???

Only bet I ever won was the only one I ever really took, because I knew I couldn’t lose. I was discussing Colombia with someone (we’d both been there) and they forgot Colombia has both an Atlantic and a Pacific coastline. We bet on it, and since I know world geography on the continental scale nearly by heart, I won the bet.

I wouldn’t have even taken that bet if I had a 75% chance of winning, because I bet $100 but was broke. Never bet on even the slightest uncertainty if you can’t afford to pay, it’s not worth it. Fortunately, I’d been to both over both coasts of Colombia on planes, seen Colombia on all sorts of maps and globes, and reality is consistent enough that coastlines on a map don’t change until the real world changes first plus a delay to update the maps, and internet failure would just mean the bet was off. I had basically no chance of failure and the guy would have been pretty patient in the 0.0000000~0001% chance a freak accident occurred.

Obviously nothing is guaranteed, but if your chance of winning is lower than your chance of dying or having your life permanently ruined if you lose, you’re better off walking away. And that’s why I never liked the Golden Saucer type games in Pokémon and Neopets, one spin really is just one spin for me, win or lose, because if I don’t win the first time on a luck based “game” then I see it for what it is… an obvious con.

Yeah, if it’s 50% then I’d take the bet but the game is never that generous. As they say, the house always wins.

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The terrorists in that case managed to outlast a billion/trillion $ anti-terrorism budget, I don’t think the US had much negotiating power or a choice to not negotiate in that case. Ironic considering how many times that it’s been the other way around.

YES, because OP is typing words that can be misconstrued as being a shill or a bigoted asshole. I’m smart enough to recognize it if you point it out, but I’m not fucking psychic, and I’m the kind of person who believes in dream prophesies so that just shows that neither potential delusion nor intelligence have anything to do with people misreading things online. It’s just human and technical limitations, but your italics are clear so: if you don’t want people to be annoyed at you, maybe respond without being condescending.

Oh so you admit you’re a shill for bp or aramco. When it comes to shills, the first person to mention a brand name is the one getting paid.

I guess you’ve never heard of the beach with sand that is more radioactive than Fukushima and has been since long before nuclear energy or even nuclear weapons. People go there because the black sand is pretty and because it doesn’t have enough ionizing (cancerous) radiation to hurt anyone, it’s actually really popular.

Not all nuclear power plants are equal. Fukushima barely reached “level 8” on the danger level of nuclear accidents, which is the catch-all “really bad and off the charts” level. Even though Chernobyl was also “off the charts”, the soviet nuclear program was also focused on using power plants to make weapon’s grade plutonium and their design was flawed severely, so Chernobyl was and still is much, much worse.

Three Mile Island was a maintenance issue, and Fukushima was due to catastrophic damage, so what if we could build a nuclear plant that relied on something other than technology to prevent a meltdown?

Simple, gravity. Trains used to crash into disconnected carriages from other trains whose engineers never realized a coupler broke. Now, when a train starts, there’s pressurized air in a hose running the length of a train and when it fails the air is released; that was the only thing keeping the brakes on every car _de_activated. So the train immediately comes to a halt. That’s what an actual failsafe is, but nuclear plants currently in operation don’t have that because they were built in the 1950s and 60s on the cheap.

Instead of air, an electromagnet in a NEW design keeps a seal at the bottom of the plant closed. If the electricity fails, the seal is opened by gravity. When the seal is open, the nuclear fuel is sent dropping into a cooling tank with enough water to keep them cooled off for 100 or more years, during a mere few months of which we can repair the minimal damage easily. Unfortunately, the design was held back for decades for numerous nontechnical reasons, and now the average person is too fucking terrified of past failures based on the lies of businessmen and the shortsightedness of Cold War paranoia to use something that actually works.

But I remember we did it. “Okay, Brian, the record’s five. The record’s five… Okay ready? Go!”

Huh? Just for clarity’s sake, is this a good or bad thing?

It’s also 2023 and I’m sick of pretending what happened didn’t happen just because the internet doesn’t like hearing about it.

I wish I could go back in time, “buy” those kids and raise them in safety and comfort. This is not an okay “joke” OP, and I see people are finally starting to realize what I realized in 2017 after watching that shitty movie “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” that literally drove me to insanity.

A lot of people don’t care about children, instead seeing them purely as a burden unless the child is forced to work. It’s disgusting and rooted entirely in overly conservative values.

Many who don’t fit into the above category are simply sexist and hate kids as being the result of either “being a traitor to your gender” (if you’re female) or “pussy whipped” (if you’re male).

This seems to have been the majority view since at least 2015, though I only noticed it when I realised children were being cast exclusively as villains, victims of the villains, or heroes who are forced to “grow up” over the course of the story. If proof is needed, I can provide a list of not one, not two, not three, but 33 different stories that do this and almost all of them are either made in the 2010s or became popular in some way in the 2010s.

Because nobody made a Steam Deck until 2020. Everyone plays video games now and have for years, and unless you have a console, the only way to play 99% of video games is using Steam’s windows version or a specially adapted Linux .

Don’t get me wrong, the moment that Windows 11/12/etc. outright requires logging into a Microsoft account (Protip: As of this writing, using the email “[email protected]” and submitting a blank password forces Windows 11 to let you make/log into a local user account) to use it, I’ll be installing Steam OS on my OneXFly, and it’s why I don’t use my “free” upgrade to 11 on my Windows 10 gaming desktop. I just don’t think you realize how big a deal compatibility really is for gaming.

Yes, but that’s because it motivated them to strike. That’s basically the less violent version of a riot.

Notepad++, because I mostly program OpenTTD mods.

NO! That poor kitty! 3 :<

Or breaks the glass on the Brownian flux capacitor.

…actually, what is the flux capacitor for, really? My theory is that it IS a real capacitor and thus related to energy storage/discharge.

I swear they should have run a virus scan or CCleaner or something on that thing. Even the Glitch Techs don’t have a holodeck THAT buggy!

I tailored my answers to that assumption. It’s a reality, even if a heavily-manipulated one, and the person(s) inside the simulation are as real as we are, given the description of “perfect simulation”.

So you’d created a clone slave of yourself. Ehrm… I’m not sure how to tell you this but…