If I steal a cheap pen, it’s because I wanted a cheap pen. There’s no deeper meaning to it. I’m not going to fence it for a fifteenth of a baguette at the bakery.

If I steal ten cents though, I break a much deeper taboo because money is by definition fungible. Why do I need the money, what am I going to use it for, and why didn’t I empty the cash register while I was at it? These are all worryingly open questions.

Furthermore I reject the premise that stealing 10 cents is functionally equivalent to stealing a pen worth 10 cents; if anything, the premise that these are equivalent depends on a very debatable modern consumerist idea that commodities are perfectly interchangeable for money and/or the belief in a “rational actor” that has never existed outside of economics classes. Sure that may have been be valid if I was in charge of doing a bulk purchase of pens (and even then people aren’t as rational as economists would like but I digress). These economics concepts are all too theoretical to apply to individual actors in everyday life.
That pen is “worthless” to my employer (at least in my mind) and simultaneously worth a lot to me; I wouldn’t part with it for 10 cents or even 1 euro because that wouldn’t be worth the inconvenience of not having a pen, or simply because the idea of someone wanting to buy something I own and didn’t intend to sell is offensive to me.

I do agree with the basic premise that we treat money as special, but to me that’s a natural and rational consequence of its fungible and abstract nature. It’s much weirder to consider physical objects to be fungible IMO (even if it makes sense on an abstract level for commodities), and that’s why the sentence “you’ll own nothing and be happy” induces so much existential dread despite being based on theoretically sound economic principles. I don’t care if it’s actually cheaper or more resource efficient, I’m not buying a subscription to my woodworking tools or selling my house. I like the psychological safety of owning things.

It’s a real color (as real as colors can be, which is not very). It’s not a spectral color, you won’t find it on the rainbow. It’s actually the result of your red and blue cones being activated together.

Life is Strange’s writing is trope-y and often not that great, and my neurospicy ass doesn’t even relate with pretty much any of the nostalgic tropes about teenagehood (as far as I’m concerned these were the worst years of my life, by far, and any piece of media that wants to make me relive them is very unlikely to make its way onto my computer).

However the game manages to more than make up for all of that with an enthralling story that fully immerses the player with compelling gameplay, meaningful choice-based storytelling, great artistic vision, and ground-breaking character acting. The whole thing is expertly calibrated to deliver emotional gut-punch after emotional gut-punch.

Hellblade is just straight-up amazing and the Melinda Juergens’ character acting is hauntingly raw and poignant.

Oh you poor things, the lack of attention we give you is what allows you to thrive. I’d almost shed a tear if there was an inkling of truth in those ramblings.

People, observe the rhetorical devices of tankies. They do not engage in meaningful discourse. They answer with non-sequiturs framed as innocent questions. They present themselves as free speech defenders, yet they use this free speech to defend the most oppressive regimes in the world, though most often implicitly as their whole thesis becomes an obvious sophism were it to be explicitly stated:

America bad, therefore Russia/China/NK good.

It’s the exact same rhetorical devices that /r/The_Donald used during the '16 election, only with a different goal. It’s the methodology of people actively working against their own self-interest, shitting all over rational discourse because they found themselves in a self-reassuring echo-chamber of anticonformism.

The main display that shows your speed,etc. randomly shutting down

I know two people who had this exact issue with their new-gen Golf. First cause was the French language would crash the whole dash if you cycled the dashboard views (to my knowledge they never fixed the issue and the workaround is to set the car to English). Second cause was a malformed JPEG from a radio station would cause the dash to bootloop until you drove far enough from said radio station, which would allow the car to work long enough to disable that feature (IIRC).

So yeah, QA is down the fucking drain with VW on their latest gen. They had a new CEO, and now a new one again I think? But the reputational damage has been done. Too bad, I really liked my '18 Polo.

I wouldn’t recommend sway to someone who isn’t actively looking for a tiling WM, I would recommend finding a good spotlight equivalent to use on KDE as that will still be less customization work than it would require on barebones sway (which is hardly usable).

It’s not as bad nowadays that apps yielded to GNOME’s bullshit. Back when GTK2 apps were still common… Urgh. Plenty of apps were broken without it for no good reason.

I like opinionated UX - I use sway - but GNOME’s approach is incompatible with “general use” and only works (for now) because of canonical’s weight and ability to impose their vision as the only vision.

