Then again, I never saw a 6 pack of large bottles of coke until I came to Norway, where every grocery store seems to sell 6 packs of the 1.5 liter bottles, so Europeans are not exactly without their own Coca Cola habits to support.

Meanwhile, I just passed over Europe’s flyover countries yesterday.

One thing many people have surprisingly low comprehension of is that people ≠ government.

Regular Israeli civilians did not partake in the war, did not cause the apartheid, and did not steal the land. They were born there, or went there on a promise of entering a friendly Jewish community - not of murdering people.

People defending this have a surprisingly low comprehension of the fact that Israelis, generally speaking, are literate and educated enough to be aware of the fact that most of the “Oh, we’re just a nice friendly Jewish community” is a lie and their taxes and labor will go towards supporting this stuff. Israelis are not stupid people, they are not incapable of accessing news and information from non-Israeli sources. The longer Israel continues to be such a predatory, imperial state, the less sympathy I have for the civilian population that says “Oh, I don’t actually support this, but my mom and dad live here and won’t move, so I have to stay here.” Well, fuck your mom and dad, and fuck you too if that applies to you. At this point, I only have sympathy for the small portion of the population who are either actively opposing this regime from within, or who are planning on leaving and are still in the process of finalizing their departure.

This is catastrophic when it happens to Palestinians, and not much better should it happen to Israelis.

Considering that the longer we avoid this for the Israelis, more of their neighboring countries are going to experience it, I will once again be unequivocal in saying, screw the Israelis in that case. I would much prefer that literally every resident of Israel gets told to screw off back to where they came from, rather than to see the genocide and displacement of the Palestinians be expanded to the Syrians, Lebanese and other neighboring nations, like Israel has already signaled it’s intent to do.

My sympathy for the Israeli people is directly proportional to their opposition to the actions of the Israeli government, which seems unlikely to change much, considering that this is just the continuation of decades of Israeli policy, rather than some exceptional state that only emerged because they were attacked once by Hamas. Contrary to what Israeli propaganda would have us believe, this isn’t something special that is only happening because the Israelis were shocked by one particular attack.

Because you can improve and refine your technique. For example, I no longer need to open up duckduckgo to figure out what that one command was that worked for me 6 months ago. Now, I just type away. ctrl-r, ffmpeg, and bam, right there in my shell history, all I need to do is change the inputs and outputs.

Firefox is just the browser, Mozilla is the organization constantly wasting money on features Firefox’s users are actively hostile to in a bid to tempt away people already using Chrome. Not the OP, but I’d be down to donate to Firefox’s development directly, but I wouldn’t want to make a donation to Mozilla hoping it would go toward Firefox, only to find out they took my money to build some new LLM integration that nobody asked for, only to sit unused for years before being quietly shuttered in favor of the new tech buzzword of the day.

How did has that big picture thinking work out for them? Considering they couldn’t take the presidency or either chamber of Congress, it doesn’t look like it’s worked so swell. Egads, could it be that the holy DNC has screwed up and it’s their fault? Heavens, no, it must be the ignorant peasants, too feeble of mind to understand the profound strategems of the DNC.

Eh, I’m sure they’ll be back to have this same conversation again in a couple years when the DNC pushes another candidate to drag the party further right and then blames leftists not voting for the candidate who delivers none of what the democratic base asks for for their loss that go of it, too. Clearly, years out from a primary is not the time to criticize the party either, I must just want Trump or his appointed successor to run away with it, again.

I’m sorry to learn your inability to parse meaning from text extends to even text you yourself wrote. Maybe you should seek treatment.

The text you quoted essentially absolves the Democrats and DNC of all responsibility, placing the onus on leftists to either put together someone with enough money and backing to displace the entrenched political parties who dominate our politics, or shut up and take whatever is offered by the DNC lest they become the new whipping boy, yet again. You’re already gearing up to blame leftists for the DNC tossing the next election, and you don’t even know who their candidates will be, or what platform they will run on. 2028 could be the corpse of Nancy Pelosi running on how mean people are to Israel, and shouldn’t we let them just massacre a bit more to vent some stress, and you’ve already laid the groundwork to blame leftists if they don’t fall in line to vote for the DNC with your asinine “flip” or the original image, which conveniently absolves the DNC of any responsibility for their own repeated failures to win elections.

No, you want to play this dumb game of Schröndinger’s leftists, where we are simultaneously a group too small to merit making any concessions to, yet also such a massive force that our not voting for Dems apparently decides elections all on their own, thus fair grounds to single out for extra scolding this go around of it. I’m just pointing out the DNC leadership is suspiciously holding pistols of the same caliber as the weapons that put those nice holes in their feet. We got here with them insisting they know what their constituents really want better than even the constituents themselves do, and it worked out swimmingly for them the last go of it.

I’m calling you out specifically for engaging in such stupid and disingenuous activity with your nonsensical flip. The DNC are not the last bastion of political genius in this country, and managing to lose the last election should be an indictment of their strategies and platforms employed. Going to the right to become the GOP-lite didn’t work, so obviously, the solution is to browbeat leftists and whip out some non sequitur about them raising their own candidate with the funds to beat the entrenched political establishment, rather than maybe considering for even a fraction of a second that the DNC’s own strategies and their tendency to cave and give the GOP everything they want on a platter while also gaslighting constituents about key factors like how well the economy is doing might have a tiny bit to do with their inability to win elections or get policy pushed through.

