D) America has ALWAYS had a Canada-invasion plan percolating as a contingency. They update it every half a decade or so to bring it inline with the latest intelligence.

The most recent plans are designed with climate change in mind, in order to secure resources like the grain fields and oil fields of the prairies. Much like the Nazi “Lebensraum” plans for Poland.

I would consider the latter to be depraved indifference, but the former to be maliciously genocidal.

Of the two, the former is much, much worse than the latter. And with everything being a spectrum of some kind, the former is much further along the path to being evil than the latter.

With that said, there is no single person pushing all the buttons in Israel; as such, I am sure there are people in the Israeli command structure that represent the former much more than the latter, and vice versa.

But if there is one characterization I feel is wholly appropriate: on Oct 6, Israel looked at the evil of Hamas and said, “hold my beer and watch this.” And boy, did they ever deliver.

$325k for a 3bdrm 2bath detached SFH in good condition?

Awww, that’s adorable. Even after taking the exchange rate into account, that would be like going back to 1998 in my corner of Canada. Right now, a house like that on a 0.21 Ac plot of land would be running you $1,300,000 CAD. In places like Vancouver? $4,800,000 CAD on average.

I’m a little surprised they found an attorney willing to hang it out there and go for this.

Everyone needs food and shelter, and I’m betting that this one is fresh out of Uni with a newly-minted shingle.

I have a tube-based distribution system from the second-floor window that I started using during COVID to keep my distance from those plague incubators that came calling, and just never stopped using it.

I live in a moderately cold climate, and Halloween evening nearly always drops to around -5℃ to 5℃. So it’s much nicer to just sit in a cushy armchair by the window with a warm blanket over my legs and drop candy through the tube. A surprising amount of adults, teens, and tweens are tickled pink by that system, although a lot of little kids need a surprising amount of direction to get their candy.

And yes, I always drop either two pieces or - for those in dark hoods and carrying scythes - full-sized snickers.

To me, it is a balance of both.

Life is definitely what happens to you. That alone is strikingly important, as much of it is not stuff you have any control over. You are quite literally a victim of most of life.

However, how you react to what you can control is also critical in dealing with it, in that you can identify things you can very much directly affect in some way.

Stoicism includes the ability and skills to tell the difference between the two, coping with the former as best as possible (to retain your mental health), and actively strategizing on how to deal with the latter as effectively as possible in order to minimize any negative outcome or maximize positive outcomes.

Removed by mod

I don’t consider that causing harm.
but I still don’t give moral consideration to plants in either case.

So you are species bigot, and a hypocrite for refusing to take the ideology to it’s logical conclusion.

Cool beans.

Plants scream when eaten:

• https://www.sciencealert.com/plants-really-do-scream-out-loud-we-just-never-heard-it-until-now
• https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/botany/plants-feel-pain.htm

Any that’s the hypocrisy of Vegans. Milk and honey are the only two animal-based food sources that don’t involve the killing of animals. And in the case of most cow breeds, milking is actually needed as they have been bred to produce far more milk than their calves drink. And with careful management of the hive, you can harvest a lot of honey from a mature hive without negatively affecting the hive itself - it just delays/defers new queen production and swarming, which is desirable anyhow - no beekeeper who has hives primarily for crop pollination wants to have hives swarming each and every year.

Now that is a real superpower.

I also manage to annoy TF out of my wife at being able to go from fully asleep to bouncing out of the bed like a piece of toast in under 10 seconds.

About the only thing that can impact this is severe sleep deficit, which - years ago - mean less than 3-4hrs in a night, but these days (in my sixth decade) means anything less than 5hrs of sleep in a night or less than 7 after multiple days of a sleep deficit.

Companies will find some way to monetize those fees. Those multi-million executive salaries won’t pay themselves.

The ONY REASON why immigrant labour is needed is because too much of the profits flow to the Parasite Class at the top.

It used to be that America could build affordable family homes for decent-sized families using well-paid American citizens. This was possible because those Americans were actually paid well enough to afford homes of their own; most of the value of their labour actually came back to them. Plus, most building materials weren’t beset by Greedflation and the need to keep obscene amounts of wealth flowing into pockets that were already overstuffed without more wealth than the person could spend in 100 lifetimes.

America could return to that time, where even the lowest-paid workers make enough to be within a stone’s throw of affording their own home. All it takes is a political leader willing to do the politically painful job of taxing the fuck out of the Parasite Class - including treating any loans taken out using stocks as collateral as “income” to be taxed, regardless of the destination of those funds.

That, plus a metric arseload of other things such as making corporate ownership of homes illegal and making “investor ownership” of homes beyond about 3-5 homes similarly illegal. Because not only do these parasites suck up the supply of homes, preventing renters from getting off the rental market, but they are also the primary players jacking up rents to unaffordable levels, seeking to squeeze every possible dollar out of hard-working Americans. Let these parasites find a real job if they want to continue earning money.

Well said. Then there is the entire ecosystem of programs and apps for which there is no real ability to install on Linux (and for which tools like Wine will either be buggy or even nonfunctional), and whose absence will just piss users off.

As much as I love Linux and BSD, it is really only for people who are either mentally geared to shift off of Windows or whose minimal needs won’t notice the difference; it is not a drop-in replacement for Windows.

For example, my octogenarian father has exactly such minimal needs except for one program: Quicken. Any bugs or issues running that as an installed desktop program on Linux would have him enraged and throwing the PC out the window. So he is still on Windows, and I am keeping my eyes open on how to properly neuter/excise Copilot once it drops.

So far tools like Win10Privacy have been exemplary in allowing me to rip all manner of spyware, adware, and annoyances out of Windows.

I’m sure that Copilot will meet the same fate with one external debloating utility of another. Even if I need to replace the Explorer-based shell with a third-party one.

I am troubled by the fact that horses are dying in sufficient numbers to even contemplate this system of disposal. How are y’all all abusing those poor things such that they die in such large numbers? A horse’s lifespan is 25-30 years, so over the long haul, with one rider per horse there ought to be an average of only three horse deaths for every human death in the backcountry.

So the funny money is all a scam.

Colour me shocked.

Ah, the banal evil of conservatism in play. With only a few idiots, they hurt entire communities who are desperate for aid.

Reactive dogs that try to chew the rear wheel and your ankles off.

ISO-8601 is the only true time format. Big-endian all the way, baby!