Garage?

Maybe, but it’s just an aspect of the hobby. Besides fiddling with bed leveling it is mostly ready to use, even if you buy new and assemble it yourself that’s only a couple hours. Most of the other issues I brought up really only come into play once you start trying to do something less common.

I stand by my suggestion to fiddle with one for a while. You can probably pick one up secondhand, get a feel for the hobby, and upgrade once you figure out what features and capabilities are most important to you. It’s the sort of hobby where you have to get your hands dirty a little bit just to get a good grip on what your real requirements are. Good printers can be a little pricey, and knowing what you need helps you avoid overpaying for stuff you don’t need.

It’s probably not the best, but I started with an Ender 3. I kinda like it for not being the best. While you’re dealing with bed leveling issues, and hot end issues, and extruder issues, and Gcode issues, and filament issues, and adhesion issues, you’re learning about the core aspects of the technology.

Sure, you could get something that’s basically plug-and-play from the start, but then you won’t really understand what’s going on. And eventually, you’re going to want to do something that requires you know what’s going on.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not abusively bad or anything. It’s just simple, it doesn’t have modern creature comforts.

You can probably pick up an E3 secondhand, pre-assembled, for pretty cheap. It may be the most extensively troubleshot, documented, and modified printer ever. You can ship-of-Theseus it into basically any specification you want, and I’ve never had a problem that didn’t have dozens of solution threads.

Even if you eventually replace it, and you probably will, the lessons you learn fiddling around with it will carry on into the hobby.

Ignoring the AI part, since it doesn’t even know it’s gaslighting you.

Maybe read some Buckminster Fuller. He opined to some length about trends in real-world changes.

Isaac Asimov as well, just for a general sense of the approach.

But overall probabilities are kinda arbitrary when applied to specific events. They work fine for a whole lot of similar events (e.g. pulling colored marbles out of a bag) but they don’t really have any tangible meaning for unique events. Either you guess wrong or you guess right.

If you want to predict future events, you need to have a good grasp on current events, past events, and systemic behavior in general. There isn’t one methodology that yields results generally. You need to tailor your approach to suit each prediction.

That’s not something you can learn from one book, course, or series of exercises. It relies on broad scholarship.

Narrow the scope of policing. Have more social services and emergency mental health resources so cops aren’t expected to do all that.

“Defund the police” never meant “Remove all funding for police”, it means “Reallocate potions of police funding to more comprehensive social services”

How bout the power of flight, that do anything for ya?

I chose my wife in large part for her honesty. It’s much easier to teach a brutally honest person to be more tactful than to teach a dishonest person to be honest.

It’s spicy, salty, heavy on a particular ingredient, anything that might be off-putting to some.

What is the soup of the day?

“Soup du jour”

Mmm, that sounds good.

This is an actual exchange I had.

Especially roasted

It’s just the only one that I can imagine a physicist or engineer would be proud of.

To be fair they’re physicists, not English majors

I feel like it’s all gotta be from #8 right? It makes it pretty easy to get >0 legitimately, seems like it would be hard for anyone working on black holes to not have a double digit score from that alone.

Though I could see some cheeky positive values from #13, assuming the theory is a well established one, Randi style. (Or #20 for the typo)

I’m not unhealthy, they’re educated stupid.

I’m on Sync, dunno about anything else.

I have gone through phases of blocking very vocal idiots, but then as you said I feel at an informational disadvantage.

I’ve gotten recently into tagging people with descriptions of repeated behavior. That way I still know what’s going on, but I know what to expect from them.

Guillotines are too tame for modern audiences. Wood chippers are fresh and exciting.

Within the framework of a representative democracy not voting when you don’t have representation is the same as voting for someone who isn’t representative of your interests.

Within the framework of FPTP elections they are different. Voting against the person who is least representative, no matter how marginally, is better than not voting.

Could you clarify?

The claim was that electoral democracy was a misdirection, my point is that all the effort to manipulate it demonstrates that it is the seat of power, and the oligarchs have merely occupied it.

I would definitely lump those people in with the “liberals who do nothing except vote” crowd

Since they’re defined by not voting, they aren’t. They are, materially speaking, equivalent to anti-electoralists. The liberals are at least voting for plausible harm reduction.

And when the choices are all false ones?

Yeah, that was exactly my point.

Nobody saying that “electoralism is a sham” is saying that’s the “be all end all of their political responsibility.” They just generally have a broader definition of “political responsibility”.

Yeah that hasn’t been my experience. Especially in the last election cycle, I saw a lot of that supposed strawman. No community engagement, no actual political engagement, no workplace engagement, just “Kamala bad”. People who insisted that not voting or voting third party would send a message. Don’t pretend they don’t exist, I’ve talked to dozens.

I stand by my statement. All else equal, a liberal who does nothing except vote Democrat is better by far than a “leftist” who does nothing except tell people not to vote Democrat.