But yes, it’s the leftist who have ruined everything by not voting for Kamala last go of it. Just a thought, but if any single group is so powerful as to singlehandedly decide the outcome of national elections like the blue MAGA brigade has been whining about leftists doing on here since the elections finished, wouldn’t it make a bit more sense to actually listen to those people and throw them a bone on occasion? But no, it’s clearly the leftists fault for not waiting their turn when Kamala had seniority in the party, and they need to be punished and ridiculed further, even if it costs the Democrats more elections.

Ah, yes, the DNC, famous for having worked out so well in steering the party away from being nigh-indistinguishable from their main opposition. An excellent position from which to mock those dissatisfied with, let me check my notes, ah yes, how the DNC itself shat the bed in the last elections.

It could also have something to do with the fact that, for a 20 year old person, none of the games in the series that have come out during their lifetime have been the fan favorites. Even amongst die-hard Final Fantasy fans, you don’t get people losing their minds over FF XIII the way they do for VI, VII, IX, or X. For most of the recent games, the most effusive praise I’ll hear for them is that they aren’t that bad once you get used to the systems and figure out how the game works.

The N64 beat the PS1 to the joystick by two years, a

It came out about a year and half after the N64. The N64 June 23rd 1996, and all other markets saw a later release. The first DualShock was released in November 1997. and I would say the extra time to reflect and refine the design was well worth it, and something Nintendo should have considered as well.

Being first to the market with a new concept isn’t always great if it means you rush a subpar product out the door to try and beat the competition to it.

It’s not just Zoomers, I grew up when the big systems were PSX and N64. I thought it then, and it still strikes me as valid, that controller looks as though it were designed by some entity entirely unfamiliar with human anatomy. The fact that you could figure out what they intended is ultimately irrelevant as to whether or not it was a good design. The dual shock came out a year after the N64, with a much more comfortable to use anh intuitive design, and I think it’s telling that pretty much every major console since has used a controller that takes far more after the Dual Shock design in terms of placement and orientation of the joysticks in respect to other buttons.

I don’t think they are misrepresenting it. Between the NY State Lotto, Powerball and Mega Millions, the state lotto has the lowest estimated cash payout post-tax, and it’s still $1.6 million prize. You might be priced out of Chelsea and Soho, but there are plenty of decent enough neighborhoods in the outer boroughs where you can find an apartment for $750,000. The Powerball is the next smallest pot, with an estimated lump sum payment of $29.4 million, which would certainly let you buy an apartment just about anywhere in NYC you wanted, and still have plenty left over for living expenses to not have to work again.

Even then, the NY State Lotto has a smaller jackpot than typical at the moment, considering the average jackpot is $10.26 million, according to the state’s website. So, at least in this case, the NY State Lotto still offers one a feasible, if not reasonable, path to homeownership, while the Korean Lotto doesn’t offer that with its average jackpot for those who live in Seoul.

For Spanish, at least, your ears deceive you. It’s /meɾˈsedes/ in the vast majority of the Spanish speaking world, and /meɾˈθedes/ for large parts of Spain. All 3 ‘e’ sounds are identical.

Spanish can be weird and nonsensical at times, but it’s mostly counterintuitive grammatical rules. Things like “antes de que” having to be followed by the subjunctive, even in the past tense when you’re speaking of an event you know for certain occurred as you’re saying. The relationship between phonology and orthography in English is just a mess that’s gone and contaminated this one.

I can’t really answer for anything other than ebikes, but that’s mostly because ebikes have attracted the same group of inconsiderate assholes that dirtbikes and quads in urban areas have attracted in the past. I’m sure there are plenty of people on ebikes that just ride them around as they’re meant to, and I’m all for using them for replacing cars and stuff for commutes. But if you ask me what I think of them, the first things that come to mind are assholes riding them at high speeds in the dark with no lights, cutting through grass, trails and anything else in the parks in my city and nearly running people down. Or people whipping around corners on crowded sidewalks on them. Or delivery drivers running red lights on them and taking people out in crosswalks that had the right of way.

None of these things are the fault of ebikes themselves, but when a huge portion of the ridership that someone comes in contact with consist of either inconsiderate assholes or desperate people whose livelihoods are determined by inconsiderate assholes, it shouldn’t be a shocker that it leads to an overall negative impression of people using them.

Depending on the state, you could also easily record the calls for documentation. Look up state laws, and if you happen to be in a one party consent state, have at it with the phone calls, too.

Yeah, and you get all sorts of weird pronoun use in Brazil, anyway, once you branch off from formal speech. I’ve heard people using tu with the você conjugations, people trying to act like gangsters using nós instead of a gente, Brazil is a weird place. On the plus side, it makes it a bit easier for non-natives, since you can mess up most things in terms of pronunciation and conjugations, and still find someone that will go “Ai, meu deus, mas você fala igual às pessoas da minha cidade.”

I would think this needs the regional classification. There are big chunks of Brazil where tu may as well not exist as a pronoun. I also wouldn’t necessarily say that addressing someone by their name would be universally taken as a sign of respect. Plenty of people will just use names like that in informal speech, like “Você não vai acreditar o que falou o João ontem.”

For Spanish, I pretty much only use it with customers at work, and nice, elderly people. I guess I would use it if I were in a court for something in Spanish, but otherwise, I don’t really use it at all.