I think around about the 2008th to 2012th season of the AD series the writing was starting to pick up a bit, they’re just sorta phoning it in now and trying to spice it up with some shark jumping B stories about the political backdrop .

That shit drives me insane I really want to turn it off.

Just make sure you don’t use it, or fail to clarify and confirm the meaning of its use, in a business setting or you could be in some trouble.

I don’t mean to be a bit obvious but I really think of all the insightful analysis you might get it really boils down to “he’s a cartoon character” both literally and metaphorically.

When he’s evil, it’s funny. His evil plans are… well… cartoonish. He tried to block out the sun, he built a factory that uses the plastic from beverage packaging to deliberately snare sealife as a business venture, he tried to pose as a child in an elementary school in an attempt to trick the principle in to donating school funds to his power plant. It’s true he had more realistic and grounded evil too like trying to cancel all the plant employees’ dental plans, but in the same episode he does zany wacky stuff with a 1000 monkeys at a 1000 typewriters writing the world’s greatest novel and you tend to forget he’s evil because that’s just so funny. In fact his hilarious ways of spending his ill gotten wealth or his old-timey antics are so cooky and eccentric it’s kind of hard to hold on to resentment that he has undeserved power and privilege and besides, again, it’s a cartoon so there’s no actual real harm to be upset about and the tone of the show and his appearance in it never tries to portray that harm in a serious way so you can’t really even be so wrapped up in the fiction that the harm even feels real as in other works of fiction.

They have also occasionally humanized him, as a necessary measure for when entire episodes have revolved around him so he has his troubled past with his lost toy BoBo and his own quick abandonment of his own parents, he’s been unlucky in love and he’s insecure about his baldness even showing genuine empathy towards Homer for his desperate attempts to use the company medical insurance for hair replacement medicine. In fact I think the few times they really show him as an actual unlikeable prick are when he stays at the Simpson home and behaves like a monster and the time he tried to marry Marge’s Mum and was extremely hasty and controlling about it. In both those instances we could genuinely hate him, but they more or less redeem him by having him be forced to accept consequences for the behaviour.

Is it illegal for me to hear any other person’s song? Can we co-ordinate? I think with the 8 billion of us we have around we might actually get close to covering the full library of human songs as long as none of us repeats. In that case then I don’t really care which one, I’m happy to be just assigned one to make none of us doubles up. Another question would be how well the human birth rate can keep up with number of new songs people come up with. If we can average out the rate of growth can we just assign any given new song to a registry so we don’t exceed that average and that mete out a new entry from the backlog in the registry to each person as they’re born? Maybe if we can assign a song to each person that has ever lived or at least who’s life was recorded we can add some resilience to account for unexpected low birth yields or something. I’m assuming a song is still “legal” after its person has died. If not it’ll be a bit more complicated.

Boysenberry. It’s weirdly become very rare at least where I live. It used to be quite common

Is it… people?

Wait soylent is real? It’s it green?

Or a terrorist

Haha what the fuck?

Kinda, but I’m more or less resigned to the inevitability of it and I’m actually proud of myself, like a little kid, when I go out to eat and DON’T somehow end up wearing part of my dinner

But I thought the entire basis for people wanting a product like ground news was that it can be difficult to get facts or to have a firm grasp of reality where it pertains to the types of events we’d call “news” because the only way in which people other than active participants in the events or journalists, can gather such facts is through media. Since one doesn’t reliably know what facts have been omitted or distorted when consuming media, the main way to get another perspective and hear different narratives, framings and details of the story are through any media other than the one you’re consuming. This can be misleading because there is a lot of it and in addition to the possibility of outright materially incorrect facts, one could also be gathering the facts within the framework of a perspective that serves agendas or corporate necessities or biases inherent to a given publication. With a lot of different media options including many one mightn’t even know about and with opacity surrounding what media is subject to what biases and agendas among other influences the process of comparison and analysis based on multiple media sources is cumbersome and time consuming and likely incomplete. What the ground news guys are claiming to offer is a service where they do some of that work for you and some kind of a methodology by which they do their analysis.

Whether one trusts them to do it, or if their analysis is fair, or how thorough they are or if their criteria and methodology provide a useful framework for analysis is a different question similarly hard to answer but I don’t see how your proposal for comparing against “facts” isn’t going to fail for the same reason simply consuming news media uncritically to try and stay informed would. Unless you’re experiencing events first hand or personally conducting journalism you’re always going to have limited capacity to know what the facts are or how they are distorted by the media from which you get them.

Even better then, your speech would be so memorably bad that people would be even more certain it was you and you couldn’t have been elsewhere.

If he’s you and you want to be free of your life and wish it could be someone else’s problem then your duplicate is just going to run a mile and thank their lucky stars for this break.

I’m pretty nice. I think it’d take some more intense circumstances like in Dark Matter before I or a copy of me wanted to kill anyone. I wonder if I’d be ok with taking turns for time with loved ones.

I never really considered it was because the toilet might be rounder and less oval but I have definitely noticed those toilets because for some reason they’re ALL like that in every workplace and commercial building in this one suburb of my city. I have no idea why just that suburb decided they really enjoyed the idea of everyone having their penis touch the toilet bowl. I work freelance and because of agglomeration, most companies in my industry all set up shop in that particular suburb so I got to experience a wide gamut of different buildings who all made this same bizarre and infuriating choice.

I have this drive if you look at the image you can see that the rear panel has a little semi circular nib of plastic at the bottom. It serves no purpose, but what it does do is make it nearly impossible to plug the DC connector in. You can’t quite tell from the image but it’s perfectly placed so that you can’t fit the requisite number of fingers needed to securely hold the plug and push it in to the cavity where the inputs of the panel are located. It actively encourages the otherwise pretty unlikely scenario of making only partial or near contact with the connector and not quite properly plugging it in. A dangerous possibility from a safety perspective but also a great way to lose a bunch of data by having it lose power or short out during operation. It’s one of the most exquisitely designed inconveniences hell’s engineering department could have possibly developed.

Hahaha I love that this is written as “he had a religious experience WHILE talking to a chair”, not “he had a religious experience AND talked to a chair”. Dude’s just having a normal conversation with a chair and then something weird and unexplained occurred that put him on the path to god. I wonder if the chair was as convinced.

I wouldn’t say it was weird, I think it’s one of the better arguments since it only relies on pure hard nosed practicality, but it still doesn’t hold water for the reasons you say. I think at least within the constructs of what it considers, it’s logical, it’s just that it fails to consider too much, among which, whether or not belief in the existence of something like that can just be chosen on the basis of what would be practically expedient.

It could be demonstrated to me that belief in Santa Claus can have material benefits, and failure to believe will mean that, if he does exist, you will no longer receive gifts. With that logic it would make more sense to believe in Santa Claus than not to, since there’s no downside to believing and being wrong and a potentially negative consequence to lacking that belief and being wrong. The problem is that, I can’t sincerely believe in something that for all intents and purposes I can say I “know” isn’t real simply because I would like to enjoy the hypothetical benefits and avoid the hypothetical consequences. I can say I believed in Santa Clause, if doing so meant that someone was going to give me gifts, but saying it and believing it are distinct concepts so the wager would be more persuasive as a means of deciding whether or not to declare belief in something than believe it.

forever alone together?