That is a fair point. But then again, I don’t even remember the last time I was in a store that had honest prices.

This is one of those things that makes me feel the slightest bit more agitated and cynical towards people and society. We all know it’s manipulative, and that should be enough reason not to do it. So why does everyone who runs a business do it? Like yeah it does work, but is it really worth subtly eroding your own customer’s trust in you? There’s an invisible cost of goodwill here.

I lean in favor of rebirth, but via naturalistic processes rather than projections of our own moral wants. I don’t need a supernatural explanation to recognize that whatever is most irreducibly “me” was born at least once. Why would I assume it would only be once?

If we follow from that premise, we can also chart a kind of probabilistic, umm, not karma but something not far off: If we’re reborn after death, how do we determine what kind of life our next one is going to be? Pretty obvious actually, just look at what kind of life everyone has already. If, for example, only 1% of humans have an especially good life, it looks like there’s a a really slim chance any one of us is going to be the one who gets to have that kind of life.

By contrast, 99% of humans are living in increasingly bad conditions, lower wages, higher prices and virtually every economic card stacked against us, as well as *gestures broadly*. It’s remarkably more likely that anyone would be reborn as a 99 percenter.

But why should we assume that we would only ever be reborn as a human? The total human population right now is 8.2 billion. There are estimated to be about 20 quadrillion ants in the world. And more than 44 billion animals have been bred into existence and slaughtered for food this year alone. Are you more likely to be reborn a human, an ant, or someone else’s property?

There’s a consequence here if rebirth is the law of the land. It would mean that death is not an escape after all. The only way to give yourself your best chance of a better next life would be to put in effort to make the world better for everyone. There is no way out, only through.

If the hardware can ever be shrunk enough to make even a semi-pocketable x86 handheld, I would be happy if Valve were ever to release a “Steam Deck Mini” or something.

Or maybe their new efforts with ARM support point toward a future of a much more portable Steam-on-Linux-on-ARM device.

It would be more accurate to say it’s like requiring you to make the source code for ZSNES available if you were distributing copies of ZSNES.

What, where do you get that? Any publicly conveyed copies of gpl-licensed software must make their source code available, and be published under the same license. This is true regardless of modifications.

Came in to say this. Linux on ARM is getting so close to daily driver ready.

I know it would have the same issues as the Unreal Engine - all the training, engine building, and systems integration it’d take to get a game released, but I think it’d be cool if Bethesda were to make an Elder Scrolls game on their ID Tech engine. That codebase is pretty celebrated.

Would you care to elaborate on what you feel like when you try living on plants? What do you tend to eat? How long does it take before you start feeling like shit?

Judging by your last comment about it “not hitting the same” my initial thought is that the issue might not even be nutritional, possibly more psychological/subjective.

I don’t, to be perfectly honest the builtin controls are the only part I don’t like. Too heavy, too bulky, terrible dpad, and for me it’s so uncomfortable to use the LR bumpers that I almost always remap them to the back paddles.

The last straw with consoles for me was when they all started charging money regularly just to play online multiplayer games.

My Steam Deck makes for a better console-like experience than any of the major consoles, and more. I have zero interest in going back to Sony or especially Nintendo’s scams.

In my work customers will randomly hand me Bible tracts maybe 1-3 times a month. I graciously accept them despite knowing I very much disagree with their religion, give a warm thank you, pocket it, later on read it one time as a rule, throw it away, and then move on with my life.

The majority of them are pretty standard stuff, blah blah blah, don’t go to hell, get saved yeah yeah yeah. Sometimes though, someone will give the most amazing tracts - they’re in the form of whole tiny comic books, and they have these wild stories about the Catholics and the pope being the Antichrist. Fascinating stuff.

Anyway, people who have other beliefs exist. Sure it’s annoying, and that person was in the wrong for persisting when you clearly indicated you weren’t interested, but also it sounds like you brought a lot of negativity to that interaction in the first place as well.

In western civilization everything is low risk until we’ve come too far to avert calamity. Before the 2008 financial crisis, every institution that played a role would have you believe everything was great, right up until everything was falling apart.

With global warming we always had, and still struggle against entirely too many people, and lying institutional vested interests, downplaying or disbelieving how serious of a global catastrophe climate change is forming into.

The only reason h5n1 is “low risk” at the current time is because it’s not yet a human-to-human calamity that is already too far underway to put a stop to. We all saw how badly we all collectively handled covid.

We are now at mammal to mammal transmission, and humans are also mammals. The only actual difference between low risk, and full on pandemic, at this point, is patient zero.

You should really go back to the article and read the whole thing, as well as others that are linked to in it. Because in this one the WHO describes it as an enormous concern, because it is.

https://www.sciencealert.com/who-warns-growing-spread-of-bird-flu-to-humans-is-enormous-concern

Right, the difference in immune benefit is so crystal clear for everyone who makes the switch, not even considering the other myriad benefits like heart health, diabetes reversal/mitigation, weight loss, and mental health benefits.

Eating the flesh of an animal is not good for anyone. It’s not good for the animal who was abused their whole life and murdered. It’s not good for the environment. It’s not good for all the beings who get sick from pathogens because of it. And it’s not even good for the human animal who consumes the other animal’s flesh.

No, no it would not be beneficial. That would be the opposite of beneficial (unless it’s plant-based steak).

If anyone wants help going vegan, I’d be happy to help. Even if it’s infeasible to get enough people in the world to stop eating animals fast enough to avert the next pandemic, there is evidence that people who eat plant-based have better outcomes from getting sick, as well as just getting sick less in general. Not to mention getting animal products out of your homes reduces one of the vectors through which pathogens can spread. So at the very least you’d be giving yourself your own best chance (just keep in mind it’s no replacement for vaccinations!)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=047C-mMQpSE

I’m nearly as far from an expert on infectious diseases as it gets, but - and if anyone who knows about influenza reproduction can chime in - I remember reading that influenza has incredible abilities to mutate wildly and recombine. The analogy was like, if human reproduction is like taking two decks of cards and randomly shuffling half of each deck together, then influenza is like taking any number of decks, randomly chopping up and re-splicing portions of random individual cards together, as well as resorting all of them back together without any regard for whether the results are going to even produce anything that can live or not. But the reproductions and randomizations are so voluminous that it doesn’t matter - at least some of it will stick.

In other words, in addition to the wildly rapid mutation capabilities these viruses have - if you have animals that are carrying more than one strain of influenza simultaneously, those two or more strains can produce hybrids.

But again: citation needed.