Discord has individual volume adjustor per person in chat. With my friends turning me up and me turning my mic volume setting in Windows all the way up, I’m able to talk quietly enough in the next room without bothering my wife if she’s sleeping. We also have a white noise sound machine we run at nigh in our bedroom, so I’m sure that helps. White noise is probably your best bet if you’re in a smaller living area.

Your example is too damn spot-on, haha, man I haven’t seen one so brazenly fake in a couple months. Then again, I only stick to the smaller subs on Reddit whenever I do use it, so bot activity is a lot less frequent on those.

TIL the etymology of goodbye is a contraction of “god be with you.”

If kids are dumb today, millennials are on the hook for it, boomers didn’t do this one.

The bulk of older teenagers/college kids are from Gen X, not so much from millennials.

Oh I don’t mind it as much; but, for an animated movie that’s somewhat geared towards a wider age demographic range, it felt a bit too long for younger viewers.

Those movies were already too long, IMO. The shortest of the two is 114 minutes. My son really liked them, but we had to break up each movie into more than one session.

That’s seriously missing how this is going to be horribly weaponized. Is it abused by some? Yes. Are there thousands of completely legitimate nonprofits around the country that do amazing work in their local communities? Absolutely yes. But those nonprofits also tend to be progressive advocates for those in poverty or minorities, aka the “political enemy” of the conservative extremists.

Think it’s supposed to be a pun since John Wick and Wicker Man.

It’s not the government that tells the insurance what’s cosmetic or medically necessary unless she’s on Medicare or Medicaid.

Regardless, there needs to be laws that make it illegal for insurance companies to try and overrule doctors’ medical diagnoses and deny coverage. I’ve straight up had my insurance company argue with my doctors about prescriptions before, requiring them to fill out a bunch of pre-approval forms that they have to renew every year, which then causes me to have to wait an extra few days before I can even get my meds. Luckily, my meds aren’t life-or-death. Unfortunately, they pull the same shit for people needing life-or-death medications, too. It’s fucking evil and I cannot comprehend how over 220 million US voters aren’t rioting to get a better system.

You don’t even need to do all of that. Simply teaching kids to be curious, critical, and not afraid of failure prepares them in a much more universal/general sense.

A lot of these people were probably told they were special growing up and “really smart,” which unintentionally reinforces the idea that they naturally know things and their identity is tied to being smart/knowledgeable. So when anyone contradicts that identity–confronting them with facts that don’t align with what they thought to be true–it feels like an existential threat to their ego.

Hell, I think northern Nebraska had widespread, massive flooding a few years ago due to extreme weather causing one of the dams to fail. Wiped out several communities.

Not super far from there (~6 hours), WNW Illinois.

Makes me think that the midwest will soon get more populated due to its position away from coastlines

We have our own shit show of extreme weather. For example, derechos (an oceanless, inland hurricane essentially) used to be rare. We’ve had 2 massive ones in the last 4 years. This summer alone there were hundreds of tornados hitting places that rarely ever see them. Hell, it’s god damn October and we’re still having ~90°F days, which hardly ever used to happen.

Iirc, tasks requiring elevated permissions wasn’t the main complaint, maybe just one of the most vocal ones.

Even with good hardware, it was not optimized for performance in general. This was amplified by the fact they also marketed Vista as having a wide range of older hardware support, which resulted in many users upgrading from XP only to have their performance absolutely tank. I think there was even a lawsuit because of how they marketed some devices as, “Vista ready.”

Regardless, Vista was still better than Windows 8.

Oh for sure, I fully understand that there are tons of things/mechanics we take for granted every day that we don’t actually know how it/they work(s) at the most fundamental level. Static electricity just seemed like a pretty important one that I’d just assumed it was well and thoroughly researched/understood.

Anyway, completely agree with you that this breakthrough is great news and that there are some exciting practical applications that may emerge as a result, particularly the more that model is understood/completed.

I had no idea this was unknown, and it’s even crazier that the model for it is still not complete even after this breakthrough. More power to them, being able to fully understand triboelectricity and eventually fully controlling it will be great. Hopefully they’re able to crack the rest of the mystery soon.

This is what my wife and other lady friends into fitness use while working out. I don’t think I’ve seen non-high waist leggings in workout settings for years, come to think of it.

The UN’s Global Plastics Treaty is certainly a step in the right direction. I’m not sure what can actually be done about the problem, especially with how pervasive synthetic materials are throughout the world. And what is medicine supposed to do? Plastics revolutionized sanitation, particularly in the medical field. Very complicated issue to resolve.

And how much of those profits go to those workers? Let’s take a well known Marvel movie, the Avengers Endgame. It cost roughly $220 million to make. The total global box office for that movie is estimated around $2.8 billion. That’s ~$2.6 billion in profit. Please tell me how much of that went to the film crews and various film departments? Hell, a huge chunk of the budget cost probably went to the actors to begin with.

Anyway, my original point wasn’t even entirely around sticking it to the billionaires. Until laws are made to protect our ownership of digital licenses, I have zero problems with people pirating. Additionally, the majority of folks are going to be paying, so a minority of people–who typically have lower disposable income–pirating content are not destroying regular peoples’ livelihood, this has been proven for over two decades now.

Bottom line: Come down from your ivory tower and just let it rest. Regardless of what either of us says or believes, pirating will continue with or without us. You can disagree with it, which is fine, or you can justify it, which is also fine. It won’t change reality either way.

Defending multi-billion dollar corporations in this day and age is absolutely bizarre. And for the record, I rarely pirate these days. And even then, it’s for digital copies of physical content I already own. But I really don’t give a shit what others do, especially if they’re not hurting common folk. And if you truly think it’s okay not to fully own the digital licenses your purchase, then good for you for keeping those billionaire’s boots clean.