I live around the Twin Cities metro of Minnesota (two cities split by a river), which installed its first passenger light rail about 20 years ago. I recently moved from the north suburbs to the south side of town. I was very excited to be able to drive 10 minutes east on the freeway to my buddy’s house within walking distance of a station to take the 10 minute light rail ride downtown for a basketball game. Previously I would have driven 20-40 minutes (depending on traffic congestion) to pay $20 to use a parking ramp because the light rail doesn’t extend north.

Over the last 20 years they have extended the rail between the airport/Mall of America on the south side to the downtown of one city, and connected that downtown to the downtown of the other city across the river. If you live anywhere north of the city proper, or more than a few miles away from the one line running south, there is little reason to use the rail system over driving the whole way. If you do though, it’s pretty great.

That’s just been my experience, my understanding is some larger cities (Chicago and NYC are what come to mind) have more robust rail systems, but many cities (mine at least) have limited access for most people living in them.

The Bowling for Soup cover is the worst cover of a song I have ever heard. Not because it’s bad, but because it takes the original song and does absolutely nothing with it. The first time someone put it on near me it took me a full 30 seconds of confusion to realize that the song sounded wrong because the singer was different.

A good cover involves an artist taking a work from another artist and making it their own, with a different tone, pace, etc. The Bowling for Soup version does none of that.

It’s almost funny that the most recent trailer ends with the line “the game about capitalism, made by capitalism.”

This comment reflects such a weird mentality that I see sometimes, conflating being social with being extroverted. The two go hand in hand, but they are not the same. I love having time with myself reading or playing games, but I am consistently at my overall happiest when that time is punctuated with going out and socializing with friends or occasionally meeting new people. Never going out doesn’t make a person introverted, it just means they are antisocial.

“Australopithecus” “What’s a little boy like you doing with big boy words like this?”

It’s so you click the post to read the second part written in the post itself. In this case that Andor makes other Star Wars shows unwatchable.

I think I see what you’re trying to say, and I don’t necessarily disagree with everything, but based entirely on this one comment (which may not be indicative of how you generally communicate) I have to wonder if the communication issues you see stem at least partially from your own over-articulation of thoughts and use of “fluffy” language.

I think this bit highlights what I’m trying to say best:

are virtually never taught if not en passant and indirectly This statement feels like it’s saying the same proposition three times, but if I dig into it it is saying three things, but in a confusing manner. I think it would have been better served by replacing “if not” with something simpler like “or taught” to more easily connect the first idea with the other two in the reader’s mind. I probably would have replaced it all with “are taught incidentally at best,” which I think captures the meaning you are trying to convey in terms that are easier for anyone to understand.

I don’t say this to try to bring you down. I just find beauty in seeing a concept existing in one’s mind, unbounded by the world, given a vessel structured by the words of language not to constrain or limit that idea, but to focus it into something that can be shared and understood with others. The vast majority of the time I see that vessel be too loose without giving proper shape to the idea it wants to convey. Yours is one of the very few internet comments I see that does the opposite, where it feels forced into a shape that’s too rigid. That makes me want to say something, because the mind that does that is a mind I think could learn from stepping back a little, rather than being told to force itself forward.

This is as much me challenging myself to understand what bugged me about your comment as it is a comment on your comment, and for talking about giving shape to thoughts I don’t think I did a super job of it.

I do think that humans are one of the only creatures capable of overcoming the difficulty in communication between minds because we are one of the only creatures capable of complex language to do that stuff I said earlier. But it is a skill that is difficult and requires a lot of time and effort to learn or teach. I do think communication is highly valued, or at least a lot of frustration espoused about a lack of communication, but modern society does make it difficult to work up the effort and acquire the resources to develop that skill.

Great game, I remember really digging the Clayface fight. The little clay enemies went down easy, but there were enough that it felt… mushy(?) getting through them to get at Clayface himself.

Okay, but imagine if, when the cellular phone explosion kills him, his ashes are scattered across the ocean. But then that water gets used to make lotion for babies, setting the wheels of promotion into motion. At least the sun would still shine in the summer time.

Yeah, I had a few modern philosophers as professors in college when I minored in it. Based on a glimpse at the wikipedia article you shared, I’m hesitant to call these modern rationalists philosophers. Sophists sounds more appropriate.

I just thought there was some additional context that you missed which would explain the confusion some people are having. I will easily admit that it is my fault for thinking of historic philosophers whose ideas are still discussed today before a fringe group from Silicon Valley that uses the same terminology.

