I’m a little surprised to hear people so willing to let the government of Ireland determine who they are allowed to hate and for what reasons.

Most financially secure people still work full time. I suppose that in theory, they’re able to quit their jobs without suffering immediate, catastrophic consequences but if they actually did that sort of thing, they wouldn’t be financially secure for long.

(In my experience, many financially secure people actually work much more than full time. I think they would be better off if they didn’t because at some point time becomes more valuable than money, but they have the sort of personality that compels them to. This is often related to starting out without financial security.)

The very rich can do crazy stuff without consequences but they’re such a small part of the population that I don’t think comparing oneself to them is useful.

There’s no logical contradiction between believing that some people should be killed and believing that other people shouldn’t be killed. You might as well ask why a soldier would shoot at his enemies but not his allies

(I’m not picking a side in the “Are fetuses people?” debate here. They are from the point of view of the people against abortion.)

There were showers in the locker rooms when I was in school, but the ordinary gym classes never used them. (Maybe the sports teams did?) I think I would rather have dropped out than showered naked in school.

They are blaming bad luck for their shitty personality.

I wish I was the kind of guy who liked being social and meeting new people, but I’m not. I can force myself to do it, but I can’t force myself to do it much (and I think people can tell that I would rather be going to the dentist). I didn’t choose to be like this, and I didn’t choose whatever inborn characteristics and childhood experiences made me end up like this. If there’s a way to choose not to be like this, I haven’t found it. I do think I got unlucky.

I’m not trying to complain about my fate here. I got lucky in a lot of other ways. I’m just saying that it isn’t fair to tell people that they would be happier if only they were someone else.

If we feel it’s so important to have a cute girlfriend, then should we not respect that a woman might want a cute boyfriend?

Isn’t that what anon is doing? He’s lamenting that because he is neither good looking nor particularly charismatic, the women he wants to date have no good reason to date him.

I’m not sure why anon is making a big deal out of that. One time when I was on a second date, the woman told me that I seemed like quite a pessimist. I said “No, if I were a pessimist, I would never stop screaming.” She didn’t want to see me again but I still chuckle whenever I remember it.

Heh, I walk around naked with the blinds open because where I live, people would need binoculars to see me and if they choose to, their resulting suffering is their own fault. One advantage of being unattractive…

I think people value private outdoor space differently than public outdoor space. I don’t actually have a balcony but I think I would usually prefer a private space to a public one, even if the public one was much nicer.

That’s funny. I see all the skyscrapers around here with balconies and I get jealous, but I never thought about the fact that I almost never see people on those balconies until I read your question.

I wanted a balcony but the real estate agent politely implied that I couldn’t afford one in the area where I was looking for housing. With that said, I can see myself using it for just an hour or two a week while the weather is nice. I like the idea of sitting out on the balcony but I expect that in practice it would be noisy out there and boring on my own.

Googling this is unreliable because Microsoft keeps patching out ways to do it. I couldn’t get what I read online to work when I got my Windows 11 laptop back in May, but what did work was using the keyboard button that turns on airplane mode.

I get why Microsoft (acting in its own best interest) wants to discourage offline accounts but trying to ban them completely is ridiculous (especially since Windows 11 works just fine with the offline account). I think I would have returned the laptop out of spite if I couldn’t get an offline account to work, but I’m probably much more spiteful than most people.

I never feel inconvenienced by having to wear clothing. I suppose part of that is because as a man, I can go shirtless without getting stares and I wouldn’t want to be without underwear (for support) even if I were on a deserted island. I wonder what the circumstances you have in mind are in which you would like to have the option of being nude in public.

Edit: Now that I think about it, there have been a few times when I wanted to go swimming and just swimming in my underwear wasn’t an option because I would have to walk while wearing it later and that would be uncomfortable.

The apartment I bought had cabinets with fake, decorative drawers on them. Except it turned out that one of those drawers wasn’t decorative. It was just stuck.

Inside there was a full set of silverware (as in literal silver) from the 60’s complete with the original receipt. It’s worth thousands of dollars. I guess whoever lived there before me was in no condition to pack and the people who packed didn’t know about the silver…

I remember when I was at school (this was 6th or 7th grade) and the teacher wrote y = x and drew a diagonal line on a Cartesian plane. At that moment, I realized that the world was made of math and I was enlightened. I’m not exaggerating - the experience revolutionized the way I could think.

The interesting thing to me is that I have worked with physicists who appear to be capable of even higher levels of abstraction than I am. If I read an equation, I need to think about its geometrical representation but they claim to think directly in terms of equations. (Pure mathematics, not the letters and numbers that make up the written equation.) I believe them because they can comprehend equations much faster than I can; they and I would go to talks where the presenter just put up slide after slide of equations and I would be lost almost immediately while they were able to follow along. I don’t think that’s simply because they’re much smarter than I am, because I am otherwise generally able to match them intellectually.

That’s how I did it too. There is a sphere on a plane. A force is applied to the sphere, parallel to the plane. Neither the sphere nor the plane have a defined color, size, material, etc. Nothing specific pushed the sphere.

My job is often to mathematically model the things people say to me, and in those circumstances thinking like this is correct.

I don’t think this way when I daydream, although the visual components of my daydreams are more like the feelings I get when I look at something than like concrete mental pictures.

… As opposed to a Nazi running the US space program, which this guy saw the day of.

Libre Office (at least Calc which is the one I use most) is usable but it has bizarre random slowdowns and crashes relatively frequently, whereas I have never once had issues like that with Microsoft Office. I still use Libre Office (on both Windows and Linux) because it’s free but I acknowledge that it has disadvantages.

You don’t mind their UI conventions? I suppose I could probably get used to them, but while I’m comfortable with Windows and Linux desktop environments, I find the Mac one to be quite unpleasant to use for some reason.

You use Arch? Bah, I am Arch.