rand_alpha19

Same here! I’m Canadian and, while we may have a snap election at any time given the current situation, our next scheduled federal election isn’t for almost a year.

I still find it so baffling that red states are limiting the number of polling places to make it as inconvenient as possible to vote. Surely that reduces the willingness to vote of their own base too. Given the electoral college, jerrymandering, and voter roll purges, you’d think they’d be satisfied with how things are rigged already without resorting to blatant disenfranchisement.

It would be cool for you guys to have a viable third party, so you should try to make that a reality outside of just voting if you can. I’m sure they would appreciate a donation or another volunteer after the election and local efforts are often more meaningful long-term since they help create the grassroots support that leads to national viability.

Lead levels in consumer products are now regulated to the point where they’re negligible in terms of the effects on human health, so lead levels in consumer products are safe. We know the toxic level of fluoride; an adult would basically have to eat 2+ full tubes of toothpaste (which has more fluoride than tap water) to die/experience severe side effects and so your concern is not proportional to the actual level of risk.

The wordplay is funny, but that actually doesn’t sound too bad. Especially if they make their own pickles.

So I’ll preface this by saying I’m a late 20s Canadian who attended elementary school from 2001-2009, but we weren’t taught phonics (the actual system), we were taught about word sounds.

A lot of my classmates were on their own if they didn’t immediately “get it.” Also, it was encouraged to skip words if you didn’t know them and then try to guess what they were based on the context of the sentence. Lots of wrong guesses happened and those kids got laughed at.

I found it incredibly concerning as a kid because there were a ton of weaker readers who could barely get through a single sentence. This is still happening, even if it’s not in your child’s school, and that should concern you. These kids will grow up thinking they’re stupid when they just needed different tools like your son has.

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“Were you dropped on your head as a child? That would just add to my problems.”

Without any context it almost sounds like he was hoping to nationalize a chip company. Knowing Trump, he means that only the “bad” chip companies (i.e., he can’t name them so they don’t matter) were incentivized by the act to build in America.

Wow, that’s really frustrating. It’s annoying that a (probably well-paid) teacher can’t bother to figure out if it’s a kid’s real work versus stock teaching materials. As someone who clearly demonstrated ADHD symptoms as a kid that were never identified in a classroom setting or at home, I think this (not recognizing or caring about a student’s personality or individual needs) is unfortunately something endemic to teaching.

It can be upsetting to realize that, while we do have public education that often tries its best, parents are largely left with no support if their kid is a bit different from normal, and if a parent isn’t aware of their kid’s needs that just means the kid is on their own. At the least, you are a very present parent and your daughter has you on her side - for example, my parents would have just let the students and teachers at the in-person school bully me because of the hassle of changing schools.

I hope the stress from this doesn’t affect her too much. Congrats to her on the 100% after this mess was sorted out.

Yeah, that’s why I specifically mentioned dividends. A lot of executives are also paid bonuses on their salaries based on stock performance, so they can “double dip” in these cases too. This is on top of lobbying for deregulation.

Must be great to not have to worry about money and be able to simply fire other people if it ever becomes a concern; it just further goes to show that these people don’t actually add value to even their own companies.

Ah, I see. That’s definitely not my experience; snacks take like 10+ minutes and are usually the reason if I’m late to the show.

Billionaires mean that workers are exploited and underpaid somewhere in the chain. Support for billionaires means support for exploitation and resource extraction from actual workers (and the government initiatives and representatives they pay for).

Their money doesn’t come from nowhere, it comes from us. It comes from income taxes spent on subsidies, it comes from stock dividends paid for by mass layoffs, it comes from not having to pay a commensurate fine when hundreds of thousands of gallons of pollutants leak into the water we drink and fish in.

“Absolutely supporting billionaires” is a decidedly uninformed position.

Welcome to Debian! Listen to @[email protected], that’s the easy advice.

Has arriving at the specified showtime not worked out for you? Usually that’s enough time for me to get there, use the washroom, get snacks, and sit down before the movie actually starts. But I don’t go to the theatre often or usually see movies when they first come out.

If you check this list and this list, many games on Steam will actually launch without Steam running. I don’t think I can say the same for a lot of other platforms, excluding GOG and itch, of course.

I don’t disagree with you about why it exists and that it’s bad, but the fact remains that it does exist and Remedy and Epic, as companies, need to face that when making these decisions and factor that into sales projections accordingly. They should have known what they were getting into, and forcing people into using Epic isn’t really the answer to the lock-in problem anyway.

Edit: Turns out a bunch of other platforms have DRM-free games too, TIL.

I wonder how many Americans are going to go to Thanksgiving dinner with all of their family and lie about who they voted for because they don’t want to talk about how they don’t see anyone but cisgender men as real human beings.

Respectfully, using Epic means using yet another platform. I have games spread across Steam, GOG, itch, Amazon, Ubisoft, and probably at least one more. If I buy a game on Epic, chances are I’ll forget about it, so I don’t bother.

This isn’t to mention that the one game I do have on Epic, GTA V, has 3 different launchers when used through Epic (when it wants to actually open). It doesn’t do anything Steam doesn’t and doesn’t do many of the things Steam does. I don’t even really love Steam either, because it crashes constantly on Debian for me, but I already have 500+ games there and it’s got ~20 years on Epic. I’m also a Linux user, so Proton is essentially one of the only ways I can reliably play most of my library.

Platform lock-in should be a consideration for companies, even though it sucks, because it’s an objective reflection of the reality of the games industry. Remedy knew that they would have fewer players going Epic-exclusive but seemed to underestimate to what degree that might hurt sales; this past couple of years have been sort of bad for the average person, so maybe they used previous sales data that didn’t really account for lower levels of consumer spending.

The game wouldn’t have been a massive success even with 30% more money than what they ended up earning. They didn’t want to pay the fee so they didn’t, that’s their choice and they were free to make it; the result isn’t Valve’s fault, they weren’t involved at all. When it’s on GOG or Steam, maybe I’ll buy it on sale, but at this point there’s no reason to lock myself into another janky platform. I did this with Control: the GOG version of Control is great and I don’t have to use Epic.

My parents (who are nearly 70-year-old computer users, by the way, and threw away their 2010 Apple laptop in 2015 because it essentially stopped functioning) absolutely don’t have the technical knowledge to do something like this. I think you may be vastly overestimating the average user.

Learn what a cuck is before making Baby’s First Meme.

Cuck booth? I just want one site where there are no teenagers, oh my God.