$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.

“Kill all men” - Lauded, celebrated, even encouraged.

“Kill all women” - Misogyny and hatred of the highest order.

In a fair and equitable society, you cannot have both. Either both are lauded and celebrated, or both are examples of gender bigotry and hate that should be widely repulsive and actively shamed.

The fact that the two above exist in society, exactly as I have characterized them, demonstrates the massive, pervasive, cancerous, and corrosive anti-male gender bigotry that has already infested our society at all levels.

Sure, a tiny percentage of men are still “at the top”. Whoop-de-doo. Are we to judge and persecute the lower 98% by the status of the top 2%?

And sure, a tiny percentage of men still behave badly. Again: whoop-de-doo. Are we to judge and persecute the vast majority of well-behaving men, and treat them as if THEY were behaving in the exact same way, based on that vocal minority?

This is how you push men away, to isolate and to alienate them.

You cannot treat all men as a monolith of evil, responsible for everything and anything that ills not just women, but society as a whole. You cannot punish men for every perceived benefit of “teh patriarchy”, especially when those men (most under 40) no longer receive any benefit whatsoever from said patriarchal structures. You cannot provide benefits and help and services to exclusively women, locking out male sufferers of those same systems, especially when women are no longer the majority of sufferers under those structures. You cannot give lopsided advantages to women, artificially raising them above men, in systems that are supposed to be merit-based or performance-based.

Otherwise, why call it “equality”, when it clearly isn’t in any way, shape, or form?

Look at both sides in the same light, with each as deserving the same rights and protections and responsibilities as the other, and the rightward-shift of men becomes blatantly reasonable and obviously expectant. Because the alt-right is the only group which is “giving” men anything to hope for, even though it is nothing more than empty promises and snake-oil salesmanship; a bait-and-switch meant to use men as pawns in a class war (Parasite Class vs working class) that will ultimately hurt them far more than help.

Final note: I have absolutely no problem with the vast majority of the things female supremacists are demanding. My problem is that they are wanting only women to benefit from these things, and are doing their best to deny men the same benefits at every turn. Which is why I take deep offense at anyone calling me a “feminist” – to me, that is a slur, an anti-male pejorative. I am an egalitarianist, first and foremost. Equality of outcome and equality of opportunities is the foundation of where I stand. And I will call out hypocrisies and inequalities where and when I see them.

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The Parasite Class. That’s what happened. These are people for whom any amount of wealth will never be enough. So they extract it out of the working class by cramming down wages, making all aspects of life precarious, and raising prices.

We all suffer and the 0.1% accumulare more wealth than they could possibly spend in a thousand lifetimes.

North Korea calls itself socialist

They also call themselves democratic.

Are they? Would you call their system democratic? No?

Why one and not the other?

It’s not laziness.

Most people are too resource poor, too time poor, and too exhausted from being violently forced to be profitable to someone else, to have the headspace to do what you suggest.

You can indeed spend every waking moment optimizing your life, but then you would be just one person among tens of thousands who could be successful doing that. 99.999% of people would utterly burn out trying to achieve the same. They don’t have the underlying intergenerational wealth that would give them the ability to do so, or don’t have the free time to do so, or have too high of a cognitive load just putting one foot in front of the other to do so. Vanishingly few people are “just too lazy” to do so, and of those who are, they are the ones who can monetarily afford to be lazy.

It’s why poverty is fiendishly expensive, and why it is almost impossible to escape poverty

OMG, like North Korea isn’t bad, it’s just the US that “doesn’t like them”.

You’re linking North Korea to the conversation about communism, when that alone is a fatal error: NK is equally as much communistic as they are democratic. As in, not in the least.

There has never been any kind of a long-term (5+ years) communist country on the planet. Prior power structures have always stepped in to decapitate communism in favour of a violently autocratic dictatorship much like a monarchy. What remained of communism was only ever kept as a thin veneer of legitimacy, much like a rotting Edgar suit.

religious beliefs aren’t considered mental illness

You’re right — it’s actually brain damage and cognitive impairment.

In a fair and equitable world, communities like this would not exist, because these people would not have that wealth.

All extreme wealth has been stolen from the working class. That’s the only way it can be obtained.

I make a meaty spaghetti sauce with various spices, but I cook the ground beef in the pan at a low simmer for about 2hrs before I even add the tomato sauce, in order for those spices to penetrate the meat.

I call it a nuclear time bomb because it tastes totally normal - very delicious, even - but about 10-15 minutes in, you are reaching for a hand towel to wipe away the sweat which is quite literally dripping off of you. And you have felt NONE of the hot spices on your tongue.

A much quicker dish involves Cæsar dressing, which I add copious amounts of garlic powder to (4-5 tablespoons), then prevent the dressing from solidifying by adding lemon juice, then wrapping up with freshly ground garlic. As in, a paste, *not chopped or minced._ For a salad using a single head of Romaine, the paste alone uses 15-30 garlic cloves depending on size. And this is on top of the garlic powder. Tastes amazing, but it can get garlicky enough to be barely edible. Think the same kind of burn when chewing down on a fresh raw clove. I sometimes get an “addictive overwhelming thirst” for this garlicky dish that has me gorging on it almost exclusively for an entire week.

Now that is a real superpower.

I also manage to annoy TF out of my wife at being able to go from fully asleep to bouncing out of the bed like a piece of toast in under 10 seconds.

About the only thing that can impact this is severe sleep deficit, which - years ago - mean less than 3-4hrs in a night, but these days (in my sixth decade) means anything less than 5hrs of sleep in a night or less than 7 after multiple days of a sleep deficit.

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 think you are ascribing to an entire community that which only a few descend to.

I’ve been a mod on forums before, and my only concern was keeping the signal::noise ratio high. In that regard, new “I’ve got the same problem” posts made many months or years after the current thread had gotten wrapped up only increases the noise; a new thread is far more appropriate for the latecomer and anyone who replies to them than continuing to use the old thread.

The difference is temporal, and dependent on the activity level of the forum in question: highly active forums should see new threads spawned after only a few days or weeks, slow forums could see follow-up comments in the original thread still being appropriate many months or even years later.

Being a good mod isn’t about power or control, it is ensuring the forum operates as effectively as possible for it’s users. Sometimes that means spawning new threads, locking old ones, or even banning bad-faith or misbehaving users. Once you moderate, you discover very quickly that moderation is a highly grey zone, with surprisingly little black or white.

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.

Evil is as evil does.

Humanity would be infinitely better off if it was purged of all mythologies and superstitions.

This is the attitude that leads us to search results polluted with forum threads with bad, unchallengeable ideas (because they’re locked). Almost all web1 forum are becoming digital flotsam because of these bad moderator opinions.

I thing you replied to the wrong comment, buddy. Nothing in your comment makes any sense in the context of my comment that you replied to. Nowhere did I say anything about locking threads or moderation.