That’s a very large assumption. The simplest explanation is that we feel like we have free will because we do. Quantum mechanics suggests some major challenges to determinism, and the best arguments to restore it require a very unsatisfying amount of magical thinking.
Freight rail is still alive in my area–and that means commuter rail could be. But like a lot of places, the public has been duped into voting against their own interests. I don’t want to hijack the thread, but it’s an issue that–if you care about it, you should be voting for Amtrak Joe. Public transportation needs to be part of the nation’s climate agenda, and the Criminal Cheetoh wants to sacrifice us all on the altar of petrol.
The problem is that the infrastructure doesn’t exist, and introducing it is cost-prohibitive for large parts of the US. I would love to be able to take a train from my small town to the nearest metro area 30 miles away and then take a tube to a block away from my destination–but that’s just not going to happen in my lifetime, because the city can’t afford to install a subway, and the auto lobby won the war against commuter rail before I was born.
Could it be better? Sure. Might it become better? Maybe, but probably not in my lifetime.
In the meantime, people are de facto dependent on cars. Destroying infrastructure necessary to support the reality of how people must, through no fault of their own, travel punishes the traveling public without addressing the actual problem.
If we’re going to transition to better transit infrastructure, we first have to build the better infrastructure–and pay for it by eliminating unseating political opposition. Only then can we dismantle these kinds of monstrosities without disenfranchising the people who depend on them.
We all called it. Didn’t matter. Time to move to the next box.
That kind of attitude lingers dangerously close to the everything-is-a-conspiracy-by-the-shadowy-cabal line of reasoning. Biden’s a Catholic, but it’s certainly not “obvious” that he’s “intentionally letting the nation slip”. You can scroll down barely a page on whitehouse.gov and watch the president commit to restoring the standard of Roe v Wade. It’s under the statements in favor of Pride, committing to combating gun deaths, lowering housing costs, and protecting pensions. Joe Biden’s executive orders have been the most progressive executive action since Roosevelt.
Here’s something a lot of non-religious folks might not know: the evangelical right? They hate Catholics. The MAGAs hate them ideologically, but the ones running the show hate them because the Catholic Church is their competition when it comes to running private schools and otherwise lucrative community support institutions. Biden is absolutely not on their side, theologically or otherwise.
It was a disaster. Trump lied for 90 minutes straight, but he did it confidently, with a straight face, and without rambling. It was a vast improvement over his stump speeches. Biden mostly told the truth, but he meandered, stammered, got mixed up, and was obviously ill. That’s just what happened.
I’m going to vote for Biden anyway, because the old man stands for policies that actually benefit me personally (and a second Trump term is a threat to the existence of the Republic). But the debate was bad for him, possibly catastrophic. His campaign desperately needs an October surprise, and at this point it’s hard to guess what it might be.
Really? Didn’t stop me…
Just cheat? Whatever happened to class cheating? In the old days if the game was too hard and you didn’t have a big brother to do it for you, you just put in the godmode code or turned on a trainer or something.
Some games are just hard. That’s what makes getting good at them feel rewarding. The Souls games haven’t really been for me either (due to the pking–not so much the difficulty), but it’s not like the game makers owe me anything.
Warning, Reddit link: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fkftiwovba73b1.jpg
The thing that did it for me is the picture making the rounds of the truck sight lines showing the M1 as safer than an F250 in terms of blind spot. These things are really ridiculous.
Yeah, my bad. I forgot how cool it is to just spout whatever bullshit you want. Hurray for ignorance.
No wonder humanity is doomed.
That an opinion lacks evidence does not alleviate the requirement that its factual allegations be supported by evidence. “I don’t think the surface of the earth is curved” may be an opinion, but it’s a provably wrong assertion, and adding a disclamitory phrase to it doesn’t excuse the statement from evaluation.
Citation needed.
They decided to sell access to the content in exchange for user information, thereby forcing human readers to choose between surrendering privacy or using other means to access the content, all in order to make up purportedly for a perceived slight by bots. Maybe their motives are pure as the driven snow–and it’s their content, so they can wall it off however they please–but I’m confident you don’t genuinely mean to suggest that this measure will stop the content from being scraped and fed to LLMs.
Datawalled. >(
That’s a game of legal Russian roulette I wouldn’t want to play. Eventually he’s going to rip off the wrong person, and in the meantime all his victims have the option of sitting on their claims (SOL notwithstanding) to find out if he ever makes any money.
It’s a broad generalization, but it’s not really a matter of opinion. We can scan people’s mouths and faces when they talk (and have in order to demonstrate this stuff). I think the last example probably only applies that way in particular circumstances though, since English speakers automatically group, contract, and arrange certain phonemes in certain orders (e.g., I’m not, I ain’t, but never I amn’t–and in real speech “I ain’t” is almost always one syllable). In this example, more frequently my country ass contracts the first syllable of “gonna” away instead of the second, so “I’m 'na head to the store; y’all need anything?”
The hot potato example just stands for the premise that in real speech the t at the end of hot and the p at the beginning of potato slur together, and if you deliberately enunciate both consonants, you sound like you’re reading to a transcriber. Compare the way a normal person says “let’s go” to the way you sound if you force separate the words: you sound like you’re doing a Mario impression.
Thank you. I’ve had this conversation with family members way too often. They love their local chiropractor. They always leave feeling so much better, etc. I ask them what he does, what his advice is, and what kinds of questions he asks them, and everything they describe is not chiropractic. It’s massage, or nursing, or physician. No wonder you love him: He’s practicing medicine.
Well congratulations “liberals”, bots, propagandists, defeatists. You win. If Trump had beaten Biden, it would have been Biden’s fault, along with the party. Now the party gets to share the blame with you. You lot gambled this for the rest of us. Let’s hope your bet pays off. Open your wallets and hit the pavement. If you’re a real person and you pitched a fit so this would happen, you got what you wanted. Act like it. Your lobbying won you an obligation to campaign. If you were on social media begging for Biden to quit, now you owe the time you spent here to Harris’s campaign (or whomever the fuck they nominate).
You bought it. You own it.