I think the Simpsons summarized this best

Marge holding up a new baby on board sticker

Look what I got. Now people will stop intentionally ramming our car.

I think the comment you are replying to is not about the unordered list — but your use of em dash.

See the above sentence for an example

He likely has narcissistic personality disorder and so this is less an act and more a mask, a shield. The person he’s protecting the most is himself, he needs to be this facade.

I found this video really quite fascinating about what it’s like caring for a dying narcissist. Whatever family that remains hold out hope that as death itself nears the narcissist might finally let down their guard and show their true self. Apparently the opposite happens.

https://youtu.be/FavgHrxc6oY

Neat, I appreciate your insight. Upvote from me and today I learned.

Yea I tend to think than when someone identifies as a Libertarian they almost certainly don’t mean a civil libertarian, which is how the aclu actually identifies themselves.

We have grown from a roomful of civil libertarians to more than 4 million members, activists, and supporters across the country. The ACLU is now a nationwide organization with a 50-state network of staffed affiliate offices filing cases in both state and federal courts. We appear before the Supreme Court more than any other organization except the Department of Justice.

This is literally the only time the word libertarian appears in their own history https://www.aclu.org/about/aclu-history

Liberal policies are an actual thing, a thing that leftists frequently disagree with.

Libertarians are often placed on the right part of the left-right divide. The fact you’ve chosen the label libertarian instead of conservative is animated by the exact same “purity test” that you find so silly.

If I were your partner, although it might not feel like it in the moment, the sooner the better.

If you aren’t going to commit to them, that’s your choice to make, but free them up to find someone that will. Every ounce of love and time and attention they pay you from the moment you make the decision to leave until you find the gumption to do it is a waste for them. The most respectful thing you can do is not waste the precious and finite moments of their life.

Let them know what you’ve decided. Have the courage to tell them plainly and honestly that you are leaving and that you won’t be the person to love them. Let them get over you so they can find the person that will love them.

And don’t you dare double back unless you mean to stay. If you stay do it because it’s what you want not because you feel bad. That partner is a human being, one that deserves the truth and to be loved. If you can’t do that, or don’t want to do that, that’s your choice.

This is the least we owe our partners, to be honest with them, to love them or let them find love elsewhere.

I know you are getting a lot of downvotes. Choosing to leave someone you love is not a popular opinion. I could not do it and I think most couldn’t. In time I suspect you will find one of two things to be true.

• You will find someone you truly love and you will recognize that this relationship had affection and care but was different.
• You will find that what was out there wasn’t worth what you gave up, that this was love, and you will wish you had it back

This is life though, the hard decisions, and only you get to make them. I hope you make a good one, and above all, if you want to be a decent human being, treat your partner well. If that means standing by their side in love, great. If that means being honest with them so that they can be happy, also fine. Just don’t lie to them, don’t be needlessly mean in ending it, have the courage of your convictions and tell them the plain simple truth. Don’t make up a reason that feels better, don’t blame them for the relationship falling apart, don’t trick them into hating you.

You owe them that at least.

Explain your situation then.

Sounds to me like you love your partner and they love you. You’d like to leave to go have other life experiences.

It’s pretty easy, which do you value more, the love you have for your partner or these life experiences you could have?

I don’t know you, but my guess is that if you are thinking about it enough to want to find an answer, then you already have your answer. You value the life experiences more, you care about your partner, and you don’t want to hurt them.

I’ve been married to my wife for over a decade now, I love her with all my heart, I can’t think of any kind of life experience that would make me want to leave her. I imagine that love is not a binary on or off type thing that there are degrees and kinds of love. It’s very well possible that you love your partner but not enough to want to stay together forever.

This is really a question that only you can answer. Which do you want to do, it’s your one life, you get to choose. But don’t stay with your partner because you are afraid of hurting them because if that’s why you stay, you will become bitter and resentful and the idea of “what could of been” will always be this perfect thing that they kept from you.

Stay because you want to stay or leave because you’d rather leave.

In general you can’t be responsible for someone else’s emotions.

If you were having a casual relationship and the other person has big feelings you don’t reciprocate, that sucks but it’s not your fault.

If, however, you reciprocate those feelings, or pretended to and led them on, then you do bear some responsibility.

