My armchair prediction is that even if Democrats manage to gain back control of power in the US, many countries will now be skeptical of entering any arrangements with them for longer than 2-4 years. US voters have now shown a propensity for electing and re-electing a leader that is able to come in and comprehensively dismantle decades of intense diplomacy and geopolitical navigation in a short period of time. As such, wise leaders of other nations won’t be willing to enter long-term arrangements that last beyond a given administration anymore.
As an Australian who has never studied Agatha Christie in any context, I literally had no clue what the censored word was. I was, and am, appreciative of the context that was provided by other commenters. Be careful when you make blanket statements like “we all knew what the book was”, because you’ll almost always be confidently incorrect.
What the fork did you just fricking say about me, you little bench? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed pewpews. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the flip out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fudging words. You think you can get away with saying that spit to me over the Internet? Think again, fuddler. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, misanthrope. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your “life”. You’re finking done, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can booboo you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable bumbum off the face of the continent, you little shirt. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your franken tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goshdarned silly. I will poop fury all over you and you will swim in it. You’re fully dumped, kiddo.
That’s a perfectly reasonable viewpoint to hold, though sadly from a pragmatic perspective all it does is maintains the power imbalance between employers and employees. I’d love to live in a world where I don’t have to commit fraud in order to get a decent job but, for as long as I do, I probably will.
While I totally agree with you, it’s important to note that LLMs are decidedly not part of the evolution of AGI. They’re a separate piece of technology on their own branch. An LLM could never feasibly be developed into AGI. The development of AGI is going on in the background, as you said in a slow grind, but those researchers are not working on LLMs nor are LLM programmers working towards AGI.
most cops don't live near their precincts anymore - these people aren't their neighbors. They're 'outsiders' who they don't need to imagine as human beings.
This can be a little bit of a double-edged sword. Working in social services, I’ve heard numerous cases of children disclosing parental abuse to a cop who says words to the effect of “I know your Dad, he’s a good man and wouldn’t do that. Let me take you home and tell him everything you just disclosed to me” or women who try to report domestic violence only to be faced with a similar outcome.
I don’t think there’s an optimal distance for cops to live from their precincts. The only panacea seems to be defunding them.
Source? Not trying to aggravate or anything, but I just haven’t seen any statistics that bear that out. This report from Pew Research in 2025 suggests that married women are roughly split:
Married men and women are more likely to identify with or lean toward the Republican Party than their unmarried counterparts, with 59% of married men and half of married women oriented toward the GOP.
The image above this statement shows 45% of married women are Democrat-aligned whereas 50% of married women are Republican-aligned.
It’s a difficult and tetchy issue at the best of times, but I’ve got to say I’m also in the camp that believes that issues of difference need to be worked on from both sides. My partner has ADHD and often interrupts me, which is a pretty big trigger for my CPTSD, so we work through that together as best we can. I know that she struggles to control interrupting me, just as she knows that I struggle to control getting triggered when she does so. We have a common understanding and both work on being accommodating to each others’ needs. Over time, we’ve struck a great balance that works well by meeting each other in the middle as best we can.
I also have coeliac disease. While I get frustrated that many restaurants, events, friends’ houses etc. don’t have gluten free options, I also understand that it’s my responsibility to manage my disease. Sometimes that means bringing my own food; sometimes that means going hungry. I can’t walk through the world demanding that everyone provide an experience that caters to my disease (like a good number of coeliacs do). I would feel selfish doing so.
Society is a co-op game. We all have our strengths and weaknesses; our abilities and disabilities; our positives and negatives. We all have to make accommodations to one another to achieve the best outcome for everyone. None of us have the right to dictate that others cater to us unless we’re also willing to cater to them.
As a side note; ADHD does not imply that a person is neurologically unable to understand social cues. Other forms of neurodivergence experience this to varying degrees, but that’s not an immutable criteria of ADHD.
These are words you can use on the Fediverse. You don’t need to self-censor with words like ‘unalive’ because there’s no corporate algorithm, no shadowbanning and no de-prioritising content based on language. There’s no need to import TikTok/Instagram newspeak.
Depends on the store. I worked at a big box hardware store and every public holiday you’d have old geezers just milling about wanting to strike up a 30 minute conversation with you about some esoteric project they’ve been working on for the last six months while you’re frantically mixing four different customer’s custom paint colours and trying to point other customers in the direction of things that have huge signs already directing customers to.
How I would love to offer an extremely exclusive and expensive product or service and have a billionaire approaching me trying to get it for free, to be able to say “Oh, I’m sorry, can you not afford it? We only offer this to people who have enough money to pay for it. I’m sure if you work hard, one day you’ll earn enough money to come back and give this a try!”
Nothing would hurt a fragile billionaire’s ego more than insinuating that they’re poor. Their entire lives and identities revolve around being rich and to take that away from them, even for a few seconds, would haunt them for many years to come.
It’s a real privilege to know that your vote can never be cast away, wasted or exhausted. I’ve literally never voted for the two biggest parties as my #1 choice, but my vote usually ends up with whomever I preference higher. In Australia we also give a candidate/party election funding based only on #1 votes, if they reach a certain quota, so even when my vote ends up with Labor (our major centre-left/centrist party) I’m actively contributing to the election coffers of a smaller party or independent and sending a message to the major parties.
And then you look at democracies with more pluralistic forms of voting and Green parties actually have decent representation. Here in Australia they teeter between being the third and fourth largest party (depending on the jurisdiction) and have been in governing coalitions a good number of times. Mandatory voting + ranked choice voting + proportional representative voting really changes things.
I’d go one step further to say that empathy and compassion aren’t actually alien concepts to them - they know full well what they are. Empathy and compassion are signs of weakness to them. Empathy and compassion are evils to them. Empathy and compassion are anathema to their worldview. Empathy and compassion are for those whom they hunt.
They view themselves as amoral apex predators, able to take what they want under ‘might makes right’. They aren’t all psychopaths - they’re sociopaths who selectively choose towards whom they feel empathy and compassion. They’re cognisant of this and view it as their strength. They’re fucking malevolent.
My armchair prediction is that even if Democrats manage to gain back control of power in the US, many countries will now be skeptical of entering any arrangements with them for longer than 2-4 years. US voters have now shown a propensity for electing and re-electing a leader that is able to come in and comprehensively dismantle decades of intense diplomacy and geopolitical navigation in a short period of time. As such, wise leaders of other nations won’t be willing to enter long-term arrangements that last beyond a given administration anymore.