Also they didn’t replace the tray with a better way to manage background apps, so they can suck a dick on the UX front.

The fucking system tray. Which literally every other DE and mainstream OS out there supports because some apps depend on it and break if it doesn’t exist.

Last I checked GNOME devs said “no, we will never support it, because we’ve DePRecATeD the tray in GTK”.

It’s functionality so basic I have 3-6 apps which depend on it at any time on my work machine. Anyone saying it doesn’t fall under “basic functionality” is either a GNOME dev or a troll.

The kind of farming that makes any money isn’t slow work.

It is, however, tangible work with tangible results. Unlike spending months changing the polarity of nanoscopic silicon structure for the non-appreciation of an utterly clueless salesperson whose braindead ideas will have left the world in a worse state than you found it despite anyone’s best efforts.

I should seriously get into woodworking. Kidding. Sorta.

Greenfield nuclear is (probably) not economically relevant.

Refurbishing existing NPPs has a LCOE on-par with renewables and gives breathing room for variability issues that will otherwise be absorbed by fossil fuels until that eventual transition to storage/smart grid.

Any discussion of nuclear’s costs/profitability that does not distinguish between greenfield and existing/refurbished is agendaposting since most of the costs of a NPP are upfront.

Plenty of villages where I live that are absolutely unsafe for anyone to walk around. There is no requirement for a road outside urban limits to have a sidewalk, even if it is a major 90 km/h (55ish mph?) road that happens to be the only way to get from village A to the school in village B.
Cycling through the countryside, I have straight up trespassed through someone’s property because there was no legal way to get from point A to point B, walking or biking, and not die.

Obviously not comparable to the US where even city centers are majorly unsafe, but still. Most rural areas are fully car-dependent.

It depends.

Shop clothes/yellow jacket? All function (usually).
Literally any clothes when it’s 30+ °C outside? Style/cultural norms.

Most situations sit somewhere in the middle, but most people care at least a little bit about style. It’s not a fight, and I don’t understand why you frame it as such. It’s perfectly possible to wear functional clothes that also fit and with colors that don’t clash (actually most people who say they don’t like fashion have ill-fitting clothes, which is less functional).

Why do we design other buildings than concrete cubes? Why do we plant trees on the side of the road? Why do we put paintings in our hallways? Why do we paint our walls anything other than hospital grey? Why do websites have CSS? Why do we gift each other flowers?

Esthetics, self-expression, culture. Fashion is the most personal form of self-expression, it should not be a surprise that people care about it so much.

I don’t care if you wear socks and sandals, you don’t have an obligation to partake in cultural norms, but going all the way around to “fashion is stupid and clothes are just there for wind protection” is nihilistic beyond usefulness.

The kind that rails on “anti authoritarianism”? Or do you have a charitable interpretation of “authoritarianism” that is somehow compatible with democracy?

I also fail to see what any of that has to do with capitalism, which I have neither defended nor mentioned yet you brought up.

Goddam arguing with tankies and their endless litany of non-sequiturs is such a pointless exercise.

Please, go ahead and develop. What part of my comment leads you to believe that?

Typical Stalinism/Maoism: Anyone who opposes my implementation of Marxism is an enemy of the proletariat and can be persecuted to any extent. These people agree with the mainstream idea that communism can’t be implemented democratically, but come to the conclusion that democracy must be abolished.

This meme is an open dogwhistle to tankies and thankfully meaningless to anyone who hasn’t fallen into or interacted with this small subsection of the far-left.

I don’t think there is one beyond “hey look we all know this thing”.

Americans: “We are a diverse patchwork of cultures and saying the US is one gigantic boring monoculture just because we share a common language is offensive”

Also Americans: hundreds of millions of people literally all relate to the same quirky element of childhood imposed through immense conformist institutions, can’t even process the idea that other cultures exist that do not relate to this specific element.

I need to hear what this connector would sound like when connected to an actual Dolby Atmos system. Do the crackles and pops get spatialized and make an impromptu symphony going around your room? The people must know!

If the prices are as legitimate as you suggest then surely that will be easily revealed by the subpoena’d accounting books and Novo Nordisk will be cleared of suspicion. Wouldn’t that be the system working as intended?