Yeah if California secedes, fruits, nuts, and vegetables would get a whole lot more expensive for the rest of the country… something like half of our produce comes from California.

Yeah but I get like 5 spam calls a week from “Nicole with loan processing” or “Joshua Martinez from the loan issuance department” and they always leave a voicemail that I have to delete because I tried to get a personal loan 4 months ago.

Ladder pulling is a shockingly common trait among immigrants humans in general.

FTFY

But didn’t you know that teeth are just luxury bones?

That sounds like a hardware limitation more than anything. Is it normal for standard consumer wifi chips to be able to receive and broadcast simultaneously on two different networks? I know that’s definitely not something you can usually do with PC hardware.

So… everyone who doesn’t risk their lives for a small chance of making a difference is a fascist? Yeah, sure, that checks out. “If you’re not with us then you’re against us” is not and has never been valid logic.

Then you stop the interaction and it’s ultimately harmless. Should we pass up any and all opportunities to have meaningful interaction with people just on the chance that they don’t want to be bothered?

Generally, you pass on the situations where it’s likely that they want to be left alone. For most people, it’s not hard to tell.

Yes but it’s not fair to assume that everyone else is as averse to interaction as you are. Many people enjoy polite conversation as a distraction from the drudgery of their job.

I basically have no idea how a person moves to another country and just starts talking at other people.

The same way you talk to people in any new place you move to, regardless of if it’s the same country, state, or even city.

It sounds like they’re just bothering random people because they think everyone wants to be their friend.

I don’t think that’s what was being talked about at all. That said, that’s not always a bad thing either! Sometimes it is ok to just go up to random people and talk to them. If they engage with you, then great, you have a conversation. If they don’t, then you take a hint and walk away.

I apologize for making assumptions here, but I’m guessing that you’re a) on the autism spectrum (so am I), and b) have social anxiety at least partly because of it (I definitely did). But, it’s not always rude to just go up to someone and talk to them. Honestly, there are situations where it can be appropriate in nearly any context.

I think it’s generally an autistic thing to come up with a set of internal guidelines that we use to determine when and when not to talk to someone. Sometimes those guidelines end up erring too far on the side of “don’t do, too risky”.

I know it can be hard to figure out how to navigate social situations, especially since learning requires doing and that’s the scary part, but the only way to learn is to put yourself in those situations in the first place. Just remember that for neurotypical people, whether or not something is appropriate is purely “vibes-based”, using a set of fuzzy guidelines they don’t even know they have. If you can figure out even approximately what those guidelines are, you’ll be ok in the vast majority of situations.

I’m genuinely confused as to what you think they’re doing. Like, do you assume that they’re just barging into situations where they aren’t welcome? Are you assuming that they’re not using the same tact and discretion that one would use to engage in polite conversation anywhere else? What does it being in another country or language change?

I get the feeling that you don’t do much socializing outside of the internet, so I’ll let you know that yes, it is entirely normal for people to have polite and unexpected conversation in public or wherever. People can choose to disengage if they feel like it. Nobody is being held verbally hostage here. Just because you have difficulty interacting with others and find it annoying when people talk to you doesn’t mean that others feel the same way.

Yeah anything less than 15% is considered low here.

That was beautiful, but I didn’t think it would still hurt this much.

It’ll be two years this month.

There’s no president of the world yet.

I think that you don’t think that there’s any meaningful difference between “spiritual” and "supernatural " then you’re missing the point.

I used to be an atheist anti-christian skeptic type that didn’t understand my partner’s beliefs at all, because why have beliefs if you know they aren’t real? sugar_in_your_tea’s above quote from Equal Rites actually fits it really well.

Your beliefs have an impact on how you act, and your acts have an impact on the world. Therefore I choose to live by a set of guiding principles and interact with the world in a way that fits what I want it to be like. The whole point is that you can only influence what you interact with, but also you never know what you’ll interact with.

That said, I think that people who claim to be able to influence the lives of others without interacting with them directly are on ego trips.

However, I also don’t think that anyone can say anything for certain, as we live in a universe driven by probability, where “spooky action at a distance” is an actual scientific phenomenon.

tl;dr: Spiritual describes how people interact with the world but supernatural describes hypothetical (meta)physical phenomena.

Damn, I checked the last of those boxes last year and I’m not even 30.

I’ve always hated that. I feel like I’m seeing it less and less on newer vehicles, though, so maybe manufacturers are also realizing that it’s stupid as hell.

Or maybe it’s just not worth the cost to have two different but mostly identical versions of a very expensive and highly integrated modern taillight housing for different markets.

It wasn’t just the norm for websites, it was the norm for every single kind of established platform that offered “free” content; see TV, radio, and even our goddamn public roadways.

Apple did not create an ad platform for the iPhone when it was introduced. The iAd platform was introduced in 2010 with the iPhone 4 as “mobile ads done right” (well after Google’s acquisition of AdMob in 2009, and certainly after the iPhone launch in 2007). It was subsequently shut down in 2016.

Developers never needed to “hack” ways to put ads in mobile apps. Mobile ad platforms already existed at the time, and developers were happy to use them extensively once they realized that smartphones were becoming a truly mass-market product (just like TV advertising, imagine that).

“I blame RCA for television ads. If they hadn’t made the first mass-market television set, we wouldn’t have TV ads interrupting my morning cartoons!”

that’s how you sound rn

Well, it was the norm for websites, why would anyone expect it to not transfer over to every other conceivable platform like it has today? The fact that Apple made the first device that allowed people to put adware on a device in your pocket is pure happenstance, and I’m not even sure how true that is given the existence of Blackberry and early Windows Mobile devices.

That said, have you ever heard of WildTangent? Because they’ve been around for a loooong time, and were really attractive to poor and stupid kids like me that really started using the internet circa 2005 and wanted to play computer games.

Again, what are you basing that on? Many websites, games, etc. that had traditionally only been accessible on a desktop/laptop were already primarily using ads for monetization at that point (I should know, I was using a lot of them). Blaming Apple for simply making the first handheld devices capable of running similar software makes absolutely zero sense.