Does your Aunt get paid rent from the people living in those houses? Is that rent more than it costs to own and maintain the properties? Yeah, thought so. Yes, your aunt is a parasite. She is extracting profit from other people simply by virtue of being the one to own the property that she doesn’t live in. She isn’t providing value, she’s restricting access.

She may be a lovely lady the rest of the time, I’m sure she lives a vibrant and full life elsewhere, but that doesn’t change what she’s doing. Nobody owns “a couple of houses as an investment” if they’re not making money off of them, and they’re only making money by extracting it from the people who have to rent.

This is one of those cases just begging for Jury Nullification.

Because they’ve been fooled into thinking it will either benefit them, or benefit people they feel “deserve it.”

Alaska has Ranked Choice voting.

The existence of other candidates is not the same thing as any of them having the slimmest chance in hell of winning, and the way our cursed voting system works, they’re going to end up drawing votes away from the “major” candidate that most closely aligns with them. As a result, the “major” candidate they most oppose has one less vote they need to overcome. That means that until and unless a 3rd party candidate manages to completely overshadow one of the major political parties, which is effectively never going to happen, a 3rd party vote is just one more vote your most opposed candidate doesn’t need to beat.

And no, 3rd parties are not going to overshadow the major parties. It’s just not going to happen. Look at the absolute dogshit circus that is Trump, look at how many lifelong Republicans have vowed to never vote for him, how he’s absolutely obliterated any little shred of legitimacy the GOP had as a governing party. Now recognize that with that utterly weakened, vulnerable position, that best chance ever, no 3rd party has managed to even come close to unseating them as one of the inevitable 2 contenders. If it hasn’t happened now, it won’t happen ever, not with FPTP voting.

Sure, but they’re not asking you before they do it. If one candidate has gone on record saying a certain demographic should have their rights stripped, and there’s a district that is populated by mainly that demographic, they don’t need to poll the area to guess who’s going to lose that district.

Because certain people with power find it advantageous to make it difficult for the people in certain areas to vote. If you know that district isn’t going to vote for you, and morality is a thing that happens to other people, you could make the polling place too small with too few workers.

It’s not Insane, it’s just wrong. People who can’t afford bail can generally get a bail bond, which will front the cost in exchange for the defendant paying about 10% IIRC. The thinking is that people who aren’t considered a flight risk, and aren’t a risk to the community, shouldn’t be imprisoned until there’s a guilty verdict, and putting money on the line that they lose if they don’t show up to court will encourage them to show up.

On the surface, it’s not an insane thought. It’s just… wrong. It just doesn’t really work. In practice it really does just disproportionately punish those who are already suffering, while also making it possible for the wealthy to further escape any consequences.

My opinion is only that I’m not going to get attached, guy’s probably not going to be here long. That’s all.

Pissy that the Ambassador didn’t involve Republicans in a tour, while Republicans have been doing everything they can to force the Ambassador’s home country to lose a war of aggression against them.

Why the fuck WOULD the Ambassador invite Republicans?

For my part, I don’t have all of my fingers scanned into the reader (Which is on the power button), so it’s easy to just use a different finger in the event that I want to access my lock screen specifically.

I do full size candy bars, but I’ll also drop a handful of loose candy corn instead into the bag of someone who’s clearly too old.

Technically it’s possible, but it’s neither probable nor likely, and it’s especially not effective. From what I understand, a lot of devs who do try to use something like ChatGPT to write code end up spending as much or more time debugging it, and just generally trying to get it to work, than they would have if they’d just written it themselves. Additionally, you have to know how to code to be able to figure out why it’s not working, and even when all of that is done, it’s almost impossible to get it to integrate with a larger project without just rewriting the whole thing anyway.

So to answer the question you intend to ask, no, LLMs will not be replacing programmers any time soon. They may serve as a tool of dubious value, but the idea that programmers will be replaced is only taken seriously by by people who manage programmers, and not the programmers themselves.

