I get that we don’t think straight in those moments of our life, but it’s such a horrible thing to force on someone and their conscience…

I’m a nurse in a psychiatric hospital. When someone is actively suicidal, they indeed are not thinking straight. They are (usually) just looking for a way to escape their pain. Actively experiencing pain (be it physical or mental) reduces our capacity for empathy - that is, to consider how our actions will impact others.

I have had countless patients tell me their method/plan for suicide was to jump in front of traffic, jump from an overpass, lay on a road, lay on train tracks, etc… and none of them are ever, in those moments, thinking about how it will effect other people. Not because they wouldn’t care, but because they are simply unable to while in that state of mind.

I’ve had some who, once they were feeling better, shared about how they eventually realized how it would have impacted the driver of the vehicle (or the person who would find their body if it was by another method). But that usually only happens once they’re no longer actively wanting to die.

I’ve also had several patients who were the person to find a loved one post-suicide. It messed them up.

Can I fault them for following rule 34? …please?

Benefits can be expensive, and they only pay you for the 40 hours because it’s a salaried rather than hourly position. They just want free labor at the expense of the employees’ sanity.

For practical stuff like that, I find directly searching on YouTube to be the most useful. The wealth of free practical instruction available on YouTube is staggering. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help for those who want the information in written form, and a not insignificant proportion of it is by amateurs who have no idea what they’re doing nor know what the word “safety” means.

The worst part is: the wealthiest few of them could each, individually, if they wanted to, end world hunger permanently with their current wealth. Estimates I’ve read range $40b per year or something like $250-300b just once to set up sustainable long-term solutions globally.

Musk, Zuckerberg, or Bezos could end hunger globally and permanently. Any one of them, individually, could do it. If the richest 10 billionaires all pitched in a portion, they’d all recoup everything they spent within a couple years at worst. If the richest 100 did, many of them wouldn’t even notice the expenditure.

But it would only take 1 of them.

Wiktionary suggests both “fixing to” and “fitting to” are used synonymously. Fwiw, in Tennessee, I only ever hear “fixing to”. As someone who learned English outside of the southern US, it makes little sense to me also. But what makes even less sense to me is people saying “trying to” to mean “want to”.

Also consider a healthcare career. As a teenager, I wanted to do computer science/engineering, and sometimes I do wish I had stayed on that track. But now, as a nurse, I could get a job in any state in the US by tomorrow. I dare you to try to find a hospital that doesn’t have open nursing positions. Even when the economy goes down, people still get sick. Even if society collapses, the knowledge/skills will be useful.

And if you don’t want to change diapers or deal with blood, there are still options; I’m in psychiatry and rarely have to deal with either.

My understanding was that it was a “no modern weapons” thing. That is, pre-1900 weapons were “acceptable”, hence why the pirates and wild west sets could have guns, but the police sets do not. To my (absolutely non-expert) knowledge, Indiana Jones sets only had revolvers, a pre-1900 technology. As I recall, there was a bit of controversy when they released the Sopwith Camel (a WWI-era fighter plane, i.e. post-1900) set with machine guns on it.

The Star Wars sets have fantasy weapons, not real modern weapons. Why that or a revolver should be seen as meaningfully different from a modern gun is, evidently, left as an exercise for the consumer. In any case, clearly the stricture has been relaxed over the years.

So, like, … maybe 50 or so smaller regions? And a few other mostly even smaller territories that don’t get those rights, just for funsies?

I joke, of course. But in seriousness: Are you suggesting the US just defederate and become more like, say, the EU? What are you anticipating that would solve? Moreover, what is it that makes it too big to be a democracy? Can large governments exist only in authoritarian forms? Why would that be?

Pro-business/anti-regulation types teamed up with the anti-abortion types around 50 years ago in order to get votes for their unpopular ideas, then they did everything they could to conflate the two ideologies to where Christians (the dominant religious group) now think Republican=Christian=Republican and thus ALL Republican ideas intrinsically align with their religion. I.e., Jesus was a capitalist rather than anything that’s actually in the bible.

Tl;Dr: propaganda and the natural human tendency toward in-group bias.

It was really only the OG Pebble and the Steel. It was resolved by using a different screen connector in the Pebble 2 and Time.

I’ve had multiple OG’s over the years and each have developed the tearing issue. It’s a fairly easy fix if you’re comfortable opening electronics, but obviously that’s not going to work for every customer of a mass market product…

No moving on here. I still wear a OG Pebble daily, and I’m super excited about this. I just wish they hadn’t chosen ‘Core 2 Duo’ like it hadn’t been the name of another product…

Most phones support multiple regions’ frequency bands, especially these days. Some don’t, probably mostly older ones. Manufacturers used to make different versions of the same model for different regions.

Are you me? Because this is me.

The iPhone keyboard requires 2 taps for punctuation, including periods. Americans (and iirc especially younger ones) use more iPhones than Android phones (don’t know about other countries, but OP indicated in a comment that they’re in the US). I’m not some old guy saying the youngsters are just lazy, but I do think the iPhone keyboard is a factor in how text-based communication has evolved.

Pleasing the copyright holders. I don’t know how it is for the Dutch national library, but with a system used by many libraries in the US there’s a cost to the library based on the number of times it’s checked out, so more revenue for the copyright holder and the digital middle man. Allowing you to have the e-book indefinitely would be, at least in their minds, no different than giving it away. 🤷

I needed a laugh. Let me know when you publish your first novel; I’ll be pre-ordering it.

And make it abundantly clear to everyone that you’re not suicidal. Record videos with date stamps. Send date stamped letters by mail to friends, with instructions to retain the letters indefinitely, and perhaps which are clearly marked “to be opened in the event of my death”. The letters should say something along the lines of “I am not suicidal. I do not want to die. I am not going to kill myself under any circumstances. If I die, it was not by suicide. I want to live. I have ABC reasons to live. I have XYZ plans for the future.” Etc.

Keep multiple copies of the information in multiple locations, and make sure multiple people know where a copy is. Ideally, have a dead-man’s switch set up, or someone you trust to do it, to automatically send all the information to all the major news outlets if you do turn up dead, along with a statement akin to the letter outlined above to make it clear you were murdered.

They also want the ability to make you agree to a TOS with an arbitration clause so you can’t sue them when your wife dies because they screwed up her food.

Yesterday, at a park, I saw some Patriot Front (a neonazi group) posters on two adjacent polls. One was something about the “American spirit” descending from “European blood”. The other said “America is for Americans”. Without a hint of irony.

As if Europeans didn’t immigrate but just popped out of the ground here, or something?

Racists aren’t known for their critical thinking skills.