The further context is that you posted this in the Philosophy community, which draws my mind more toward historical thinkers than modern groups that use “rational” to sound smart.

Ah man, but tests of athletics are so fun to narrate! First roll: “Seeing your clear physical advantage, the shaman leaps toward you as soon as the competition begins, managing to work his way into an advantageous initial position.” Second roll: “Pressing the advantage, the shaman is able to weave between the arms of your stronger grab, heaving you up and down to the ground. At this point, there’s only one chance for you to recover.” Third roll: “It all happened so fast. Despite superior strength and every magical boon at your disposal, the shaman’s quick reaction and formidable skill at using his own body has managed to pin you just long enough to eke out a win. ‘A little overconfident, weren’t you?’ he says, offering a hand to help you up (or glaring down at you if he doesn’t like you).”

$50 fro 6pm-2am is cheaper per hour than a movie ticket or dinner at a restaurant, and hitting that many bars is easy when they’re all on the same 2-3 block stretch!

You just have to live in the right city with sufficiently high rates of alcoholism! In Fargo, ND you could get a tall 200 lb+ man proper sloshed over an evening downtown across 5-8 bars for $50 or less as recently as 2019. Not as cheap as drinking at home, but enough that most folks without kids working full-time could do it every other weekend.

I’m sorry, but did you read the post? Do you think that the highest quality explosive ordnance they could make would involve zero explosives being loaded in them, with zero of them exploding? The post leaves it completely unambiguous.

Hi, I drove a LLV for a couple years! It’s actually so, when they stop at a mailbox, they don’t have to leave or lean across the vehicle to reach out to a mailbox on the right side of the road. It is also easier to hop out for packages, as you said, but if I recall the volume of packages was much lower when the vehicles were designed, so they were more focused on delivering letters from one mailbox to the left.

Another fun fact, LLVs are one of the only street legal vehicles in the US with a shorter front wheel axle than the back! This makes turning much tighter so the driver can pull a full U-turn on any standard road without needing a Y-turn, since visibility is pretty awful behind the vehicle when backing up. This also makes them pretty fun to drive.

I hear to find the best BBQ in Texas you need to find a restaurant attached to a rinky-dink gas station.

Yes, but given the context clue of “I’m seeing a lot of comments telling you how to feel, to “be okay with it,” which I think is lame,” which do you think I meant?

Maybe it depends on how you define the two terms, but I disagree, or at least what you’re saying wasn’t my intent. I think understanding emotions is the primary way to deal with them, but I added the bit about channeling it because sometimes understanding isn’t enough and something more needs to be done. In my mind controlling an emotion means exerting willpower to push down or replace an emotion that arises, while channeling entails a greater degree of acceptance of the emotion and then purposefully putting it toward something productive.

In the context of this scenario, demanding acceptance when the present emotion is probably some mix of disgust, confusion, and fear summed up as “I don’t like it” is a form of emotional control that isn’t healthy. After understanding what emotions are in the mix and (hopefully) why those emotions are present, there are productive and healthy ways to deal with them without trying to force them to change. Confusion has the most obvious way to “channel” it by researching polyamory to be less confused. You may say that that’s not really channeling, and I agree that it can be a vague term, but without that confusion (or by rejecting it) I doubt there would be curiosity to learn, which would hamper a healthy response. I feel pretty deep in the weeds at this point, but I hope that clarifies what I’m trying to say a little.

Basically, to use definitions from Merriam-Webster, to control is to “to exercise restraining or directing influence over” emotions, while to channel is to “to convey or direct [emotions] into or through a channel” toward something productive. The first isn’t a healthy coping mechanism in the long run, the second is if done right.

I’m seeing a lot of comments telling you how to feel, to “be okay with it,” which I think is lame. Feelings aren’t something to be controlled, only understood and maybe channeled toward something. When a couple of my good friends began a polyamorous relationship, it really weirded me out, but eventually I came to accept that it worked for them, even though it would not work for me.

My advice is to first understand why you don’t like it. Give it some personal thought, then do some reading on what polyamory is and how it can or cannot work to compare and contrast with the thoughts you had going into the situation. In the process, you will not only gain better ways of understanding and expressing your own feelings and concerns, you’ll also have learned useful advice and guidelines to share with your daughter.

Then sit down with your daughter and share your more refined understanding of your feelings and how they lead to your approval/disapproval of her polyamory and share the guidelines you found to keep such a relationship healthy should she decide to pursue it. I think the middlingly fortunate reality is that she is reaching an age where she will do what she wants, whether it is behind or in front of your back. At least she’ll know that you tried to understand.