Debbie*

Yeah, that's part of the reason why I just dealt with the pain whenever I was prescribed stuff like Vicodin. I don't want to risk it at all.

I've seen plenty of people who think they could take hard, addictive drugs and not get addicted, or that the addiction would be a small price to pay for the highs of the drug. Plenty of people have far too much self confidence for their small understanding of the situation. It's why drugs like heroin are still around; if everyone intrinsically understood that they're not worth it, they'd have disappeared a long time ago.

My wife and I usually plan big vacations about a year in advance so that we can follow flight prices and whatnot to get a good deal. We also book a few days at a cabin for our anniversary every year, so we just book the next year's reservation while we're there, since reservations can fill up even several months in advance.

Only planning a week in advance seems stressful to me - we planned a last-minute (for us) road trip vacation earlier this month for the long 4th of July weekend, and it was tough to find cheap places to stay that weren't super grungy.

From what I can understand, they think of freedom not as the ability to do what they want, but as the inability for others to stop them from doing something, so instead of focusing on doing what makes them happy, they focus on the things people dislike about them, making sure that they never feel forced to stop, as that would make them less free.

The very belief that the decisions of the powerful few are a reflection of the opinions of the people as a whole is how we got ourselves into this mess in the first place...

Does Look Mum No Computer count?

Yeah, it's specifically because they're trying to increase profits for so long that they need to get so incredibly meticulous and complicated with how their business works. Companies that just try to earnestly provide a desired service to people who need it in their area of operation don't need to worry about such details.

Now I'm picturing a cop trying to walk all confidently out of his squad car during a traffic stop while wearing a frilly maid outfit.

Revolution will either come, killing most of us, or the train of rampant capitalistic destruction will continue on, killing all of us. We're not close enough to immediate death for most of us to view revolution as an acceptable answer yet, but I have no doubt that in a few decades, when the young adults of that time look back on the current times and think "they had it so easy," the risk associated with an uprising will seem much less daunting when compared to the risk of simply living within whatever jumbled-together scraps of a system we'll have left by then.

Revolution isn't a solution that any sane person gets excited for; it all but guarantees a short life full of suffering for the vast majority of people, but it's a solution that is chosen when the alternative is guaranteed suffering for everyone outside of the upper class. It's the last resort used when the best hope you have for the future is to fight for the chance that a few people make it to peaceful times, because you don't see any other way for anyone to get there by working within the system.

Voting is important, yes; we get the best chance to make it to a revolution by voting blue, slowing down capitalism's destruction of the world, but so long as each election is populated by 2 candidates proudly bought out by corporations who don't give a shit about the world, there will be no viable option within the system to actually stop its destruction. That requires actually changing the system through uprising.

That's exactly it. Determinism is the idea that all the various forces of the universe impact things in such a way that, however things play out, it's how they were always going to.

Imagine a time in your life when you made an impactful decision, and imagine you can go back in time to that moment. However, when you do everything is the same - you're thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same feelings. You've had all the same experiences, and are in the same frame of mind. Every single atom in the entire universe is exactly the same as it was in that moment. Would you ever actually make a different decision from what you had in that moment?

Determinism says no - if you had the capability to know the exact state of the universe in a single moment, you'd be able to tell what the next moment's state would be, and on and on to the end of the universe, since it's all nothing more than a single incredibly complicated chain reaction.

And he's got 38 degrees in fucking.

I didn't really see people mentioning that "would" can still be used past-tense outside of "would have," though it's not in the same way - you use it when talking about something that happened multiple times in the past. For example, "When I was a kid my friends and I would go to the pool every Saturday," which means that, as children, my friends and I did visit the pool every Saturday.

Now this is my kind of meme; it actually gets into the details and complexity of the scenario it's discussing - while still making fun of it and keeping the meme feel - rather than just simplifying it to the point where it looks straightforward, killing most of the important discussion.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see most of the "both sides are bad" posts as a push toward the center, I see them as a "both sides are too far right" telling people to vote blue now, but to also fight for a far more left-leaning candidate by the next election, since we shouldn't be settling for someone like Biden long-term.

Another issue is that information is easy enough to find that people don't bother to remember things as much anymore, since they can just look up the majority of stuff on Wikipedia or something if they ever need to know it. It leads to people having a smaller pool of background knowledge, which makes them easier to mislead.

I just buy 50 lbs of all-purpose flour, throw it in a big, wheeled food-safe container marketed for dog food, and use it for nearly everything that calls for flour. I've never had a problem with my breads or cakes while using all-purpose flour. I still need gluten-free flour and some specialty stuff like corn flour and almond flour for some recipes, but those come in nice, resealable bags.

Why the long face?

Microsoft was screwing over consumers before Google was even founded.

That's the thing. We think 2 steps forward 1 step back is making progress, but the steps forward are tiny, and the steps back are huge.