Only bet I ever won was the only one I ever really took, because I knew I couldn't lose. I was discussing Colombia with someone (we'd both been there) and they forgot Colombia has both an Atlantic and a Pacific coastline. We bet on it, and since I know world geography on the continental scale nearly by heart, I won the bet.

I wouldn't have even taken that bet if I had a 75% chance of winning, because I bet $100 but was broke. Never bet on even the slightest uncertainty if you can't afford to pay, it's not worth it. Fortunately, I'd been to both over both coasts of Colombia on planes, seen Colombia on all sorts of maps and globes, and reality is consistent enough that coastlines on a map don't change until the real world changes first plus a delay to update the maps, and internet failure would just mean the bet was off. I had basically no chance of failure and the guy would have been pretty patient in the 0.0000000~0001% chance a freak accident occurred.

Obviously nothing is guaranteed, but if your chance of winning is lower than your chance of dying or having your life permanently ruined if you lose, you're better off walking away. And that's why I never liked the Golden Saucer type games in Pokémon and Neopets, one spin really is just one spin for me, win or lose, because if I don't win the first time on a luck based "game" then I see it for what it is.... an obvious con.

Nothing, but it's three days after the 7th Anniversary of Trump's election, hence the anti-Christ thing. I doubt Jesus will rise, but three days is long enough to safely say November 9th meant nothing.

Also, no hard feelings on the "no one's going anywhere when they die". I have a slight, possibly deluded hope that the afterlife is a dream you never wake up from, but despite that I'm no Q-Anon style idiot and I don't have a reason to think anything is special about 2023/11/09, especially if nothing happens.

I'm just saying, this thing in Gaza has awfully strange timing. If things are as deterministic as scientific evidence generally points towards, I would think December would be a more apt time for tempers to flare in that region due to food prices and religious holidays.

But all that said, even if the world is going to end, just as you said it doesn't mean there's an afterlife. I was instead implying the more likely bad scenario; Wake me up in three (or five? I'm not oblivious to unfortunate implications) days unless we're all dead then.

As for Trump, I don't care if it was just mysticism, the title of the Anti-Christ is also symbolic; The kind of awful person who looks appealing to idiots that is willing to do anything including killing children by starvation to feel like they "won" and never, ever take any blame are exactly the kind of person that even (the historical, I did say this is about symbolism and not religion) Yeshua of Nazareth would likely have been strongly against.

In other words, the Antichrist is anyone who leads sheeple to the slaughter and eats their corpses (figuratively speaking) instead of guiding people to be saved from roasting in their own wool during the summer by shearing off the excess (metaphorically, but yes, PETA lied to you about sheep and wool). Regardless of what a person like that leads people away from (humility, patience, rationality, morality, things that were or are commonly associated with organized religion, even if rationality is gone from modern churchgoers), it's the promise of "be superior to people you hate like me!" that makes this so insidious.

I might be vengeful but it's personal, never bigoted or generalist. I don't want Israel's adult population dead. At all. Nor is it ideal. Nor should the Hamas suffer no consequences either. And the kids on both sides should be spared, they didn't start this. I feel that, even if it will never happen, an example has to be made and should be made of hypocrisy; you can't be a nation of Holocaust refugees if you yourselves are trying to exterminate the children of an entire group. Is it right? Hell no, I should be killed for suggesting it. Is it justice? No. Will it send a message that killing kids is NEVER acceptable by ANYONE? That's the intent. I don't know if it would work but I'm angry enough that I want to see it happen, and my only hope is if it does, it's quick and painless, for the sake of the adults who did no wrong.

Don't side with me on this. To say anything else in ending this off would make me no better that Trump, Putin, Stalin and Hitler. It's not right to stir up hate, I just hope justice will be served or that the world ends within 72 hours.

Yeah, if it's 50% then I'd take the bet but the game is never that generous. As they say, the house always wins.

I call it now, they won't stop until there's no one left.

Let me be clear; I'm no anti-semite or neo-nazi, and I am explicitly excluding their children because that was the worst part of the holocaust, but if they go that far I want to declare war on Israel and not stop until every adult in that country is dead. I'm fucking done with any pretense of mercy for child killers on both sides.

I would have been fine with horribly torturing the adult Hamas for what they did, but this is too far and it must be avenged. Fuck you if you still support either side of this conflict after what's happened.

That's it. Launch the fucking nukes, ALL OF THEM, EVERYWHERE, at the whole goddamn region. If neither side is going to spare each other's kids, I want that whole area fucking gone.

