Looking at this with adult eyes, no I don’t think you’re a jerk. It sounds like you’re trying help him see the reality of the situation before it causes him any undue emotional (or financial) suffering. It’s not, however, very hard to imagine how from his point of view he might feel like you’re being jerk, or maybe a bit hypocritical.

Is there any way you can get him playing with kids who are good enough to go pro? If he can start playing against people who genuinely have the goods, it’s probably not going to take him very long to figure out for himself whether he can keep up or not. And that way you don’t have to set yourself up as the bad guy as much, and you can play a more supportive role and be there to guide him to an alternative path once he gets sick of the other kids running circles around him. At least that’s how it worked for the couple of kids I knew growing up who were good enough at basketball or American football that they really thought they could go pro. It was playing against people who were the real deal that made them realize they didn’t have the shot they thought they did. It was pretty obvious that these other kids had something extra, and were playing on a level my friends felt they were probably never going to reach.

Not off the top of my head, but the paint color is called “TV Yellow.”

Those old black and white television cameras had a lot of limitations. For instance, things that were white and glossy would cause an extra-bright flare effect that would leave trails across the screen whenever it moved, and it was even worse on video. Guitar companies had to invent a brand new shade of yellow for musicians who performed on TV that still looked white on camera, but didn’t light up like a road flare under the studio lights.

Which is a long way of saying that when it comes to those old cameras I would expect the light from a blowtorch to cause some weird artifacts.

Yeah, black weirdly tends to be easier to see in the dark than some other colors. It often ends up looking darker than the surrounding darkness. Slightly lighter colors like brown and gray don’t contrast with the background as much and are much harder to pick out in the dark. People who have owned a black dog and a brown dog at the same time will have probably noticed that effect. At least that’s where I noticed it.

He’s on several episodes playing that character.

Nana Visitor also has a guest appearance on that show.

Definitely the Internet’s superior source ofl Star Trek memes.

Great Britain is the big island of the UK which contains England, Scotland, and Wales. The United Kingdom is Great Britain plus the six counties of Northern Ireland, The Isle of Man, and (I think) some of the islands in the English Channel.

A Briton is a person from Britain.

IDK, man. Canada be weird sometimes.

Yes, it’s its own country.

Canada, along with Australia and a bunch of other former colonies, belong to what’s known as the Commonwealth, of which the British monarch is the head. It’s basically an association of countries that used to be ruled by Britain, but Britain no longer has a say in their laws or how they’re governed.

Australia didn’t have a revolution. Australian independence was a long process that lasted from 1901 to 1986. You may want to check the “The steps to full sovereignty” section of the “History of Australia” wikipedia article.

No, Britain is not all the same country. As previously stated, the island of the Britain is England, Scotland, and Wales, which are separate countries, but members of the United Kingdom, and are governed by the UK Parliament. The six Irish counties that make up Northern Ireland is still part of the UK. The rest of the Ireland, known as The Republic of Ireland, is very much not part of the UK. They did have a revolution, and won independence in 1922.

The frustrating thing is that Trump didn’t even get more votes this election than he did last election. There wasn’t a bunch of new Trump voters that came out of the woodwork and turned the tide. He was absolutely beatable. He only won because 15 million of the people who voted for Biden last election just didn’t bother this time.

In my state (Colorado) early voting works exactly like regular voting, just, you know, earlier. Registered voters get their ballots automatically sent to them in the mail. You can return your ballot by mail, drop it off at an official drop box, drop it off at a voting location, or you can show up at one of the early voting locations in your county and vote in person the traditional way if you prefer that. Right now in my county there are six locations where you can do in-person early voting. There will be orders of magnitude more in-person voting locations open on the day of the election, but I think most people choose return their ballots by mail or drop box.

Every voting/counting location is staffed with a bipartisan team of election judges, and election observers. I believe the locations are run by paid county officials, but largely staffed by volunteers who have completed a training program. I’ve never heard of there being a shortage of volunteers

The voting drop boxes are big reinforced steel boxes which are securely anchored into concrete. You would need some seriously heavy duty cutting tools to get one open without the key. They are placed in front of city offices like City Hall, the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the city library. They’re usually in open high traffic areas, and are under 24/7 video surveillance. I believe they’re also emptied multiple times per day. I wouldn’t say they’re impossible to tamper with, but it would be extremely difficult to do so and get away with it. To my knowledge, so far nobody has tried. I’m not actually sure what it would really accomplish. I guess you could destroy ballots, but stuffing one with counterfeit ballots would probably be caught almost immediately.

