are we just amusing ourselves until death?

Yes. That’s arguably neither a good nor bad thing; a life with a prescribed meaning or prescribed expectations would be scary in a different way.

There’s been philosophers that got famous arguing it’s actually great and we should be excited, even, but “your mileage may vary”.

he idea of this came to me because I was pondering why people fight so hard to beat diseases and live a few more years. What are they planning to do? Why exert effort just to be here longer when you don’t have a reason?

There is a thing called quality-adjusted life years. To make decisions about certain things like transplants, and to measure the effectiveness of health policy, they absolutely will factor in how much time you’ll get from treatment and how much it’s worth living.

Nations like mine will also help you peace out gracefully.

Dope!

The kid won’t remember. That poor dad will never forget. Damn.

I’d take this over most of the stuff the guy with kidney problems mentioned, absolutely no question.

Man, you must really hate deep water for it to make this list.

Which was weird, because honestly that flattered the police in no way.

Yes, that’s a pretty famous moment for your parent’s lines to start coming out of your mouth. TBF the reaction to that seems to be immediate guilt and self-loathing more often than “they were right”.

This. This so hard.

Like, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, you’re working with only a little bit of data on a world filled with lies, which tends to beget bad ideas. And that’s not even getting into the non-rational drivers kids can have.

I’m guessing the average Lemming was a weird little nerd. I was.

If anything, my own parents had trouble recognising I actually still was a kid.

As I understand the headline, it could just as easily be someone in the prison that tampered with the data. That would be the simplest explanation, then.

After reading the article, it’s not even clear it was tampering, as opposed to conversion and compilation of the original file formats. And apparently, if the footage is what it appears to be, he actually did kill himself.

It truly is just a handful of unscrupulous, malignant narcissists that have ruined everything (including the planet) for everyone else.

No, that was a much larger group effort. You and me can’t wash our hands of it. Like, even if you ignore the majority of stuff they don’t own, we let them do that.

Okay, I’ll be a bit more direct. Go talk to the aliens about it, maybe they have time. I believe the hexbear way of saying that is “disengage”.

Huh. Is there a way I could have asked that without implying an answer, or a value judgement about the answer?

Like, if it was two hours on every trip I’d say it’s not worth the added safety, but a lot of driving tends to happen off of local streets anyway, so I was honestly wondering.

They had to explicitly exempt religious texts, lol.

From the article:

The plane’s fuel was tested and found to be of satisfactory quality,

I believe in conspiracies as a general concept, like the two guards, and I believe governments have classified programs. When it gets to a certain point where vast numbers of people are involved in covering up something huge perfectly, you run into the problem of everything being possible and nothing being falsifiable, though.

In practice, people don’t believe in conspiracy theories because they honestly assess it’s the neatest way to explain the world, it’s because they get emotional satisfaction out of the community and the feeling that they know something which other people don’t. There’s psychology literature about it and everything.

What I said is my goto answer when I suspect I’m about to be arguing about melting steel beams or whatever, because that’s just a waste of time.

Bitcoin specifically? No. It’s a janky prototype that should have been superseded a long time ago.

Crypto in general? Probably something. It’s good for buying and selling illegal things.

Well, I don’t see the government covering it up, and I don’t believe in conspiracy theories.

-5. I had one parent that was not great, and one that was a doormat. It wasn’t any of the usual suspects, and I would say that that parent is eccentric and oblivious more than a bad person, but in the end I think I came out with some trauma.

School was really hard early on (because I’m also weird), while the parental issues grew more severe later on.

For the Republicans, it’s either this guy or a recently promoted conspiracy influencer with random frat bros as staff. The Democrats will still manage to lose.

(This is my impression as a Canadian)