The US President doesn’t typically give out medals to Australians.

They’re super cheap, but also they serve a purpose. B-movies are a great start for upcoming directors, videographers, production designers, etc. You may have an assistant director from biger projects you want to promote, but since they’ve only worked under others you don’t want to let them potentially fuck up on a big production. Give them a disposable Christmas TV movie to test their ability to run a set on their own.

Actually, that cabin may be cheaper. Property is way more expensive in dense areas.

A major reason lots of people move to the country in retirement is because the land is cheaper and.they end up with a bigger house and more land for less than they were paying before because it’s cheaper land with lower property tax.

Trump needs the precedent to pardon himself and his allies from all the state charges coming their way if this ever ends.

It’s like ebay in 2003.

Fun fact: Rabies is pretty much the most-lethal disease ever. A diagnosis is an absolute death sentence, followed by an agonizing death.

What we want is a solution for customers who don’t understand the benefit of DP and won’t buy an adapter when there’s already HDMI ports on both devices.

You also aren’t legally required to go down a waterslide.

Knowingly selling insurance then intentionally withholding care as the patients are entitled to as long as possible hoping they’ll gove up or die in the process so you can increase profits is absolutely worthy of depraved heart homicide.

And it’s not the same thing as reckless endangerment. Reckless endangerment leading to death is manslaughter. Depraved Indifference leading to death is murder.

I don’t expect you to keep replying because you know you’re wrong on this, and the more we argue the worse you look.

That’s literally not how depraved heart murder works.

The CEO of a Waterpark (schlitterbahn) was arrested for murder after a child died by decapitation on a slide because he’d paid off people who were hurt on it previously to keep quiet so they wouldn’t have to shut down the ride. He didn’t know for sure that particular child would die, or whether anyone would die at all. But he was so indifferent to the known danger that it counted as motive.

Johnson ordered his people to deny millions of medical procedures the patients were entitled to. He absolutely knew people would die, even if he didn’t know any specific person would.

Look up depraved heart murder.

It’s a real legal tool used by prosecutors all over the country. The idea is that if someone actively chooses to take actions so incredibly dangerous in pursuit of their own interests that it is likely to cause people to die, that indifference to human life can be treated as malice aforethought (intent to kill) and they can be charged with 2nd degree murder for any deaths resulting from thise actions. The classic example would be knowingly selling tainted food or medicine for profit.

And it’s not just a US law. China literally executed executives for signing off on the sale of tainted baby formula.

Brian Thompson intentionally ordered the increased rejection of pre-authorizations for covered procedures and medications in order to drive up profit, resulting in a great deal of injury and death.

Is random people shooting execs in the street my preferred choice for how society handles these issues? No. But when official justice is denied, the inevitable result is people deciding to act on it themselves.

Johnson is dead because he was shot, yes. But more than that, he’s dead because the justice system refuses to hold people like him accountable for their illegal actions.

Yeah - I just knew I was gonna die a few months back, and it was a panic attack. Which is weird because I’ve historically been low-stress. But between work being crazy and the world being what it is right now, things apparently got to me subconsciously.

My chest got tight, my breathing was labored, my arm went numb. It was terrifying.

And thinking you’re having a heart attack doesn’t help with the panic attack. But it was amazing how as soon as the EKG showed normal, everything started feeling better quickly. Just the knowledge that it was panic helped so much.

But you should still go to the ER in those cases, because if you assume it’s a panic attack and dont go, but turn out to be wrong…

It’s about taking the state out of the process. If citizens are suing each other, it’s an entirely civil matter that keeps Texas from having to go to court against another state. SCOTUS has original jurisdiction (i.e. the case goes straight to SCOTUS instead of working through the lower courts) for disputes between states, and this is NOT something the conservatives want going to SCOTUS.

Either they lose, or they win and set some precedents they do NOT want. Imagine California being able to go after Winchester when a California resident buys ammo in Nevada.

Yeah. They solved protien folding with ML a few years back. And I like using it for things like noise removal in Lightroom.

But so much of it has been focused on useless (at best) bullshit that I just want the bubble to burst already.

I was fully prepared to hate the remake.

I played all the FF games I could growing up. I played the original when it came out, and I played IV and VI (as II and III in the US) on my SNES.

