He’s low on the list for sure

A stopped clock is right twice a day. America has a terrible and corrupt government, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong about not trusting china’s government.

[Mark 12:17] is clearly about taxes

It is about that in the surface, sure. But when you look at the context, it’s one of many times the pharisees tried to get Jesus to either go against the Roman empire, so they could get him killed for it, or go against God, so they could exile him for it.

taxes are a pretty popular socialist repellant

Clearly one of us is misunderstanding socialist ideals, because I would say socialists tend to be the ones pushing the hardest for the highest taxes. Please explain why socialists, the community focused people who know no one can stand alone, would be against making sure everyone pitches in to help the poorest people.

[Jesus] just cared if people were following God’s orders

You should really actually give the gospels are serious read before making that kind of claim. Not saying you’ve never read any of the Bible, but I am saying that I don’t see a way to have genuinely read the gospels and come to the conclusion of “yeah, Jesus is all about the legalistic religion”.

the money changing was Babylonian money magick, of which was the reason they were thrown out

A. Where did you hear that it was Babylonian money? Babylon had fallen ~500 years earlier, so I doubt there’d be any of their money left in use. B. Jesus talks about the temple become “a den of robbers”. That doesn’t sound like the only issue was the choice of currency

the whole point was to accept handouts for those who didn’t work

Ignoring for now the fact that that’s far from the point, what’s so bad about “handouts”? Sure, if you refuse to work you shouldn’t expect to be given a mansion or something, but that’s not what anyone is seriously saying. The “handouts” that leftists talk about is stuff like food and basic housing. The idea is that your right to live is based on your value as a person, not your productivity as a worker.

Especially when you compare the effects in Lord of the Rings to the Hobbit. You can really see when the studio is overworked and underpaid, even when it’s a studio as good as weta.

Plenty of people here have talked about potential success or failure, and the economic side, but here’s my take. Despite Marx equating religion to an opiate, and especially despite the “no religion” stance of the USSR, Christianity (probably the other Abrahamic religions as well and maybe Hinduism and its offshoots, I’m not exactly sure please correct me if I’m wrong) should be massively in favor of communism over capitalism. In Christianity, we are called to be stewards of creation for God, we run it and manage it but it’s not ours. This doesn’t work with capitalism, which is focused on the concept of ownership. That’s not to mention the equality side of things, which is very much a Christian concept.

I’ve brought this up with some of my Christian friends, and it’s unfortunately not a popular idea. Probably because of lingering cold war attitudes of “communism is atheist”.

Also to be clear: yes I’m Christian, no I’m not pro theocracy, yes this is based on my knowledge of the Bible and on communist philosophy.

Given Americans, it wouldn’t surprise me

Ah yes, because the mayor of a city should be elected or not because of their opinions on a completely different country, not the policy in the city they’re running for. That makes a whole lot of sense.

Using Field’s disease there is a huge false equivalence, for two main reasons.

A: you can’t just choose not to have Field’s, but a billionaire is capable of donating their wealth to charity or something, and no longer being a billionaire.

B: the existence of people with Field’s has little to no impact on the average person outside that group, but the existence of billionaires massively changes how much money everyone else has

Machine learning software in general: great. A really useful technology for getting a generally good answer where programming a perfect answer isn’t possible.

Generative software like LLMs or image generation: I think they potentially have positive uses, and could end up being a positive thing overall.

The main problem is the current companies. They’re putting this software where it shouldn’t be, dragging in huge amounts of power and water for their data centers, and encouraging people to use their product to spread disinformation and replace their brains in general, all in the name of getting money from investors.

As often happens, the problem isn’t a specific technology. The problem is capitalism.

I have some surgery scars on my left ankle from when I was 10, and they were later reopened when I was 16. What happened was I was at a kids holiday camp, and we had a snow day. I went sledding down a cliff, hit a rock, and broke my tibia and fibula. For a few years we thought it healed fine, then I went on an unusually tough 3 day tramp (that’s another story, but it was bad enough that one of the people got bad hypothermia and we nearly had search and rescue called on us). During that tramp my ankle started flaring up again, and when we got it checked out, it turned out my growth plate had fused my foot was growing sideways. So that meant another big surgery, a bone graft, and 6 months on crutches.

hick ass pseudo-nationalistic redneck caricature bullshit

You mean this stuff

Not sure exactly what I’d put him in, but Christopher Lee

Biggest tip: don’t look for a girlfriend, look for friends. Find something you enjoy doing that can be done with other people, and just make friends through that. Eventually you’ll like one of your female friends enough to want to ask her out, and be comfortable enough around her to not be worried about rejection

I know you’ve likely heard this before, but it’s the best way to find a good partner. I met my fiance through my church young adults group, and we were friends for years before starting dating, now we’re getting married this January.

Not really the worst, but my hot take of something I don’t like: puzzles rather than problems. By that I mean puzzles have one correct solution and everything else is wrong and doesn’t work, while with a problem you’re given some tools and an obstacle and just let loose. It’s so much more satisfying to find your own solution that it is to reach the end and realize you were being sneakily handheld through it to make sure you found the only possible way through. I’ve done a few good problems where I reach the end, then immediately reload the save from before and try some different routes just to see if it works.

Puzzles do have their place though, especially in tutorials.

Mate, some of us factorio nerds enjoy that shit

Agreed. Everyone should take notes on how jedi: fallen order did difficulty. Sure, it did a bit of simple stat adjusting, but it also did things like increasing enemy aggression

I kinda disagree. Sure, if it’s just thrown on top with no real thought to it, it’s bad. But it’s possible to build around durability to make it a core part of the game. Think Zelda BOTW and TOTK. Weapon durability is a central part of the combat gameplay loop in those games. There’s plenty of weapons lying around, so you never really run out, and there are more details that mean you can actually use the system to your advantage (like how you deal massive damage on the breaking hit).

I prefer games because they’re much better at connecting you to a story. When a story game is done right, you feel the ups and downs of the story far more than you could with any other medium. Peak example is Hades. When you lose a run in hades, it feeds into the story.

I kinda disagree. I’d be happy with them doing unsafe things to feel masculine, so long as it’s only them in danger. That way we might not have to deal with them much longer