I moved out to go to college at 18 and back in with my mom as 21 after dropping out due to financial issues. I had trouble finding work there, nothing stable that paid well. I was a pretty lonely depressed guy, a virgin into my 20s, with nothing significant in my life and nothing to offer anyone else. It was a pretty shit time for me. I ended up moving in briefly with my dad 2 states away and was able to find a decent paying factory job shortly thereafter and got my own apartment. Then I found an even better paying factory job a year or two later, and got promoted to management within the year. I lost a bunch of weight, was able to save money, lost my virginity finally and I bought a house. I met the woman who would become my wife. Sold my house moved in with her. Went back to school, got my degree, got a much higher paying job, bought a much nicer house and we just had our first kid.

I don’t want to tell you how to live and I am not under the impression that everyone can just do what I did. Everyone is different. Circumstances are different. I know. But nothing in my life started to improve from my lowest point in my adulthood until I stopped the complacency, moves out and worked to improve myself and my life. I would be shocked if your 50+ year old uncles who live with you grandmother and have never had a girlfriend are truly happy with their situation. I would encourage you to seek to change your situation if you can. I’m only a year older than you. At one time I was tens of thousands in debt, out of shape, had teeth falling out, living with my mom, no social life, no girlfriends, sexless, penniless, and had no hope or outlook in life. I have had my own share of failures, yet I am in a good place now. I got my teeth fixed, got a degree, i have a nice job, a nice house, a wife and beautiful daughter, and we’re comfortable. I hope you can get there too.

Everyone’s gonna think the protagonist is named Link. What a terrible idea.

Fake. Too coherent.

Exactly. RIP, George.

The idea of “the power of prayer” is stupid on the face of it. First, you’re presupposing a omnipotent diety that can and does directly effect the universe, changing the outcomes of events based on it’s desires, whims, plans, whatever. And you think THAT diety is taking requests? When “God answered my prayers”, you think that had you not requested it, it wouldn’t have happened. You think that God answers to your puny human concerns? That shit is arrogant as hell.

But furthermore, it also flies in the face of two other common beliefs about God, at least in Christianity. “God gave man Free Will” and “It’s All Part of God’s Plan™” (don’t get me started on how those are already two mutually exclusive ideas and hundreds of millions of believers just ignore that cognitive dissonance). Many of the things that one prays for, like “getting that job”, “winning that award”, “ending the war”, etc. directly involve altering the decisions and actions of others, which means that God would be stripping them of free will. Also, the most classic call to prayer is to heal the sick, or preserve one’s life. But surely if God has a plan for everyone’s life, at minimum everyone’s birth and death must also be planned. How can he answer your prayer to save your life if it’s his plan for you to die, yet still have an plan he’s always been following? The irony is that people like to pull the “all part of God’s plan” platitude particularly when someone has died before their time.

The one that really makes me annoyed, or even angry, is when something terrible happens, people are hurt or killed, and someone who was supposed to or had almost been there says something like “God was watching out for me”. It’s so self-centered and arrogant to attribute your simple dumb luck to God’s will in that situation. Because, not only does it assume you are God’s most special little guy that he’s constantly paying attention to and protecting, but also that God willfully condemned those others who did fall to this terrible fate that he supposedly saved you from. It’s all arrogance. I can’t stand it.

That was pretty clear. The apparent player character was a misdirect. The figure that comes in at the end seems to be the “her” referred to, and potentially the main antagonist of the game. I’m sure, just like in all other iterations, you’ll have a custom built player character of any sex/gender.

Well, yeah. If you’re self employed, you have to report yourself too.

A flat tax is a poor tax. 5% of your income means WAAAAY more to someone working minimum wage with two kids than someone who has a second home, even if dollars and cents it’s way less. And the wealthy will evade a flat tax as much as they already do a progressive tax.

?

