I can guess a few things. For one, its slightly less effort than selecting the chosen text and copying, though not much less so I don’t think that’s the whole reason. But also, it does technically give more information that otherwise would have to be typed out, like its often possible to tell what platform the text comes from, the username and profile icon of the original poster, etc. And if there’s a chain of several people responding, you can capture the whole conversation without worrying about formatting nested quotes and such. Fonts can also convey mood, which you’d lose if you just copy the text.

Finally, I guess it could feel more clear as to the source, like if you copy paste text with some quote formatting, there’s more room for someone who doesn’t understand the formatting to think you were saying that thing, and it’s immediately obvious that you could edit or make up the quote if you wanted. A picture immediately says “this is something this other person somewhere else said” in a way that’s harder to misinterpret and looks harder to fake (even if in reality making a faked picture of text is easy)

Yiffit.net has been dead for awhile, I thought?

Technically, shouldn’t the fact that brain activity ultimately has a physical basis (various chemical and electrical signals moving around and such) imply that, if a person lying knows they’re lying, there should be some physical difference between that brain and the brain of an otherwise identical individual saying the same thing, but believing it to be true? Measuring that and interpreting the data might be an impractically difficult problem to solve, sure, but if there truly were no physical difference, that would have to imply that at some level, thinking is a supernatural process that at least partly occurs outside the physical universe, which is both something no evidence exists for, and would seem in contradiction to things we do observe, like how damage to the brain changes and impairs a person’s thinking

Drive through would require I get a car tho, I was more trying to defend the kiosks as, while I understand that they aren’t perfect for various reasons, like dark patterns and such that software ordering enables, I genuinely find that kiosk format the least stressful way to order food, in the rare instance that I’m at a place that has them. Dont have to install their app, doesn’t activate my social anxiety like asking an actual person for things, and I can walk in and use it rather than needing a vehicle.

In the rare instance that I go to mcdonalds, Id rather use their device than put their app on my device, or make an account to use such an app.

correct, I read it instead

Honestly, I don’t think he’d look that creepy without the context, same goes for most other famous but hated people that people dont like the appearance of, like Jeff Bezos or such. I think that that reputation comes from a combo of: people being more inclined to notice things they don’t like in people they already dislike or to consider neutral features in those people negative (the flipside of how one can find someone a bit bad looking, but then end up friends somehow and no longer think they look so bad), and media using photos of those people taken at unflattering angles, mid-speech where expressions look strange, etc, when talking about those people for an audience that already isn’t inclined to like them.

Never having actually been there, and therefore just going off vibes I get from portrayals on the internet: that city in Florida where they designed it around every property having boat access (I forget the name, looking up “Florida canal city” gives me one called “Cape Coral” so it may be that one, or there might be some other similar place ive seen pictures of before out there that im mistaking for it). Cool concept in theory but every picture Ive seen of the place it looks like someone took generic slightly rich car-filled suburbia and made it even more overpriced and dysfunctional

tbh I think Id be in no mood to actually eat anything, and trying to decide on anything in that circumstance sounds like itd just compound the anxiety , so given that itd be kind of a waste of food and wouldnt be of much comfort, Id probably just turn it down.

Ive kinda always liked things related to it (spent my childhood reading warrior cats and redwall, would always choose humanoid animal characters in games over humans when available, because I found humans kinda ugly somehow, etc) but never really considered myself one until after high school because it was considered “cringy” and I had to grow out of worrying about that. Actually was unfortunately rather judgmental towards furries myself at a certain age just out of denial.

Kinda warmed up to it in college after growing a bit and getting away from my old classmates, but it’s difficult to say what the initial draw was because, well, Ive had some sort of a liking for characters designed as humanoid animal people as far as I can remember (or, given that those are pretty common in kids media, I guess I didn’t really stop preferring them because they somehow felt easier to look at and imagine interacting with than more realistic human characters. I do have social anxiety and autism, which I suspect might have something to do with that feeling but I cant say for sure).

I would consider furry generally a subculture. I can see why some people would consider it a kink, given that furry culture seems to have a weaker taboo about sexual stuff than wider society does and that the community makes a lot of porn, but I don’t think it really qualifies as one for a given person unless one is just there for that and doesn’t have some interest in the wider community or furry characters in other contexts. For my part, I tend to imagine or prefer furry characters in any context that would generally involve human characters. Ie, if I draw or write or just fantasize about something, I’m very likely to work furries in regardless of the content, so them popping up in horny stuff is less a matter of finding those characters an inheritly sexual thing, and more a matter of sexual stuff being included in “everything that normally has humans”.

As far as my participation goes, that social anxiety I mentioned does limit me a bit, Ive not been to any conventions for example despite hoping to eventually. It’s mostly limited to art and internet communities for me at the moment, though most of my current friend group are also furries just cause those places are where I went looking for them.

