I just install DoNotSpy after a fresh install of Windows and have never had an issue with Windows Update ignoring me and doing whatever it wanted.

Obviously the system has to be offline until it is installed and probably restarted, but after that you can plug in a cable and be fine, to my experience. Mind you I am still using an old, old, copy of 10 Pro as the installer, so I am uncertain how newer, fresh installs or home edition will handle it.

Not sure how you can talk about “the big three” of condiments and leave out mayo. Is it just non-existant outside of North America or something?

This.

Nothing says “I have fulfilled my social obligation, but I don’t give a shit about you” more than a low value giftcard for somewhere generic.

Alternatively, give him a halfway decent gift and feel better about yourself for not continuing the cycle of neglect, even when he won’t appreciate it. We can make the world better, even for those of us that don’t deserve it, and considering how to make it a better place as opposed to how to get back at the people who make it a worse one is just a better use of our time and energy.

Besides, at the end of the day, truly awful people already live with the worst punishment so could imagine: having to wake up every morning and continue being themselves.

Listen, it’s a very easy premise: these anti-gay workers and activists believe homosexual thoughts are something everyone struggles with, because they experience similiar thoughts and urges all the time, and homosexuals are just people made the wrong choice. The logic is easy to follow. People bias their own experiences and wrongly assume that most people have similiar thoughts and feelings. So when you have feelings that you have been told your whole life are “wrong”, “unclean” or “evil”, you don’t assume that they’re unique to you; you see them as demons that everyone faces and attribute your ability to turn them away as a virtue. These people believe homosexuality is a choice because they believe themselves to have made the other choice.

The hate you see isn’t loathing for things they don’t understand. It’s resentment. It’s a deep-seated bitterness born of resentment and envy for people who chose not to fight against their own nature and instead celebrate it. And they believe they’re doing good by helping people like them make the “correct” choice, and eliminating any attitudes, conversations or, in extreme cases, persons, that would normalize the “incorrect” choice.

I take “nice” to mean something very different than “good” or “kind”. No, I am not a nice person. I am inclined to be an honest asshole over a nice liar. I try my best to be good, kind, understanding, etc., but “nice” is, in my books, more about manners than good acts or genuine understanding. And I generally feel that time and effort spent on attempting to be “nice” is much better spent on genuinely empathizing with and supporting people, even when that support isn’t kind or well-mannered at a glance.

I think I just take issue with the word “nice”.

The article is great, but I hate this title.

“We are living in a post-Constitutional time,” Vought wrote in a seminal 2022 essay, which argued that the left has corrupted the nation’s laws and institutions.

The “post-constitutional” world in the title is the way Russ Vought describes the current political landscape. It is not, as the title insinuates, something he used to describe the future he aims to create.

This guy is a fascist nut job with a ton of insane ideologies. We don’t need dishonest titles to make him look bad.

They legit don’t have any faces or arms. That “Thor” has a weird, flesh coloured, Megaman buster-shaped appendage, no eyes and a gaping hole of a mouth.

It’s not obvious at a glance, but each of those “characters” are amorphous blobs. Seriously, zoom in even a little, it’s really strange to look at.

I appreciate the poster demonstrating always-on to OP, and I’d never criticize them for using this wallpaper, but the only way you can call this “very good AI art” is by glancing at a thumbnail and moving on.

Infinite growth is referred to as cancer. Your friend is obviously right that we cannot sustain infinite growth, but it’s misguided to think that the only way out species can possibly survive to any length is by having more children and increasing our population year over year.

With improving technologies and automations, far less labour is required to achieve the same results. There is no reason we need an infinitely increasing population on our decidedly finite earth just to keep our species afloat. This would take a major restructuring of our social and economic systems to do correctly, otherwise we run the risk of centralized wealth mucking it all up, but the point remains that there’s no necessity to continue reproducing at the rate we have been. This supposed “need” for labour is just capitalist propaganda perpetuating the idea that work is inherently good, all designed to fuel an inherently exploitative economy. Line must go up, otherwise how can the privledged few assure that their net worth continues to grow exponentially?

The insanity and ignorance necessary to call prison “a sweet life”.

What’s the goal here? There’s no way you’re this willfully ignorant, right?

I could also go for a “no capitalism” approach, but I’ll take what I can get.

“Fuck them, I’ve got mine” pro-capitalist mindset in the wild.

