Oct 6, Israel looked at the evil of Hamas and said, “hold my beer and watch this.” And boy, did they ever deliver.

$325k for a 3bdrm 2bath detached SFH in good condition?

Awww, that’s adorable. Even after taking the exchange rate into account, that would be like going back to 1998 in my corner of Canada. Right now, a house like that on a 0.21 Ac plot of land would be running you $1,300,000 CAD. In places like Vancouver? $4,800,000 CAD on average.

I have a tube-based distribution system from the second-floor window that I started using during COVID to keep my distance from those plague incubators that came calling, and just never stopped using it.

I live in a moderately cold climate, and Halloween evening nearly always drops to around -5℃ to 5℃. So it’s much nicer to just sit in a cushy armchair by the window with a warm blanket over my legs and drop candy through the tube. A surprising amount of adults, teens, and tweens are tickled pink by that system, although a lot of little kids need a surprising amount of direction to get their candy.

And yes, I always drop either two pieces or - for those in dark hoods and carrying scythes - full-sized snickers.

To me, it is a balance of both.

Life is definitely what happens to you. That alone is strikingly important, as much of it is not stuff you have any control over. You are quite literally a victim of most of life.

However, how you react to what you can control is also critical in dealing with it, in that you can identify things you can very much directly affect in some way.

Stoicism includes the ability and skills to tell the difference between the two, coping with the former as best as possible (to retain your mental health), and actively strategizing on how to deal with the latter as effectively as possible in order to minimize any negative outcome or maximize positive outcomes.

The Parasite Class. That’s what happened. These are people for whom any amount of wealth will never be enough. So they extract it out of the working class by cramming down wages, making all aspects of life precarious, and raising prices.

We all suffer and the 0.1% accumulare more wealth than they could possibly spend in a thousand lifetimes.

North Korea calls itself socialist

They also call themselves democratic.

Are they? Would you call their system democratic? No?

Why one and not the other?

It’s not laziness.

Most people are too resource poor, too time poor, and too exhausted from being violently forced to be profitable to someone else, to have the headspace to do what you suggest.

You can indeed spend every waking moment optimizing your life, but then you would be just one person among tens of thousands who could be successful doing that. 99.999% of people would utterly burn out trying to achieve the same. They don’t have the underlying intergenerational wealth that would give them the ability to do so, or don’t have the free time to do so, or have too high of a cognitive load just putting one foot in front of the other to do so. Vanishingly few people are “just too lazy” to do so, and of those who are, they are the ones who can monetarily afford to be lazy.

It’s why poverty is fiendishly expensive, and why it is almost impossible to escape poverty

OMG, like North Korea isn’t bad, it’s just the US that “doesn’t like them”.

You’re linking North Korea to the conversation about communism, when that alone is a fatal error: NK is equally as much communistic as they are democratic. As in, not in the least.

There has never been any kind of a long-term (5+ years) communist country on the planet. Prior power structures have always stepped in to decapitate communism in favour of a violently autocratic dictatorship much like a monarchy. What remained of communism was only ever kept as a thin veneer of legitimacy, much like a rotting Edgar suit.

religious beliefs aren’t considered mental illness

You’re right — it’s actually brain damage and cognitive impairment.

In a fair and equitable world, communities like this would not exist, because these people would not have that wealth.

All extreme wealth has been stolen from the working class. That’s the only way it can be obtained.

Now that is a real superpower.

I also manage to annoy TF out of my wife at being able to go from fully asleep to bouncing out of the bed like a piece of toast in under 10 seconds.

About the only thing that can impact this is severe sleep deficit, which - years ago - mean less than 3-4hrs in a night, but these days (in my sixth decade) means anything less than 5hrs of sleep in a night or less than 7 after multiple days of a sleep deficit.

The ONY REASON why immigrant labour is needed is because too much of the profits flow to the Parasite Class at the top.

It used to be that America could build affordable family homes for decent-sized families using well-paid American citizens. This was possible because those Americans were actually paid well enough to afford homes of their own; most of the value of their labour actually came back to them. Plus, most building materials weren’t beset by Greedflation and the need to keep obscene amounts of wealth flowing into pockets that were already overstuffed without more wealth than the person could spend in 100 lifetimes.

America could return to that time, where even the lowest-paid workers make enough to be within a stone’s throw of affording their own home. All it takes is a political leader willing to do the politically painful job of taxing the fuck out of the Parasite Class - including treating any loans taken out using stocks as collateral as “income” to be taxed, regardless of the destination of those funds.

That, plus a metric arseload of other things such as making corporate ownership of homes illegal and making “investor ownership” of homes beyond about 3-5 homes similarly illegal. Because not only do these parasites suck up the supply of homes, preventing renters from getting off the rental market, but they are also the primary players jacking up rents to unaffordable levels, seeking to squeeze every possible dollar out of hard-working Americans. Let these parasites find a real job if they want to continue earning money.

I am troubled by the fact that horses are dying in sufficient numbers to even contemplate this system of disposal. How are y’all all abusing those poor things such that they die in such large numbers? A horse’s lifespan is 25-30 years, so over the long haul, with one rider per horse there ought to be an average of only three horse deaths for every human death in the backcountry.

1.5 degrees is when the tipping points start to tip.

Fun fact: the planet has been at +1.5℃ for the last 14 months.

The reason why we aren’t officially at +1.5℃ is because the official designation is a political one, which requires some insanely long time at +1.5℃ - usually on the order of 8-20 years, depending on the org - before it can be said that we have “breached +1.5℃”.

Politicians are morons in the pockets of the Parasite Class.

Climate Science.