houseoftolstoy @[email protected]

@Mr_Mister if you care to expend the energy, you can ask them the following questions:

Which country has an example of treating women well? After that, look up the birth rate.

Then ask about a list of countries with high birth rates and ask if they treat their women well. Then show their birth rates.

Yes, it is a waste of time to convince these people, since they already are committed to their narrative. But I have such questions ready when I am fine expending the energy.

@sickburnbro Norway is not cheap to live in either. Their housing is more expensive (for less house) as well as their food (in part to having to import a lot of it). Everyone is taxed out the nose too, not just the rich. Such are the costs for "free healthcare."

Not saying it is all bad to live there, but a lot of people who want their country to be "more like a Scandinavian country" have no clue that they have some parts they would not like in the required package.

@sickburnbro the third movie was also doing too much of going back to cannibilizing the original story rather than do something different by just bringing back Darth Sideous. And it was a complete crapshow when it tried to fix the trilogy, but it was unsaveable and still plain bad.

Apparently they did not have a plan going into the new trilogy. Which is something you cannot do with a billion dollar franchise.

@sickburnbro the sequel trilogy is the perfect summation of the problems with current movies. The first movie was derivative and devoid of any originality, followed by a movie that appears to hate the current fans while trying to pander to "the modern audience" with even more girlboss slop (while still being too formulaic).

Star Wars had greatness because it was something fresh. Now it is just a rotten corpse of a franchise.

@s2208 how much do you want to bet these people cheering for lower birth rates to "save the planet" or "don't want their hypothetical children to suffer" have no issue with mass immigration to their countries? If we are meant to reduce the population, bringing in more people from countries that have positive birth rates just negates the whole "save the planet" nonsense, since those people are now consuming resources at a greater rate in 1st world countries than their countries of origin.

@deprecated_ii and why the hell was there not a physical switch included with the "smart home" setup? If I am going to have a layer of "technology" be integrated in something as simple as turning on a light, I want to make sure that it is OPTIONAL, not mandatory.

Good old fashioned buttons and switches are not overrated. Anyone who has struggled with voice activation misunderstanding what you said or going in some completely retarded direction should know a manual override is not optional.

@sickburnbro this shows something I see as a different fundamental problem. That is, our country is simply getting too big to exist in its current form (supposedly being a representative republic/democracy, but that is a whole different topic).

China only functions a large population country due to their government's tight grip. India is big, but that just proves the point of lack of functionality with scale.

@Sherri_Ingrey @andetritus @cjd @Aether >girls are best off doing what they think is best for them

Way too many single moms and women with 6 figure student loan debt for useless degrees for that to be true.

@deprecated_ii but why?

@sapphire @djsumdog @Hyperhidrosis by that definition, no one is a home owner.

@bonifartius @sickburnbro women who end up in situationships do so through their own fault. They scoffed at the very idea of requiring a commitment before sex (as seen with their distaste to men preferring virgins for marriage), and now they are suffering the consequences of the very thing they were warned against.

But they still have the audacity to be mad that they are "getting used" when they were warned about how they should practice sexual restraint.

This is Trump's screwup, though not his alone. The US empire was already failing, and the events putting that in motion were before Trump was even president the first time. Biden also made things worse by trying to paper over the economic problems, but now we are seeing these tactics of the Biden administration being used in the Trump administration, I was not a fan of it under Biden, and I am not a fan of it under Trump. Eventually we cannot fake our way through economic reality.