Excretion does remove thermal energy from the body, but it also removes mass, and as a result your heat to mass ratio doesn’t change in any meaningful way.

“Keeping it in” would technically make your body temperature slower to change (Up or down) because there is slightly more mass to heat or cool. Excreting would technically make your body temperature slightly more susceptible to change, again because there is less mass to heat or cool. But really, those changes are inconsequential.

The actual cooling would occur on intake, not excretion. When you drink cold water, your body heat will dissipate into that water until the temperatures match, resulting in a slight reduction in temperature.

So in summary, excretion itself does nothing to cool you down, even though it’s taking thermal energy away, but the entire cycle of drinking cold water, heating it in the body, and then excreting it would reduce body temperature ever so slightly.

The idea that people think it would be difficult to live without an Amazon Prime subscription absolutely blows my mind. Are y’all really that hooked on buying stupid shit and getting it as fast as possible?

no.

Most of the people who think Trump should drop out have been loudly opposing him for a long time. There isn’t just one single thing they object to, no great unifying theme they can point at and say “This is why he should not run,” because Everything about him is a reason why he should absolutely not be president. Even his Felony conviction is, while perhaps more than a drop, just a splash in the bucket of what should be utterly career ending circumstances.

The people who still support Trump don’t care about any of that. They’re not going to suddenly see one particular turn-off and decide that’s it, that’s why Trump should back out. They’re committed, in too deep, they can’t back down now because it would mean the Libs were actually right all along, and that presents, to them, an existential threat. And in the end, it’s the Republican way.

When Democrats, even popular ones, fuck up, other Democrats are much more likely to turn on them, to call for and get resignations. With Republicans, that’s almost unheard of. Republicans take Part Unity to an extreme, circling the wagons and assuming a full defensive position no matter how incredibly abhorrent the crime, no matter how blatant the evidence. Today we’re seeing the perfect example. Biden fucked up a debate, stumbling over his own words like an old man well past his prime, and the party is calling for him to step down. Trump has built his whole political career on stumbling over his own words, with the only cogent statements he manages being blatant lies, and his people would rather murder their neighbors than see him lose.

Except it doesn’t just apply to men.

Traditionally, being self sufficient enough to move out of your parents house and live on your own was considered a major, basic, and early benchmark of growing up, adulthood, and success. Sort of like taking your first steps, it was just considered a “bare minimum” benchmark.

That impression, the idea of moving out on your own being the bare minimum start to being a successful adult, has not kept up with the modern age and the economy we’ve grown up in. The idea that anyone should be able to move out on their own came about in an age when a single adult working a basic job full time could afford a house and support a family on their income alone. That just is not even close to the case now, but some societal memes take longer to change than others.

Part of what drives Porn, what makes one setting or situation more popular than another, is taboo. Having just enough of a sense of “naughtiness” in a situation that it makes it more exciting, without going so far as to be offensive to the senses and take the viewer out of it. A generally successful way to do that is to take a normal situation that people are familiar with, something that wasn’t sexy, and make it sexy and pornify it.

As an example, imagine you’ve… ordered a pizza, or had some sort of workman come to repair something at your home. Pretty normal, right? But have you ever paid for that service with sex? Normal, relatable situation, made sexy. Now this is a cliché these days because it’s been done to death, but at it’s advent the “Pay for thing/get paid for thing with sex” trope wasn’t just new, it was Thrilling. It also stops short of presenting the impression of full on prostitution, the goods or services were not presented with the intent to buy sex, which makes it feel less… dirty, to the average viewer. It’s taboo, relatable, but not entirely repulsive.

Now, the “Step” concept is the new hotness. Lots of us, maybe most of us, have step-family, so it’s widely relatable. Also we generally don’t seriously consider sex with step-family, making it taboo. Finally it always stops at STEP family, not blood relatives, so it’s arguably not really incest, meaning it’s not so broadly repulsive. It makes a condition that we can see ourselves in, it’s even more naughty than just sex, but it just manages to dodge the most objectionable subject that it’s so close to.