Correct assessment. Absolutism in political systems is unproductive and leads to poor outcomes.

I am familiar with marxist theory. The problems lie in what you just said. As Marx said, it is the natural progression of a society that has progressed through the stages of capitalism and entered post-scarcity. People who advocate for other channels of achieving communism are misguided, as post scarcity is a pretty hard requirement and a lack of that aspect opens the mechanisms of resource allocation up to exploitation. And unless you can somehow stop shitheads from being born, someone is going to be enough of one to take advantage.

Even the OG natural progression of society version of communism has issues. For one, you still have the shithead human problem. There’s always going to be people out there who want it all, and they’ll exploit whatever they can to get it. Communism, being stateless, doesn’t have particularly good mechanisms for dealing with that.

Communism is an definitely an ideology. Literally first sentence from Wikipedia: “Communism […] is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology…”

But yeah, it’s kinda suspicious that every nation scale attempt at communism has ended in failure or a system that is decidedly not communist, whether through internal strife or external influence.

Hint: communism doesn’t work in practice on scales the size of nations. The ideology is too fragile and susceptible to corruption and outside influence and you end up with shit like this.

Before anyone says “it’s not real communism” that is the point. It’s useless if it’s too weak against other ideologies to be properly implemented.

Buttons and dials aren’t cheap. Even in economy cars it probably costs the manufacturer a few bucks for each one, accounting for the switch itself and all the trim that goes with it.

It only takes a handful to outweigh the cost of the typical LCDs used in car systems.

From what OP wrote, they aren’t total strangers given he knows she likes comics. He sounds fairly young so I’m guessing she’s in his social circle or someone from school. If they were total strangers or just met for the first time, then yeah I’d say it would be a good idea to strike up a casual conversation or two before asking them out. You just really don’t want to develop strong feelings for them before you ask them out. It’s a recipe for pain if she says no, and can make things pretty awkward if they’re going to have to keep seeing each other regularly.

It’s a good idea. You may want to plan a second activity like lunch or a walk in the park as well.

And just be direct. Something like “Hey, do you want to go on a date with me? We can grab something to eat and go to the comic store.”

If she says no, don’t push it. Just say okay and wish them well.

I too was terrible at talking to girls. I still am but my girlfriend doesn’t seem to mind lol

Whatever you do, just don’t try any pickup artist or smooth talking tactics. It’s gross and cringey, doubly so if you don’t have the confidence to pull it off.

I would also disagree with a lot of the other comments, if you want to date this person, make it clear you want a date. Don’t try to do the be friends then turn it romantic thing. It can work but not when you already know you want to date them.

Nixos is great, but unfortunately I can’t use it at work. I have migrated my home server infra to it though and plan to migrate my desktop the next time I have a free evening.

Why ansible? It’s the best tool I know of for configuring systems when tyou can’t build a premade image. I’ve tried puppet and chef but really like not needing any agent on the target system despite the pain of YAML syntax.

Most importantly, this stance doesn’t piss off AIPAC. If you ever want the overarching position of the us govt on Israel to change, you need to do something about AIPAC. They hold enormous lobbying power and will put it behind your opponents if you don’t support Israel.

There was a whole fiasco a while back where Juul got in trouble for marketing to teens. Not explicitly, but if you had seen what ads they were pushing it was obvious they knew it would be pulling in young people.

The answer to that though is of course tighter marketing regulations, not product bans. Banning any type of vape is an absolutely laughable proposition as long as ciggies are still legal.

OSMC makes some good Kodi boxes under the Vero name if you don’t need proprietary streaming services. I use the jellyfin plugin to read from my JF server, works great. Supports 4k, HDR, audio passthrough, many codecs, all the good stuff.

Between that and my PS5 it covers all the bases

It’s true, but some people go way too far with it. All it means is that people of West African descent tend to have more fast twitch muscle fibers. You could be white as sour cream and get lucky with your genetics and end up the same way. It’s having those muscle fibers that’s the advantage, not having west african heritage. In sports like basketball or sprinting where fast twitch fibers are a big advantage, you tend to see populations of people who are predisposed to that getting over-represented.

While there is no extra muscle, it is factually true that people of West African descent tend to have more fast twitch muscle fibers which is a pretty big advantage in many sports.

This is likely why the myth of the extra muscle originated.

Sorry bud, best I can do is ban suppressors and shotgun pistol grips. At least they won’t be able to shoot you ergonomically.