Two starches can be magnificent - it’s hard to beat a good chip butty.

I think it mostly depends on the community. There are people from all over the world on here, and different groups have different demographics.

Unless you’re using a server that’s super-picky in its federation, I can’t see that the server makes much of a difference.

FWIW, the UK currently has a bill in place that will lower the voting age to 16 before the next General Election (so, before Aug 2029).

I think it’ll be a good thing. Young people are a good deal more aware of what’s happening in the country than old people are. I mean, the current arrangement has stripped away the housing and career prospects of young people and brought us to the verge of fascism again.

For information based things, absolutely.

Something that people don’t seem to understand is that there’s a difference between AI and GenAI.

And that within GenAI, there’s low cost stuff like text and graphics, and high cost like video and audio.

And that with tools developed with GenAI often do not use GenAI when it is run.

AI is super useful and you use it in a bunch of applications already without even realising it. The camera that interprets speed signs and displays them on your dashboard = AI. Spam filters = AI. Google translate = AI.

I don’t know what you think my greater point was, maybe you’ve accidentally conflated me with another poster.

My point actually is that these are not unprecedented rates. These are entirely precedented rates. This is gross capitalism destroying the world as gross capitalism always does. What you’ve lost sight of, though, is the respective scale of things.

As I said, the US alone needlessly wastes vastly more energy and water than the entire world’s usage of AI consumes. For energy, it’s several times more, for water it’s orders of magnitude more.

You make out that solving these massive problems is impossible, so instead you’re railing against AI. Which of course is your prerogative, but just remember that there are much bigger wins out there.

There is a point there, though.

American cars are much less efficient than European ones.

The amount of water required for AI data centres worldwide is more than an order of magnitude lower than the water required for just corn in the US alone. Only a small fraction of which actually gets used for food.

The average energy usage per person in the US is nearly three times higher than someone in the UK.

The environmental cost of data centres is absolutely a concern, but we shouldn’t forget the US alone wastes more energy and resources than are used by data centres worldwide.

This was my immediate thought too.

OP - it’s not that uncommon, and is totally treatable.

It’s just some muscles involuntary tensing up as a result of something going inside (or sometimes even the idea). Unfortunately, because it’s an involuntary reflex, you can’t “just relax” it away. It’s just something your body needs to unlearn.

Talk to your doctor, follow their advice.

For what it’s worth, both of the people I knew who had it when they were younger, once it was sorted, it stayed sorted.

Survivor bias is definitely a major factor here - I can vaguely remember at least a dozen sitcoms from my childhood and early adulthood that didn’t survive (or got soft-rebooted into something better).

We do capitalise community names though - like deaf vs Deaf.

This is the same, it’s not being used as a description of how someone looks, but to what community they belong.

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I won’t touch on the points covered by the other replies because they’ve explained it perfectly. I think you’re confused about the divorce thing, though.

It was King Henry VIII who founded the church of England to allow him to get a divorce. But his version of the church was essentially identical to Catholicism but with the king instead of the pope.

His great great grandson, King James VI / I actually cared about religion and reforming the church. He supported the idea that everyone should be able to actually understand the scripture, instead of just the elites and clergy. That’s why he sponsored the King James Bible. He was also very anti-Catholic and, as a direct result, was targeted in the Gunpowder Plot.

I sometimes wonder what became of them. I like to think they finally bought a second cup so they didn’t have to share anymore.

Putting all patriotism aside, I don’t think there’s any reality in which the US uses its potential to make the world a better place.

The big difference nowadays is that it’s become patently clear that the US government isn’t even trying to make the US a better place.

The truth is that, by any normal definition, Republicans are far right and Democrats are centre right.

If you actually wanted to run a progressive platform, then running as an Independent might be your only choice.

In the UK at least, most Independent candidates run single-issue platforms. Hartlepool famously elected a guy dressed as a monkey as mayor, he ran on a platform of “free bananas for school children”. He did so well as mayor, they elected him two more times.

Another costumed independent, Count Binface (an intergalactic space warrior who wears a dustbin on his head) beat the far-right Britain First party in the London Mayoral election (although sadly didn’t win the actual mayorship).

The PS3 hit, Fat Princess.

Cool fantasy setting, much fighting, clear objectives (princess kidnapping) - perfect LARP stuff.

Plus whoever is the princess gets to be fed cake all day.

People die.

In cases where someone meets an unfortunate grizzly end, like being eaten, there’s an obvious reason. But more often than not, people just stop being alive.

Imagine you have no knowledge of science, how would you explain this? An hour ago, this body could move, could breathe, could do normal things. Now it can’t.

Something has changed. Something is missing. What was once a person is now a thing, a body.

It stands to reason that the missing bit is the key to what makes people human. It’s clearly not a physical thing - the body looks the same - so it must be something intangible.

Tie this to the fact that people are very good at detecting other people around them. We’re especially good at sensing when we’re being watched (in person, not through cameras, obviously). We also find ourselves in situations where we feel like we’re being watched when no one possibly can be watching.

So we have a fundamental element of human-ness as something intangible, and we also have situations where it feels like someone is there when there’s no-one around.

It wouldn’t take a massive leap to associate the two.

Once you have human spirits established as a fact, it’s not such a stretch to imagine other intangible beings are responsible for other unexplainable elements of the world - the weather, crop yields, health, fertility, etc.

Both produced in South Korea? 🤷‍♂️

I mean, the red robes and glowing orb do have a certain appeal.

The world (or at least the Anglosphere) has always called the # symbol the hash sign. I have no idea why Americans called it the pound sign - most places call the £ symbol the pound sign.

The term “hashtag” was not invented by an American. For the rest of us this makes sense - it’s a tag denoted by a hash sign - but I can see how it seemingly came out of nowhere if you used different words.

I’ll admit, I didn’t know the Supreme Court had said that.

It’s an insane interpretation - and I see that many justices said so at the time.

I guess whether or not the writers of the amendment actually meant every able-bodied man when they wrote “well-regulated militia”, or whether they meant a militia, is impossible to know for sure.

But to say that the word meant something different at the time is patently untrue. Around the English speaking world at that time, local militias - with that specific word used - were used to keep order. It was a common word for an actual thing people would have been familiar with.