There’s a pretty robust system in place to track who has cast a ballot, how, when, and where. If multiple ballots show up in the name of the same voter, that gets automatically flagged and triggers a fraud investigation. Also there’s signature verification system. Every ballot that’s returned by mail or drop box must be returned in its security envelope, which has the name of the voter and several unique QR and bar codes containing information tying that envelope to that specific voter. This envelope must be signed by the voter for the ballot to be counted. If the signature on the security envelope doesn’t match the signature on file, the ballot gets flagged for investigation, and doesn’t get counted until the voter can be contacted to verify it was them casting the ballot and not someone pretending to be them. Voter fraud is really pretty rare here, but it’s taken very seriously, and gets seriously investigated. When it does happen it’s usually someone trying to cast the ballot of a deceased spouse, or family member, and even that usually gets caught.

There are a lot of safeguards and redundancies in place here that make getting away with voter fraud extremely difficult, but lot of the reason why our system works as well as it does is that people genuinely care about their votes being fairly counted and so are willing to staff and fund the offices who investigate voting irregularities. Our voting system is considered kind of the gold standard for the United States, and I’m lucky to live in a place that has that. Voting systems in other parts of the US are unfortunately not run with the same vigilance or sense of equity.

Creating a need is not the same as creating a job.

Same for me too. Reddit, for all its other faults, is still just about the only place you can still get candid opinions on products in a place where it’s discussed by a large group with a deep knowledge base. Especially with niche things like fountain pens, goodyear-welted boots, and stuff like that.

Not sure how long that’s going to last though. The search engines are already hip to that trick, and even in just the last few months I’ve noticed a change in how many Reddit links I get vs product links when I add Reddit to my search query. Reddit is hip to it too, and with recently becoming a publicly traded corporation they’re probably going to wring every last cent out of that until every post mentioning a product is a bot-infested sewage fire like everything else.

And if you eat that, and then eat the right kind of flower… Holy crap, my dude, shit gets wild.

The privilege is being able to choose to eat that way out of a sense of morality or fashion rather for the reason that it’s literally all there is to eat. The privilege is being able to turn your nose up at perfectly edible food for no other reason than that it’s got a bit of egg, honey, or butter in it without having to worry about starving to death. The privilege is also having access to such an abundance and variety of food that you can maintain a vegan diet year round and not have to fear that you won’t meet all the calorie, protein, and vitamin requirements you need to stay alive and healthy while much of the world is in a constant struggle to scrape together enough calories of any kind to stay alive.

Way before that, actually. When I was a kid in the 80s they were about the same size as grade A large chicken eggs. They were already noticably smaller by 2007. Don’t even get me started on Doritos.

To quote a friend of mine who traveled to Australia recently, “I wouldn’t say Australia is the most racist country, but they are definitely the country that is the most comfortable with their racism.”

I live in Colorado, and hadn’t heard anything about this until now. So yeah, I’m thinking that move kind of backfired.

I was hoping it was going to be jaankenschnitzel.

Will never understand why people have such a hard on for him that they treat him like a god so their entire personality is based on him

It’s because they are cruel people. Trump, and people like him, give them permission to indulge their cruelty. They give them an avenue to lean into their worst, most hateful, instincts and still feel like a good and righteous person.

See, hateful racist pricks don’t view themselves as hateful racist pricks. They view themselves as sensible, rational people who see “what’s really going on.” When someone like Trump comes along and says, “No, you’re right. The Muslims are trying to force public schools to make your child pray to Allah. The Mexicans are flooding over the border to steal your job. The Jews are conspiring to replace good white people with dirty ‘woke’ minorities,” well, suddenly Trump is “making a lot of sense,” and “telling it like it is.”

Trump makes them feel good about being their worst selves. Trump lets them believe that anyone who questions their hateful worldview is just some libtard afflicted by the “woke mindvirus” and can be written off as subhuman and beneath contempt. He lets them think that maybe they’ll finally get to kill a few of them if he’s running the show. And because of all that he has earned their undying devotion.

All that trouble over maybe $10 worth of ammunition… You’d think they’d just quietly drop it in the trash or something. It’s not like it’s some kind of ultra-precious irreplaceable unobtanium or something.

Pyrophoric (adj) – Liable to ignite spontaneously on exposure to air.

Just in case you weren’t entirely sure what that word meant either.