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.

Removed by mod

That’s it. Launch the fucking nukes, ALL OF THEM, EVERYWHERE, at the whole goddamn region. If neither side is going to spare each other’s kids, I want that whole area fucking gone.

I know that won’t happen so I’m going to fucking kill myself. I hate every last one of you, humanity is nothing more than spiteful monsters and I refuse to live in a world where my choices are comfortable misery and uncomfortable misery. Moving to the middle of nowhere is not my idea of “freedom”.

Their kids didn’t target that school. You know damn well I fucking didn’t mean the Hamas’ kids should die.

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.

Ah. Alright, fair enough, thanks for correcting my mistake.

I want these “Hama’s” bastards fucking DEAD. Do NOT target people’s kids, end of story.

If that is gross revenue, I have bad news for the EU. “X” is, IIRC, operating in the red since Musk bought it.

Maniac (2023) is a series you might like. Despite the name, its more of a cassette futurism cyberpunk world with a scary amount of dystopian parallels to our own.

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.

Huh, wasn’t expecting the kid with a PC but they got that part right. In 1999 I was super into neopets.

That’s definitely half my point, yes. You can’t just shut off water to children like that’s somehow okay, I’m pissed at Israel too. The kids in Palestine didn’t kill the kids in that village, this is why even though I’m a very vengeful person, spite and “collateral damage” is not acceptable from anyone, myself included.

The US military has, in all likelihood, been already capable of this for the past 15-30 years. Google has no market other than the public, and there’s no way to stop it from tagging rich people as “that asshole who owns what used to be twitter” but also the general public (us) would just end up flagging people we hate or envy or who we want revenge on to ruin people’s reputations.

There is no upside for a tech like that in the hands of big money, not even for big money; done the way Google would do it, it would fracture society like nothing before it and that includes utterly destroying the economy before leading to some sort of nuclear exchange.

I would sign up for this if it’s opt-in and either decentralized or local storage-based. Otherwise I hope the fuckers who would ruin this idea for greed crash and burn.

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

No, but Israeli soldiers are known for mostly being deployed against civilians when someone thinks massacres are somehow okay.

I’m not on Israel’s side on this one, but fuck the Hamas too.

Yeah, ffs, if you want to fight a war, leave both side’s kids out of it.

14 and younger is too early for anyone to die, I swear if that asshole Trump really is the Antichrist (look it up, I’m no Christian but the “Kek and Medjet” meme energy is strong with that theory) and the bible was right (and if so, that these really are the end times), I hope every last person who has willingly killed a child or ordered someone to kill children goes to the 10th circle of hell or whatever passes for it, no matter what god or concept they believe in. Especially Trump (see the Mexican immigrant kids who his illegal “task force” of bigots basically kidnapped and let starve) and Putin, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Justice needs to be served for every child, whether they were enslaved on cocoa farms, working in slaughterhouses in the state that changed child labor laws, sent to juvenile detention for crimes they didn’t commit because the judge was getting kick-backs from a corporate prison, or killed in school shootings.

People say we hate child abuse. I strongly suspect what people really hate is the feeling of disgust that enter their heads if they hear “sex” and “kids” in the same sentence, which would be understandable if it was genuine concern (nobody, especially kids, should be subject to sex against their will, and yes, kids cannot consent) but it’s not. If it was, guns would be regulated, school bus routes would be required to never cross railroad tracks, and any leader - corporate or government - responsible for the intentional or negligent death of a child due to actions that used political/managerial authority would be executed.

I am so done with reality. Wake me up on November 12, if we’re still around by then.