Either “eating meat is fine because animal life is less valuable than people’s dietary needs/preferences,” or “vegetarianism is the only moral option, as all life is equally valuable,” but it seems to me like any answer in the middle is hypocrisy, no?

I dug into this more deeply in another response, but no. Life can be equally valuable and we can accept that evolution and history has led us to a place where we end life without feeling a sense of superiority over that life.

Imagine a poker game. You have been dealt a winning hand. You are incredibly confident of this and are correct to feel so. Are you a better person for winning that hand? Is this a signal that you’re not only expected to take the money of the others at the table, but permitted to do so because you are a better person?

We are the species that was dealt a better hand. This puts us in a position of power. This does not make us “better”, nor does it negate the value of those other lives, despite the position we find ourselves in. Yet we do, ultimately, get to collect as a result of that hand.

Yes and no. For one, many vegetarians and vegans would agree, so on some level, sure, that’s a very defensible opinion. Secondly, North American sensibilities would call it a moral tragedy to sell cat or dog parts, so at some point we have to accept that what is and isn’t okay to kill and consume is a question of cultural bias as opposed to moral truth.

Lastly, you can accept the state of the food chain without holding the belief that those at the top of it are “better” or “worth more”. I don’t eat beef because I am, in some universal truth way, worth more than a cow. I eat beef because I accept that in the chaos of existence, this is where the chips fell. I do not feel a sense of superiority for being able to do so. If you’re going to get really strict about it, I’d define “murder” as the act of killing for the sake of killing, and say that killing for consumption and in some cases survival is different. But even then, I recognize that this is bias. If you want to call murder the act of taking a life, I’ve murdered a lot in my life, and I don’t intend on stopping any time soon. Mosquitos won’t squish themselves.

The question of intellect and understanding and the weight of these qualities in the value of a life is a dangerous road to wander down, so I like to keep in perspective that we’re all meaningless specks in the grand scheme of the universe. Otherwise, the questions get even more challenging: to say a truly reprehensible thing, what happens when we replace the human or the animal in question with an exceptionally low functioning human being? Do we now say their life has little value because they can’t contribute to society, they can’t understand the state of their own existence, and in many cases they’re not even capable of verbal communication? Does it become okay to choose to let them die, as in the original question? Are they suddenly fit for consumption as cattle? Or does the responsibility fall on the more capable to protect them?

Appraising and tiering life is an incredibly dangerous road to go down. You can choose any example of historical racism to see just how dangerous it gets. Life is life, and the strange differences between what’s “okay” and what’s not is luck more than anything else. Even as I consume a steak while my dog begs for the scraps, I believe it’s important to keep an understanding of how we got here, else hubris allows us to justify basically any atrocity.

I dislike the belief that human life is worth more than any other animal.

Even if we’re going to argue that, because of intellect or the ability to grasp out own existence or whatever arbitrary philosophical reason we’fe going to come up it, a human life is in general more valuable than that of a cats life, my “worst enemy” would have to be someone so morally corrupt that removing them from the world would make it a better place. This makes is a very pointless question.

A stranger is more of a real discussion. The stranger is enough of an unknown factor that I think I could assume that allowing them to die is likely to have a worse impact on the world, so it makes sense to save them. I certainly wouldn’t be able to say so with enough certainty to fault anyone for disagreeing with me, though.

The Monty Hall problem is not a paradox, and I’m hesitant to call it a conundrum. It has a very simple solution. The “point” of it is that people inherently don’t like that solution because it challenges their instinct to stick with their first choice.

On the contrary, I suspect they don’t port their games to PC because they don’t think they compete with PC.

That might change with the prevalence of the Steam Deck and other gaming targeted handheld PCs.

The groups and individuals who push gender reassignment on children in our schools, and anyone else who is trying to normalize behavior that shouldn’t be tolerated, is unacceptable in my mind," Woods said in a statement.

You know, I can’t help but agree.

Watching Conservatives assign children gender based on their sex when they’re too young to understand what is being done to them is disgusting, and we shouldn’t be tolerating the normalization of disgusting, volatile, and hateful behaviour like that of the senator’s.

Jesus fucking christ. Is this a real opinion? Like, not only is this the thought that came to your mind, but after going through the cognitive filter, you decided this is both an accurate and acceptable thing to say?

Reconsider your values and the harm/benefits they bring. You need help.

Well, I do at least believe she has a PHD in bullshit. She spews so much every single day, that she must truly be a professional in the field.

Link asks me to create an account on their instance? Thought you might like to know, OP.