Why'd this get deleted?
20% sales tax
I'll take it over a comparable or higher income tax or property taxes.
In a "high trust" (homogeneous) society regulations are largely unnecessary because violating societal standards results naturally in some sort of exclusion from that society. Regulations/laws are only necessary to deal with situations where people disagree.
The type of regulations you're talking about exist to create trust in situations where there is no preexisting relationship between the parties. However, in many cases they needn't be proactive (you must be licenced/inspected/approved beforehand) but could be reactive (if your actions cause harm you will be punished accordingly.) In most cases I think I'd prefer regulations be more reactive on a smaller scale and only be proactive when dealing with larger projects/organizations, but I don't yet have a particularly well defined idea of where the line is where you should move from reactive to proactive.
Just make 'causing mayhem' illegal and punish it appropriately then.
Looking at regulations purely from the perspective of 'not enough' vs 'too much' is missing a huge chunk of the picture. There is a very limited set of regulations which are universally applicable, and they tend to be a little harder to enforce legally (can you imagine a government trying to enforce 'love your neighbor as yourself'?) Regulations need to fit the circumstances and people they are regulating, and without specifying exactly who is being regulated you can't really have his discussion.
I have more thoughts on this that I might post later, when I'm not out and about.
Not a beating, a one-man riot. And according to biblical scholars, he did that twice.
McBeth said the MIC didn't exist.
I think almost the whole panel called him out on that. Eli notably excepted, but he seems to have some concept of acting as a 'Neutral Host', sort of like Rogan, I guess. It seems to work in getting guests to open up for both of them, so I won't criticize there.
Calling Lauren Southern "White Lauren" might be a bit disingenuous.
There's at least one version of that which is still being actively worked on, and it's pretty good.
Classic reference.
But all I've wanted since they announced V was Civ IV with hexes.
A good gameplay loop requires capturing lightning in a bottle
Only if you require it to be new/unique. There's plenty of gameplay loops that are proven successes, and most of these are nowhere near market saturation. But studios/publishers aren't interested in established gameplay loops (unless they're the ones that established it) they're trying to figure out how to maximize the amount of money they can milk out of their customers.
Fingolfin
I couldn't remember if that fight was vs Melkor/Morgoth or one of the ancient dragons. But I was pretty sure there was a point where one of the descendants of Feanor made Morgoth deeply regret his decisions with the Silmarils.
giant spiders
So, interestingly, I don't think it was ever stated where Ungoliant came from, and all the giant spiders were supposed to be descended from her. She's powerful enough that Morgoth fears her, something which I think can only be said of her, maybe two of the Valar (Tulkas and Manwe, I think), and Eru*. I'm not sure there's an explanation for her origins that's completely consistent, but I think it's most likely that she's a creation of Melkor's part in the music that gained power by eating other powerful things, and not a fallen Maia.
dragons
I'm pretty sure these were twisted beasts (or twisted copies of beasts) in Tolkien's legendarium, but I don't think (as you mentioned) he ever fully nailed everything down, so I could be mistaken on this point.
*There are several tales in Tolkien's legendarium where an exceptional person punches above their weight, and I might be forgetting a case where a Maia, Elf, Dwarf, or Man managed to make Morgoth afraid, so please correct me if I'm wrong on this particular point.
Sent you a friend request. My profile pic is the PCMR guy from Zero Punctuation (back when The Escapist still had a few cool creators.)
I'm in the alpha. DM me your steam info and I'll try and get you an invite.
We live in a society where suggesting that you'd rather interact with people with a similar genetic and cultural background to you is considered more evil than suggesting that someone should kill their children if they'd be too much of a burden.
If it exists, there is porn of it.
The obvious conclusion is that Concord doesn't exist.
To quote the learned scholar anon: "Lurk moar fag."
I don't recommend spending a lot of time on /pol/, but if you're going to go there--and especially if you're going to repost stuff you find on there elsewhere--you should be familiar with board culture so you can filter out the shit. Also, if some random nobody posts nothing of consequence, that's just trash that should be ignored wherever it's from.
Dude, how much time do you spend on /pol/? That's basically a form letter that gets trotted out every time some shitty piece of woke trash gets canceled to shit up the board and slide what little meaningful discussion remains off the board. It might even be a literal AI generated post.
And now you're shitting up our board with it.
There may be no (direct) common reference between the two people, but there is a common reference. If a person hears a sound, and then later their mind reproduces that sound (say, remembering a song) they'd say they 'hear' the sound in their head (or at least I've never met anyone that doesn't unless they're making a fine distinction between the subjective experiences of hearing with the ears vs 'hearing' with the mind.) If someone says 'I don't hear my own thoughts/memories', particularly in reference to a common experience (take the song example from earlier) we can reasonably infer that their subjective experience is very different from someone who does 'hear' their own thoughts.
I know that personally, I am quite capable of hearing (or seeing) thoughts/memories, and the experience is near enough to the real thing that I wouldn't use any other term other than to clarify that I'm not undergoing some sort of self-induced hallucination.
https://nitter.poast.org/WBS_JStrabo/status/1813783029200089469
Nitter Link.
The post is in response to John Carmack whingeing about cancel culture being used to get people fired for wishing death on Trump after the assassination's attempt.
I'll admit I don't know much about Mormon theology, but don't/didn't they view whites (Joseph Smith, et. al. specifically) as the true Israel from both a spiritual and genealogical perspective? And associate dark skin (or at least some dark-skinned peoples) with the curse of Cain?
I don't think CS:GO exists anymore. Valve did a major update and rebranded to CS2.
Out of curiosity, u/Unknownsailor, which of those books have you read?
His co-author is the one with talent on those. Forstchen wrote One Second After (and it's sequels) which I enjoyed quite a bit. Not alternate history, but alternate present/speculative fiction.
I read the Civil War series (spoiler: it ends with the south still losing.) and didn't find it particularly exceptional either way, but it did keep me interested enough to read all three. The one WWII alternate history book of his I read (1945) was in severe need of a good editor, to the point that a major character dies in the penultimate chapter, and is suddenly, and without explanation, alive two pages over in the final chapter.
u/Smith1980 I don't know about the rest of the WWII books, but while Forstchen impressed me as a writer, Gingrich decidedly didn't.