PonyOfWar

Yes. Never liked the feeling of sitting or sleeping in a room with the doors open. Also I generally have the heating at different levels in different rooms.

Repost bots and hidden post histories

Sure. But all I’m saying is to consider the possibility, since if it were a paranoid delusion, you wouldn’t know it. It would feel completely real to you, because that’s how it works.

And I’m not even saying that it’s necessarily that. There are many medical conditions that could cause the type of pain you describe. Maybe see a GP first.

But your neighbors using some kind of “device” on you - that’s extremely unlikely and AFAIK not even possible in the way you describe.

That is, indeed, what every paranoid individual thinks. If people were aware of being paranoid, they wouldn’t be paranoid.

Think about what’s more likely: your neighbors torturing you with some kind of sci-fi tech, or you having a medical condition?

There is no such device. What you need is, in all likelihood, a therapist, or a doctor in any case.

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Have a battery that stores the surplus electricity for later use. That’s pretty standard for solar installations.

Yeah, parts of it may have traumatized me, but I ultimately also quite liked the show as a child. I’m sure it helped me empathize with the suffering of wild animals and gave me an early idea of why we should protect the environment.

It definitely wouldn’t fly as a kids show today, but I think it’s an interesting discussion to have when and how much kids’ media should explore darker topics. Ultimately the show was still very tame compared to some of the books my parents got to read as kids, which included things like kids getting ground up in a mill for playing a prank or getting their thumbs cut off for sucking on them.

“The Animals of Farthing Wood”. It’s a cartoon about a group of animals who try to find a new home after humans destroy their forest. Many of them die horrible deaths along the way. Still vividly remember the hedgehog family being run over on the motorway. And yes, it was a kids show!

I think you’ll be heavily affected by AI in that field as well. From possibly having LLMs as a first level support agent (already common in corporate customer support) to having to help people who messed up their PCs by letting their AI agents have full access etc.

For German, I guess Pennsylvania Dutch would come closest? At least in the sense that it’s a variety of German spoken in North America. It’s barely understandable for modern-day Germans.

Yesterday, on my bike, feeling the warm sun on my skin again after a long winter.

A hereditary monarchy is still not an oligarchy 🤷

Sure, not saying it is. I was arguing against Cowbee’s claims of North Korea being a democratic system controlled by the working class. North Korea is not a classic oligarchic system however, so I’d agree with your reply to OP.

But anyway, you’re only talking about the head of state. They have an entire system running there

I don’t think that any kind of democratic system is possible under a head of state with that amount of worship and cult of personality around a single person. The structures for a democratic system underneath may exist, but when it’s not possible to act out of line or speak out against the great leader, they might as well not. All the evidence I’ve seen suggests that it’s not. Both from North Korean media itself, which I’ve watched quite a bit of, and from the mouth of North Koreans who managed to get out.

You’re no doubt well-informed on the theoretical systems of those countries but you can’t just look at the theory and be like “that’s exactly how it works in real life”. It’s a fact that leadership in the DPRK has passed on from father to son for 3 generations now - any country that does that is a hereditary monarchy, not a people’s republic. Kim Jong Un was never part of the working class. He was raised in palaces and sent to an elite college in Switzerland. You don’t even need to trust any Western media on this - just watch a few minutes of North Korean TV and you’ll hear how the leaders are basically treated as gods. Many people who threatened or spoke out against their rule, including those in the “royal” family like Kim Jong Nam, have been murdered or disappeared.

There were and are so many dumb and incorrect conspiracy theories that I think it’s understandable that people would outright dismiss them, even if there was a real conspiracy.

Take the deep state. Sure, you can say that there absolutely is a deep state of oligarchs influencing/controlling governments. But if you read about that topic on conspiracy forums, you’ll quickly find it getting entangled in bullshit like Pizzagate or QAnon. They said Donald Trump would be the one to finally “expose the deep state”, which is just laughable. On the same forums you’ll find stuff like “flat earth”. So why would anyone use those places as sources of trustworthy information?

In Germany, people can get a “Pflegegrad”, which basically defines how much assistance someone needs. Depending on that, they may be assigned a caregiver, paid for by the state. If other relatives decide to take them in, they’ll also get some money and assistance for that.

I haven’t been there. I don’t think they offer any dishes without meat, at least at their locations in Japan.

Favourite: Coco Ichibanya. Lifesaver in Japan for me, as they offer vegan curries and exist in smaller cities where other options for food I can eat are scarce. Also, very tasty.

Least favourite: Mc D’s I guess. Only went there once in the last decade. Food was crappy and overpriced. Annoying ordering system as well.

Read the article. It’s not a traditional vaccine as we know it, but it puts the immune system on a higher alert level in general, meaning it will have faster and stronger responses to any pathogens.

I personally expect that there will be downsides to that, which the researchers do acknowledge. But it’s interesting research nonetheless.

I don’t think so. That would be a hard thing to enforce and rather pointless. Comparing it to other internet regulations like the GDPR, it’s not illegal to use a website that doesn’t adhere to it. That said, with the amount of stupidity we tend to see in politics, who knows what some countries might do.