$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.

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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.

Well said. Then there is the entire ecosystem of programs and apps for which there is no real ability to install on Linux (and for which tools like Wine will either be buggy or even nonfunctional), and whose absence will just piss users off.

As much as I love Linux and BSD, it is really only for people who are either mentally geared to shift off of Windows or whose minimal needs won’t notice the difference; it is not a drop-in replacement for Windows.

For example, my octogenarian father has exactly such minimal needs except for one program: Quicken. Any bugs or issues running that as an installed desktop program on Linux would have him enraged and throwing the PC out the window. So he is still on Windows, and I am keeping my eyes open on how to properly neuter/excise Copilot once it drops.

So far tools like Win10Privacy have been exemplary in allowing me to rip all manner of spyware, adware, and annoyances out of Windows.

I’m sure that Copilot will meet the same fate with one external debloating utility of another. Even if I need to replace the Explorer-based shell with a third-party one.

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.

Welcome to climate change. This is just the tip of the iceberg: things are just going to continue getting worse and worse each and every year.

we have our share of crazies, but they’re a tiny proportion.

Canada shambles into chat, points depressingly at Pierre “PeePee” Polivere and our CPC and PPC parties, then walks back out shaking it’s head

The answer is always, without exception, going to be violence

I fear that you are correct. Unfortunately, conservatives are steeped in a culture of violence and violent preparation; anyone on the left automatically thinks the best of their fellow man. They aren’t going to be ready if conservatives trigger another civil war in America.

This is such an excellent and rational explanation. Thank you!

So how do we reprogram people to see hierarchies as evil and destructive outside of true crisis situations?

And conservatism is fundamentally hostile to democracy, as well. It gravitates naturally to oligopolies, monopolies, autocracies, dictatorships, and despotism.

I mean, just look at Trump and Project 2025, to say nothing of past conservative behaviour involving gerrymandering and other shenanigans.

What is the common thread that links almost all of these crazies? I mean, even more than religion.

Conservatism. Almost all of them vote for, or are elected representatives of, conservative parties.

And conservatism encourages divisiveness and bigotries like this. To be suspicious of and actively hate others, to find “evil” where none exist. To believe in falsehoods even when they have been demonstrably debunked.

Conservatism of all stripes is fundamentally evil. Conservatism is what will destroy civilization, and eventually, humanity.

the minute you add “Marxist” to that sentence everyone shuts their brain off because of over a century of red scare nonsense. As designed.

Which is a real shame, because collectivist systems are the only way we can survive long-term on this planet. Collectivist systems allow us to pool resources and consumption, allowing more people to subsist at the same level of comfort while using far less.

One of the biggest scams ever perpetrated on humanity (other than religion, that is) is the adoption of an economic system that demands infinite growth on a finite planet. In the real world, such as when looking at population dynamics, these systems always lead to catastrophic collapses that eviscerate that population and frequently produces long-term damage to the local ecosystem that prevents said population from easily recovering. Or recovering at all, if we’re talking about a species of megafauna (over 45Kg, on average).

Most megafauna that significantly overshoot go extinct, and humanity entered overshoot at the 2B population point early last century. With how we have damaged the ecosystem, the planet’s natural carrying capacity has probably declined to less than 1B humans. This is particularly concerning because any end-stage economic crash (via the chaotic weather of climate change) will lead to a population crash (with the failure of agriculture at scale and the international trade that supplies us with 90+% of all food), and will also destroy any ability to produce and maintain the technology that allows us to artificially exceed the planet’s carrying capacity via agriculture at scale. I would be very surprised if humanity still exceeds 2B people by the end of this century.

For Photoshop alternatives, I’d start with GIMP for photo editing

I have always felt that GIMP was the ultimate software Camel. As in, designed by a committee to include everything and the kitchen sink without any coherent UI/UX.

It’s the software industry’s 1965 Lada masquerading as a 2024 model.

If it wasn’t for Paint.NET still missing vectorized/sprite-based text (it instantly rasterizes text the moment focus leaves it), I don’t think I could ever use GIMP.

And what does that mean, you fill a document with feminist phrases and ctrl+v over every word ‘woman’ the word ‘man’? That is… wow, that is incredibly academic. I’m actually hit-stunned by how smart that is.

If that’s the best you can come up with, then you are just as bad as Ben Shapiro.

Ben Shapiro is a moron. And so is pretty much anyone who has ever punted the “alpha male” narrative.

What I do, exclusively, is listen to what “feminists” say, and compare it to not only reality, but also how any flip-side examples for men are perceived. From there it is clear that the ideology is one of gender supremacy. There is no other possible interpretation, because there is no equality in their objectives. Any “benefits” that men accrue from feminism are purely by happenstance and lucky accident, but the foundation and exclusive intent of any one incident has always been female-first and almost always to the intentional exclusion of men.