The actual salient question though is if you love this person that loves you. If not, you aren’t doing them any favors stringing them along. That person deserves to be loved like anyone else and you will be causing them more harm than good if you pretend you love them just to save them some heartbreak.

The correct course of action is to be honest about how you feel and also recognize how your partner feels. Whether or not you intended them to fall in love with you, recognize that that is significant and your loss in their life will be painful. There’s no two ways about that, so be kind and compassionate to your partner.

But do not fool yourself into thinking that what’s right is to just keep them around because you don’t want to break their hearts. If they love you, they want to be loved back, and if you can’t do that that’s fine.

Pretending you love them so you won’t hurt them will cause the greatest pain of all.

I’m neurodivergent, let me take a crack at this.

First off, disclaimer, autism is a massive spectrum so this whole thing is a gross generalization.

Neurodivergent people act differently than neurotypical people for 3 broad categories of reasons

• different stimuli processing
• different thinking patterns
• different skills

First, is stimuli processing. Have you ever been in a crowded room and there’s lots of people talking but your brain does you a cool favor and ignores all that noise so you can focus on the person in front of you? Did you do anything to make that happen, probably not. It’s just a thing your brain did for you when processing all that stimuli, you placed your focus on the speaker in front of you and your brain filtered the rest. What if you couldn’t do that?

Stimuli processing issues can present in both dimensions, both over processing and under processing. Neurodivergent people are often placed into situations that are relatively easy for neurotypical people to process but can be very challenging for neurodivergent people to process. If you want to do a thought experiment (or actual experiment) select a stimuli you can’t ignore, pinch yourself hard every few seconds and try to carry on a conversation. You will notice it takes a lot more energy to focus on your tasks and ignore this unwanted stimuli.

Second, different thinking patterns. We all process the world differently. Neurodivergent people can have very different ways of processing information, I know first hand of three patterns that are common and that I exhibit.

• Perseveration. Perseveration is when you can’t stop thinking about a topic. Kinda like getting a song stuck in your head, but for me it’s having a difficult technical problem and literally being unable to carry out other functions because I can’t keep my brain from working on it. I wake up at 4am thinking about technical problems and then can’t go back to sleep. A puzzle might be a fun diversion for you, it can be a dangerous trap for me where I know my brain will continually turn it over again and again no matter what I want.
• Hyper literal thinking. I think about things in very black and white terms. It can be very frustrating for things to happen outside of the rules I’ve established. There are rules that make obvious sense and the contravention of those rules is distressing. For example, you aren’t supposed to hurt people’s feeling but you also aren’t supposed to lie, this makes white lies distressing (I find all kinds of deception distressing, and it’s amazing how much you are just supposed to lie to people in many social situations).
• Hyper focus. Neurodivergent people often have special interests that they can focus on for extended periods of time. If people were to leave me alone, I could write code for days, only stopping when hunger or some other undeniable physical pain occurs.

Third, different skills. Frequently neurodivergent people find social skills difficult. I said to someone recently that neurotypical people seem completely insane to me. The complex web of contradicting rules make little sense. On top of this, rules are often predicated on being able to ascertain the feelings of the person you are interacting with. Many neurodivergent people find this difficult to impossible.

The best I’ve been able to come up with is it’s like being color blind. I struggle with understanding facial expressions, body language, tone, etc. I also have problem displaying the correct things in kind. To operate in the world, many neurodivergent people adopt a system of “masking” where we learn what we are “supposed to do” and carefully study people and make sure to make our faces look right and make our bodies look correct. This is extremely taxing even if you get it right, so neurodivergent people end up sometimes getting it wrong and also spending a huge amount of energy doing this.

So to sum up. Neurodivergent people are asked to operate in a world that is constantly bombarding us with negative stimuli, spending extra energy trying to understand social signals that come naturally to others but our brains don’t pick up. Following these weird scripts requires a ton of energy and it’s easy to mess it up and then someone wonders “why are autistic people so weird?”

I still remember being taught about how politics is America is a pendulum.

It swings too far to the right and people get pissed and send it leftward. Then it swings too far to the left and people get pissed and send it rightward.

I have waited my entire life for the swing leftward, and I think I identified what broke America.

Let’s say that this pendulum swinging is necessary, we are a pack of goldfish swinging from left to right looking for something good with short short memories. This system can be metastable, you don’t make a ton of progress on anything but you just sorta bounce between the two sides and the status quo sticks around and you don’t slide into madness.