I know that won't happen so I'm going to fucking kill myself. I hate every last one of you, humanity is nothing more than spiteful monsters and I refuse to live in a world where my choices are comfortable misery and uncomfortable misery. Moving to the middle of nowhere is not my idea of "freedom".

Their kids didn't target that school. You know damn well I fucking didn't mean the Hamas' kids should die.

The terrorists in that case managed to outlast a billion/trillion $ anti-terrorism budget, I don't think the US had much negotiating power or a choice to not negotiate in that case. Ironic considering how many times that it's been the other way around.

YES, because OP is typing words that can be misconstrued as being a shill or a bigoted asshole. I'm smart enough to recognize it if you point it out, but I'm not fucking psychic, and I'm the kind of person who believes in dream prophesies so that just shows that neither potential delusion nor intelligence have anything to do with people misreading things online. It's just human and technical limitations, but your italics are clear so: if you don't want people to be annoyed at you, maybe respond without being condescending.

Ah. Alright, fair enough, thanks for correcting my mistake.

I want these "Hama's" bastards fucking DEAD. Do NOT target people's kids, end of story.

If that is gross revenue, I have bad news for the EU. "X" is, IIRC, operating in the red since Musk bought it.

Maniac (2023) is a series you might like. Despite the name, its more of a cassette futurism cyberpunk world with a scary amount of dystopian parallels to our own.

Oh so you admit you're a shill for bp or aramco. When it comes to shills, the first person to mention a brand name is the one getting paid.

I guess you've never heard of the beach with sand that is more radioactive than Fukushima and has been since long before nuclear energy or even nuclear weapons. People go there because the black sand is pretty and because it doesn't have enough ionizing (cancerous) radiation to hurt anyone, it's actually really popular.

Not all nuclear power plants are equal. Fukushima barely reached "level 8" on the danger level of nuclear accidents, which is the catch-all "really bad and off the charts" level. Even though Chernobyl was also "off the charts", the soviet nuclear program was also focused on using power plants to make weapon's grade plutonium and their design was flawed severely, so Chernobyl was and still is much, much worse.

Three Mile Island was a maintenance issue, and Fukushima was due to catastrophic damage, so what if we could build a nuclear plant that relied on something other than technology to prevent a meltdown?

Simple, gravity. Trains used to crash into disconnected carriages from other trains whose engineers never realized a coupler broke. Now, when a train starts, there's pressurized air in a hose running the length of a train and when it fails the air is released; that was the only thing keeping the brakes on every car _de_activated. So the train immediately comes to a halt. That's what an actual failsafe is, but nuclear plants currently in operation don't have that because they were built in the 1950s and 60s on the cheap.

Instead of air, an electromagnet in a NEW design keeps a seal at the bottom of the plant closed. If the electricity fails, the seal is opened by gravity. When the seal is open, the nuclear fuel is sent dropping into a cooling tank with enough water to keep them cooled off for 100 or more years, during a mere few months of which we can repair the minimal damage easily. Unfortunately, the design was held back for decades for numerous nontechnical reasons, and now the average person is too fucking terrified of past failures based on the lies of businessmen and the shortsightedness of Cold War paranoia to use something that actually works.

Huh, wasn't expecting the kid with a PC but they got that part right. In 1999 I was super into neopets.

That's definitely half my point, yes. You can't just shut off water to children like that's somehow okay, I'm pissed at Israel too. The kids in Palestine didn't kill the kids in that village, this is why even though I'm a very vengeful person, spite and "collateral damage" is not acceptable from anyone, myself included.

The US military has, in all likelihood, been already capable of this for the past 15-30 years. Google has no market other than the public, and there's no way to stop it from tagging rich people as "that asshole who owns what used to be twitter" but also the general public (us) would just end up flagging people we hate or envy or who we want revenge on to ruin people's reputations.

There is no upside for a tech like that in the hands of big money, not even for big money; done the way Google would do it, it would fracture society like nothing before it and that includes utterly destroying the economy before leading to some sort of nuclear exchange.

I would sign up for this if it's opt-in and either decentralized or local storage-based. Otherwise I hope the fuckers who would ruin this idea for greed crash and burn.

But I remember we did it. "Okay, Brian, the record's five. The record's five... Okay ready? Go!"

No, but Israeli soldiers are known for mostly being deployed against civilians when someone thinks massacres are somehow okay.

I'm not on Israel's side on this one, but fuck the Hamas too.