On the other hand, not being a farmer admittedly, I’d assume there’s some reason the almonds are grown there of all places rather than somewhere with cheaper water, is the climate good for them there or something, water consumption aside?

Well yeah, that’s my point though, there’s nothing about the US’s size that means it cant have that stuff, the big country argument is functionally just an excuse to distract from what the car industry has done here.

I mean, realistically if you gave a fox a ball, I could see it playing around with it. Like sure, they don’t exactly know or care about the rules to soccer but it’s not hard to find some way to play with a ball and foxes are active creatures that seem like they’d need a lot of enrichment to keep healthy.

There are many such areas, what I was trying to say was more that that is a solvable problem, if the government of the area was sufficiently motivated to solve it, rather than something like “we’re too big for anything but cars”, which is more of an excuse to not do any of that change to the infrastructure because it implies that nothing can reasonably be done and that cars are simply the natural way of things.

You could similarly say that Europe is huge, or that China is huge, or that the whole planet is huge, and therefore the people living there must need a vehicle. Except, most people dont leave their local area all that often, and when they do, theres nothing that inherently requires that the vehicle used to do so much be individually owned. This isnt to say that nobody needs a car, obviously if you live way out in the middle of nowhere, running transit might not be so viable- but that does not describe how and where most people live, even in the US, and for the majority that do live in urban areas, the size of the whole country is irrelevant to if they would need cars if we just built the proper infrastructure.

Turkey’s greatest national project, little known to the world, was painting their English county name on the ground in letters that can be seen from space

Quite awhile; despite what some popular scifi depicts mars isn’t really the best target out there for space colonies (and is too long a trip for short duration tourism), so first the technology and infrastructure to do those would need to be developed, and then the more convenient or economically attractive locations to set one up would have to be already taken, and then someone would need to have set up a mars colony and developed to the point where it isn’t just a research base and actually has the capacity and use for a growing population, none of those steps are short things.

Especially that first step is tough, because launching large amounts of mass to space, let alone all the way out to mars, is incredibly expensive, so getting any of this started requires either a way to get to space without rockets (like space elevators or similar ideas, which require better materials than we currently can mass produce and would represent hugely expensive infrastructure investments to build once we have the ability), or the ability to extract and use raw materials in space to build, well, almost everything except the actual people to be sent there. Which is also something where the technology hasn’t quite been developed, though progress has been made, and in any case is a bit of a chicken and egg problem because launching all that heavy mining and processing and manufacturing equipment to get it started is so expensive.

I would not personally expect things to get to a point where a middle class (or even typical rich person for that matter) can go to mars for several centuries, unless you count scientists sent by a government and not on their own dime. I do believe we’ll get there, someday, but it’s an incredibly long and difficult process, much more complicated than people like, say, Elon Musk make it out to be when they make wild claims about building a city there in a matter of decades.

No. Consider that arguing is a skill that people do not all possess to an equal degree, and what implications that has.

Suppose there’s an ongoing debate about some issue with two sides, side A and side B. Now suppose that, while the people involved might not all know or believe or understand why, side A is objectively correct in this instance, side B believes something that simply does not match with how the universe works, but matches observations close enough for this to not necessarily be clear to humans, hence the argument.

What happens if someone who is not especially skilled at arguing takes side A, and someone who is rather good at it takes side B? There’s a pretty good chance that side B “wins”, on account of being better at winning arguments, but if the person on side A changes their mind, they would actually be more wrong than before.

The point of this isn’t to say one should never change ones mind of course, just to point put that arguments are actually a rather flawed way to determine truth, and therefore that losing one isnt enough proof on it’s own to require one change one’s mind if one doesn’t find the points raised genuinely convincing.

It can be better than nothing, especially if the participants are both skilled and to an equal degree, and actually aim to find the most defensible position rather than treating the thing as a competition with a winner, but that is not what most arguments are, and if I was to bet, I’d guess that the percentage of internet arguments especially, made by the majority of people not actively trained in this (or who are trained in it but as a competitive sport, like in debate completions), that can be described that way is very close to zero.

Cnidarians. (The sort of animals that includes jellyfish and sea anenomes and coral and such). Theyre so old that the first known predatory animal as far as I’m aware was one of them, and some of them still resemble those ancient versions to a significant degree. Even tho every time theres a mass extinction corals seem to be some of the first things to go, and jellyfish tend to be slow, stupid and not very good at controlling where they go, it somehow works out for them.

Having a pet lizard has made me have a hard time taking the “lizard people/reptilians” conspiracy theorists seriously. Like, have these people actually been around reptiles? Deeply unserious creatures. Not generally social, sure, but they definitely have body language and would fail terribly at running some kind of complex scheme.