I got a PS1 instead of an N64 because I knew FFIV (didn’t know it was gonna be called VII yet) was gonna be on Playstation. I saved up my money for months to buy the PS1, and a few months later my mom (angel of a woman) went to Sears on the release day for FFVII while I was in 8th grade football practice and picked it up for me with my remaining savings.

I devoured the game. It was truly special. When a certain character left the party at the end of disc 1, I was devastated. I was and still am an unapologetic die-hard superfan of FFVII.

When I heard about the remake I was skeptical. When I found out they were taking away the ATB system and making it an action-RPG and bloating the opening chapter of Midgar into the entirety of the game I wrote it off.

But I still bought it, of course, and I have never been happier to eat crow.

The remake is fantastic. It’s an entry point to the story for newcomers that’s somehow both a retelling and a sequel that will keep old fans interested. The expanded Midgar section makes the events of the early game much more impactful as you really get to know the Avalanche crew, and everything about the production design is top-tier. The gameplay is a great balance between action and strategy that does its own thing instead of just copying what had already been done with the first game. It’s a love letter to the original while being an amazing game in its own right.

I still haven’t played the sequel, as I don’t have a PS5, but I understand it’s also excellent.

This is a great observation, because it works in a lot of situations, and is a useful tool for empathy.

Someone’s level of stress/despair can be very relative. What’s normal life to one person can seem earth-shattering to someone else. And it also explains some of the most ridiculous stuff we see in society.

I’m thinking specifically about privileged people. Much of the MAGA movement, for instance, is fueled by straight, white, Christian men feeling threatened by “wokeness”. All they’ve ever known is privilege, and when people try and balance society to give a greater voice to women, POC, religous, sexual, and gender minorities, etc they start to lose privileges they’ve always known. To them, it doesn’t feel like equity. It feels like things are being taken from them.

They grew up in a world where it wasn’t as hard to find a good-paying job for them. They really could often get by on hard work and dedication, and assumed that was the case for everyone. When they lose the advantage and see women and minorities getting more jobs, they assume that it represents society valuing “wokeness” over qualifications. Pain is relative to each person, and when your life is privileged the loss of that privilege can have the same subjective emotional sting as discrimination.

It reminds me of a small child crying over dropping their ice cream. It’s objectively not a big deal, but to that child it’s absolutely devastating, because that’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to them. As they grow, life will temper them and they’ll get over it eventually. We just have to show a little empathy as we help them move forward.

But the prices won’t go down. Reductions in production costs are only reflected in sale prices when there’s a market force driving the costs down. Right now, people have to own cars, and the barriers to entry into the matlrket are too high for new competitors. There’s no reason for the auto manufacturers to lower prices if their costs go down. They can just pocket the difference.

The earth is also rotating and orbiting the sun, which is rotating around the galaxy, which is itself moving.

Top of that lorry is gonna be whipping around at relativistic speeds.

Heck, just hitting a potholes will make it move millions of lightyears.

I don’t know how much it would encourage Putin to invade again.

It’s not like he invaded part of Ukraine and was allowed to keep the annexed territory in the name of peace, then 8 years later invaded again, right?

When I was a mid-level retail manager, my philosophy was that my floor worker’s job was to take care of the customers, my store manager’s job was to take care of corporate, and my job was to facilitate both. The best way to do that most of the time was to take care of and protect my floor workers.

Most of the time the customer complaints were baseless. Sometimes they were legitimate. But in all cases my priority was taking care of my workers. I may have had to coach them on something after the complaint (usually on how to better handle asshole customers), but ALWAYS in private, and always calmly.

Sometimes I had to do something for the customer if there was a legitimate issue, like give them a $20 gift card or something.

But no matter what the situation was, if a customer was abusive to my staff they were banned from the store on the spot. I’d trespass them, put their picture on a board for our greeters, and if they attempted to return we’d have polkce escort them away.

If they had been trying to buy a firearm (we were a massive destination outdoors store), we’d blacklist them in the corporate system and I had a text message group with all the nearby firearm dealers where we’d share the names of customers we’d blacklisted.

Nobody’s business was worth allowing my people to be abused. I didn’t care that we were losing a $20,000 sale - my staff was worth more than that, both from a basic humanity standpoint, and also because having a good, experienced, loyal employee is more important than having an unreliable asshole customer. And you don’t retain good employees if you don’t protect them.

Scaling goes in both directions.