When 9/11 happened and Ws war on terror emerged, I worried that it would break the system. But in 2008, Obama emerged with a progressive message of hope and change. The pendulum I was told about was about to swing left. I had lived through the right swing of Ws time in office, and now I got to see what the left had to offer (which as a leftist was very exciting).

I watched two phenomenons happen concurrently that broke the system.

1. Obama captured the leftward energy that should have swung us back to the left and held it solidly in the center / center-right. He ran as a progressive firebrand and then governed from the center / center right. The big hop and change we got was nationwide Romneycare, a program devised by the Heritage Foundation which has done nothing but entrench the powers of the insurance industry into law.
2. Racism broke a large part of the voting public away from reality.

Obama wasn’t the first to do this, Clinton’s triangulation strategy was also a democrat governing from the center.

So we have a captured Democratic Party, beholden to the donor class and they capture the periodic leftswing energy and hold it center / center-right. Things fail to get better and the population goes “well fuck the left doesn’t have any answers, let’s swing the pendulum back the other way”

Over time the result is that the Overton window shifts and shifts and shifts until an oligarch is doing nazi salutes and the corporate media is going “oh he probably isnt really doing a nazi thing, he’s just advancing policies that nazis would love and saying things nazis would say and is excited and you know how hard it is to not do a nazi salute when you are excited.”

Our only hope now is that trump doesn’t slowly boil us into fascism and overplays and the people revolt. But Americans have proven to be willing to just take it in the ass rougher and longer than I’d ever imagine.

The best thing everyone can do is just tune out this bullshit.

MAGA is what happens when edge lords grow up. They love laughing at people freaking out over every dumb thing they do.

During the first trump term I watched the news, I got angry at every thing he did, his supporters lapped that outrage up.

This time fuck it. Rename the Gulf of Mexico to trumps big boy bathtub if you want. Enjoy it MAGA people, enjoy all your epic trolls but I won’t be on the other side getting upset. And then enjoy when the tariffs make your construction business unprofitable. Enjoy when his bungling jacks up prices sky high and you can’t buy bananas anymore because he threatened to nuke the countries that grow them for reasons no one can identify.

This term they can just enjoy the fucking mess they’ve made and I’m not going to give them any satisfaction in getting upset and yelling at the village idiot to not play with fireworks. Go ahead, blow your fucking fingers off dumbass.

USA USA USA

Quick note on this one

Pedestrians are not expected to look out for traffic, but are not allowed to just cross anywhere. So it balances out.

If you end up driving, pedestrians are not allowed to cross anywhere (although some places like New York have legalized crossing anywhere) but pedestrians always have the right of way. You can’t run people over because they crossed outside a crosswalk.

So if on foot, use crosswalks or you could get a ticket for jaywalking. If in a vehicle, don’t hit pedestrians.

Why would you complete a game when you can make a constant stream of income and increase that income stream with announcements and drip feeds.

Look at this madness https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals

The title in the image

American checking in, this was also how I was taught to pluralize throughout my education.

The usage in the post title seemed correct to me fwiw

The heat generated by a dumpster fire would not be good for forging steel.

Forging steel requires a minimum temperature of 900F

This scam ad is also something that if you showed it to anyone that knows anything about metallurgy would get you laughed at.

Lucky for you the wikimedia foundation files annual reports https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2022-2023-annual-report/

I think this is the latest one available.

As to whether they need your money or not I’m a bit conflicted. They have raised and spent more and more money every year. They have a lot of money and some have argued they spend it poorly.

On the whole though, besides asking for donations, they have maintained their goal of being ad free. If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.

I think for myself as someone that has worked as a software engineer for my entire life building out massive infrastructure that is on a similar scale to Wikipedia, I don’t really know how they justify such high development spend when the tech isn’t really evolving very much. I’m sure it’s not cheap to host, so that spend is fine by me, but I’m not sure what all they are building. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, I just have a hard time imagining it.

I would encourage you to look at numbers and decide if they make sense to you. Also people have written on the subject, so some googling will likely bring you to more opinionated pieces than my own.

If I can’t take things I see on the internet at face value then I’ll also have to discount your completely unsupported assertion that “someone just slapped a caption on this picture”