I don’t hate income tax. But from my personal experience, when I was a young lad with no political leaning, seeing a quarter of my first paycheck just… disappear into the void (what I thought back then) definitely made me feel something not great

I mean right now I can see that an income tax system is at the very least a “necessary evil”, but I could also see how ppl without a fuller perspective of things might interpret this as almost theft (the evil guvunment stole muh money!!!)

Free rent/mortgage if basic necessities are allowed. If not… a Michelin Inspector permit (and associated training courses), I do like some good culinary experiences

Nothing, and it’s not because I don’t play mobile games. I have a GrapheneOS phone that is so insulated from modern technology that it can barely run Uber/Lyft… so I keep games on my computers and tablets. Me having a bunch of gadgets (I have a Steam Deck and a dedicated tablet for mobile games) helps too

And… speaking of this topic. I am slightly competitive on a mobile gacha game at the moment; almost no serious players for these “mobile game” play on phone because screen too small, so they end up using the PC clients anyway…

Got a second-hand Walmart folding table + chair set at the beginning of my PhD, I think the entire set was like $15 or $20; it was the only furniture I had that lasted my entire grad school

…are we describing the same restaurants? Unironically all the restaurants I go to generate less waste than me cooking at home lol…

As in, every time I go to a restaurant they would always bring in washable dishes/utensils, and I assume they would probably have to fill the dishwashers to the brim (in contrast to me living alone & only filling up half each time). The one time I ordered a takeout, the restaurant put all the food in insanely high-quality takeout boxes that were freezer and microwave friendly, I used them for meal prep for a full year…

Granted these are fine dining and all cost a fortune. I guess fast food/takeouts do describe that a bit better

The worshipping of the self-made man and entrepreneurship in popular American culture

I think I was just too young and fashionable, maybe I was one of those guys that saw themselves as a “temporarily embarrassed billionaire”… then got old enough to see through the nonsense

I believe no one else mentioned this but… China is a case study of why this is a terrible idea

The entire PRC uses the same time zone, even though in any other parts of the world, China should have been split to at least 3 different timezones

It is very disorienting to try and go for breakfast in Tibet at 9 am to find that nothing is open and the sun is just out… So yeah. Imagine if this is extended to 12-hr differences

Wikipedia has a nice summary of this

• Strength 6
• Dexterity 6
• Constitution 2
• Intelligence 20
• Wisdom 16
• Charisma 2

I’d wish to reroll my stats or at least try a different build

Yup I was referring to Sinder

I only really watch clips so I wasn’t that personally invested in the drama itself (other than finding it intriguing). But it did hit a bit too close to home since my boss was almost exactly like that so…

Try to use some type of boiling water technique to invent drinkable sanitary drinking water that doesn’t get me drunk (might not be necessary in some parts of Asia)

Most parts of the world that is not North America: try to convince some wealthy persons and bar owners to sponsor me to getting a bunch of bread molds and rats/mice, possibly even pigs, to conduct antibiotics and vaccine research, otherwise I might die from random sources…

Not sure if I could reasonably do those given my limited biology knowledge, but I guess they are worth trying. Besides that I’d just try to be less blunt/offensive so I don’t get sent to jail and try to live my best life I guess

Option 2

Not that I dislike 1, but between me being on the spectrum and having experience living alone in a foreign country w/o family for close to 10 years (and literally could only talk with family using video chats), I think I would be much more competent than the average person on living in the latter… Which also helps free out more space for ppl in option 1

Bear, but I think it’s because gorillas are known to be peaceful and will probably run away from conflict

If it is a fight to the death… Idk I think with how physics works it might be quite even?

My interpretation is that visitors don’t have specific rights to criticize a government per-se. However! In most non-authoritarian countries, everyone has the unequivocal rights to criticize a government as long as they are not intending on disobeying other harassment/discrimination laws, regardless of their status. Since visitors are also included in “everyone”, they can criticize a government too

Of course this only applies to non-authoritarian countries. Authoritarian countries don’t have that right even for their citizens, so visitors are not excluded either

(I hate where this train of thought is going but whatever…)

I just thought it’s more of an issue of language/expression than anything… Methinks the concept of “leasing/renting” for an indefinite amount of time might be quite new in human history, so maybe we just don’t have a better word for it

Case in point… From a pure technical standpoint, I thought a game I purchased on Steam or an audiobook from Amazon is technically “leased indefinitely with no additional fees”, but doesn’t the lack of additional fees make it equivalent to owning something?

And as otherwise pointed out, under capitalist systems you can literally own a home, but would still have to pay taxes to pay for maintenance of publicly shared resources… so at what time should we call it “leased” instead

Removed by mod

A carpet cleaner. I had to prepare a previous apartment for showing (it’s a long story) & there was quite a bit of dust on the carpet

Could just be I’m stupid, but I was not prepared for how involved such a machine is… to be fair it is meant for professional use, so I was probably just not properly trained for it

• What led to the Haymarket Massacre, which might have been the main catalyst behind the 8-hour workday… So I cannot hate it out of principle
• Seems reasonable but I don’t know how to actually implement it
• For some reason is more associated with Anarcho-Capitalism rather than the other variants, which I thought was… Interesting

Technically my primary computer activities are gaming, but these days I game exclusively on the Steam Deck or the tablet (for mobile games)…

My most speced-out computer was actually purchased for work related reasons. I wanted a decent GPU because I thought I’d be working in deep learning. Well current job doesn’t require training models and I was required to use a dedicated work laptop so… This high-spec one I mainly use for just about everything else other than gaming

Not great… I’m not a US citizen yet so voting isn’t possible. Only thing I could do is vote with my feet… so I moved out of Texas for good earlier this year. I think my current location is as safe as it gets in regards to avoiding political violence (since I’m not exactly in a group that the right isn’t threatening) so there’s that

Other than that? Nothing… If the worst happens I’ll just hole-up in the building and ask my boss for permission to work from home

Not a perfectly relevant xkcd but

(From https://what-if.xkcd.com/21/)