• 0 Posts
  • 52 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 13th, 2025

help-circle

  • This post and the numerous replies affirming our clones wouldn’t try to kill us makes me wonder, what is the basis for this trope? Is it just the assumption that any doppelganger must be evil? I wonder what the cultural origins are, would it be European fae?

    Anyway, I’m pretty sure my clone would still try to kill me, but it’d be doing so out of kindness. I’ve always wanted to die on my feet in combat, and I’ve never wanted to live, so we’d kinda be fighting over who gets the privilege of death. Whichever one of us wins has to keep going, while the other gets released.






  • The issue I have is that there is an incredibly corrupt, absolutely vile, but completely legal explanation for the massive difference in down-ballot participation; Musk and other billionaires flooded social media platforms with heavy pro-Trump propoganda. Easily influenced people were pushed to vote for Trump, but given no directions for how to vote locally, so they didn’t.

    Should these votes be counted is another question entirely. I personally don’t view it any differently than vote buying, as these voters are essentially agents fulfilling their orders, but there’s nothing on the books that bars anyone from manipulating low-intelligence people from voting how they’re told.




  • Like, I can only shoot two portals ever? Single-use would imply only being able to shoot one portal, but that doesn’t seem very useful.

    Also wasn’t portal travel hella toxic? To the point that it killed Cave Johnson? I sure as hell won’t be using it to save time on my commute or anything.

    I think I’d have to use it for violence, like sending a war criminal off a large building, but you couldn’t even really have fun with it. Everyone fantasizes about launching a billionaire straight into space, but you’d need multiple portals to get them into a situation where they’re building momentum first.

    Also, if there’s no material emancipation grids, are the portals just there forever? The portal gun doesn’t have an off switch or a way to deactivate existing portals.



  • There’s some interesting theories in this thread, but I want to bring up one that I don’t see talked about much; American democracy has been so dysfunctional for so long, the average American citizen absolutely assumes they’re being lied to on the campaign trail. Nobody ever believes a politician is going to accomplish even a quarter of the things they campaign on here. This is a big part of what made Trump so popular, with the line of thinking being “he’s an outsider, so he’ll be different.” The problem then becomes one of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, Trump being an outsider should be a reason to always take what he says at its face value. On the other, Trump is a politician now, and as established, politicians always lie on the campaign trail, so why would you expect him to keep his promises?

    I’m not going to pretend to understand how the average American is able to do the mental gymnastics necessary to maintain these two contradictory ideals, but I think it’s important to point out that a lot of his supporters grew up with zero faith in the democratic process ever helping them.



  • It someone creates a program for Windows, that program will likely still work 10 years from now

    I was with you all the way until here. This statement is absolutely laughable to anyone who has messed around with older videogames. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, running it in compatibility mode with the version of Windows the game was made for will work, but oftentimes you’re reliant on fan patches or long installation guides showing you the exact configuration of settings necessary to stop the game from constantly crashing. At that point, getting the older game to run on Windows is just as tedious as getting it to run on Linux, potentially less.

    You still are getting more of a guarantee from Microsoft, because Windows versions have typically had long lifecycles and were pretty averse to risky-changes within an OS release, but even that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore with Windows 11.



  • It’s really weird to strike at my job, because I work at a non-profit who genuinely does great work to help students go to college and university. Probably the worst part about our program is that some of the companies we take money from are shitty, but it’s hard to be mad spending evil money on educating students. They also give me an incredibly generous PTO program, meaning even if I don’t come into work for a day to strike, I’ll still get paid for the day, which seems antithetical to the purpose.

    I’m still not gonna come into work on March 14th, and maybe if I can get all my coworkers to do the same it’ll still feel like a strike, but it’s just a weird situation.