It should also be noted that if the vast majority of people do nothing special on their taxes and just accept the government’s assessment, then that leaves a much smaller group of people to be audited. And a much larger portion of those people will be those who are trying to weasel their way out of paying their share. Right now, with the IRS being criminally underfunded, they only focus on low hanging fruit, the small fries. With those people being boiler plater auto-accepting tax payers, that would mean the IRS has no reason to audit them and can focus on the big boys where the real cheats are. That’s another big reason we do not have that sort of system and why the IRS is currently so underfunded (despite every dollar spent on the IRS generating between 5 and 9 dollars in revenue from tax fraud/evasion). Those kinds of people pay to make sure it doesn’t happen.

They should (and do?) have the same information your employer, bank, or brokerage files. i.e. the same forms you use to fill out your taxes now. They know what you contributed to you 401k and your other retirement accounts.

Right. Filing taxes should only be necessary if you have itemized writeoffs or wish to contest the IRS’s statement of your tax liability. They already know what you earned their your employer, what’s been paid in taxes, what basic credits your qualify for, etc. They know what you owe so long as you didn’t have expenses to apply for that they couldn’t assume or know about. The only reason they don’t already do that or, at least until now, have a free public system for filing, it’s because tax companies have lobbied for decades to be able to milk the public for cash to help them file and navigate their tax liability.

I took a principles of programming languages course a while back and got to touch on a lot of these old languages. My professor had huge hard-on for Lisp. Don’t get me wrong. The simplicity of the language is admirable. But reading and parsing that shit gave me headaches. No me gusta.

Works too with drugging an entire town into loving you. When the jig is up and everyone hates you, gate to another world, find a powerful artifact, use it to become a superhero God of a new town.

I agree with this. Correcting one’s grammatical error is fine. However, additionally, correcting one’s grammatical error as a means to disregard the content of the comment in an argument and/or deem their opinion or perspective false because of said error? Not fine and asinine.

Serving multiple data streams

200: “I gotchu, bro. Here you go. Have a good day.”

401: “You’re not on the list. Get lost.”

402: “Pay me or get lost.”

403: “Everyone get lost.”

404: “You are lost.”

500: “Ooopsss.”

501: “Knew I forgot something…”

504: “I can’t do this shit all day.”

Mostly we’re more aware of the shittiness. On the whole, most things that were problems decades, generations, or centuries ago are objectively, measurably better now. However, there are specific things that are recurring problems or newer problems that have never existed before. Some of those are very serious problems that we are currently trying to, don’t yet know how to, or have failed to deal with. Things like climate change, mass misinformation in the information age, nuclear threats, gun violence, political corruption, war, and threats reproductive rights, LGBT human rights, and religious rights. So… bit of column A, bit of column B.

I do it as well. If I’m not actively speaking and the person speaking isn’t presenting something that I need to look at, I usually end up bouncing back and forth between the speaker and my image.

I don’t want to necessarily apply logic to it because I don’t think it’s a conscious, logic decision I’m making. But if I had to try, I’d say that the reasons are A) I cannot “look them in the eye” as I would in person without looking directly at my camera, which is both weird and means I’m literally looking away from them. That is the paradox of video calling. B) Looking at them, versus looking literally anywhere else on your screen makes no tangible difference to anyone else looking at your video feed. C) I want to make sure I am not looking ridiculous while blasting my image to a dozen people. No double chin, no resting bitch face, no glazed look, no boogers, etc. D) Staring at anyone else would feel weird, invasive, and distracting to me, including the speaker, if they are not actively speaking to me. It feels like I’m eavesdropping when I’m not actively being addressed. E) Gotta take advantage of having eyes on the back of your head. Never turn your back on your enemy. Stay vigilant. The cat will not pounce me and claw my back mid-meeting again.

A bit in Freedom units is 2 metric bits because it wouldn’t be freedom units without unnecessary confusion. A metric bit is equivalent to a freedom unit lil’bit, because it’s smaller than a bit. A bite (no relation to a byte) is 25 lil’bits because saying 25 ones and zeros outload is a mouthful. A hot dog is 4.2 bites or 105 lil’bits because that’s how many bites it takes me to eat a hot dog. A hamburger is 6.4 bites because it takes more bites to eat. A double with cheese is 7.8 bites. A whole hog is 233 hot dogs. A stampede is 23146 hamburgers.