Don’t forget the internet is global. People for whom English is a second language are much more common than they once were.

Playing Receiver in Receiver 2 was a fun surprise.

I do, but I am slightly discouraged from doing so by the drivers in my area. People are always so terrified of not being the first waiting at the next red light, they see a turn signal as a warning to ‘speed up and go past this car before they can get ahead of you.’

…unless it is. Tipping points could mean that there will be a certain level of emissions, which we may already be too late to avoid, that will take the earth out of the expected ranges and put it somewhere we can’t predict. I can’t say, but more informed people than me have suggested it as a real worry.

The question of ‘What is the purpose of government?’ is simultaneously deeply important to society and yet rarely, if ever, addressed in a useful context. I have watched people argue about multiple policies, speaking past each other the whole time, just because they had different baseline assumptions as to the purpose of government and couldn’t even see their opponents had a different definition.

Never been one to get scared by horror movies. I just can’t get the buy in necessary to feel scared for the characters. However, the closest to traditional horror I can think of that really was effective was Green Room. It’s intense in its loud parts and tense in it’s quiet. It’s realistic modern cult horror.

If you expand the field out a bit and look to more of a ‘leaves you with dread about reality’ effect, ‘When the Wind Blows’ is very affecting. It’s animated but the story is quite realistic.

Happy to help.

There are a lot of things in human society you are expected to ‘just know,’ which is silly. Human social dynamics is so complex psychology, sociology, and their various related fields are possible doctorate fields, but when someone says 'How do I know the difference between, ‘love’ and ‘love love?’ people will just say, ‘You just know.’

This would make a great little lore item in some RPG to explain why there’s a spell list.

‘We have literal magic that can raise the dead and move us across the world in the blink of an eye. Why the fuck am I having to do dishes by hand?’

‘Because no one actually knows how the spells we have work. We just have these spells left over from when they did, and ‘clean dishes’ isn’t one of them.’

Unimportant caramel.

Caramel shlarmle

I’ll toss on a bit more here if they can’t. If you are great at making friends then you probably have some idea of ‘signals’ that someone is interested in someone. Flirting is the process of displaying those signals toward someone you find attractive in the hopes of getting feedback signals. It’s a way of subtly allowing people to show their intentions without risking the embarrassment of a direct rejection. You can learn to play the game if you want. Some people really enjoy it. Some people don’t.

Note, though, it is entirely possible to skip it if you are willing to be a bit forward, and simply say, ‘I find you very attractive and like you a lot. Would you be interested in going on a date and seeing how things feel?’ This risks the awkwardness of a direct rejection, the possible discomfort for the other person if they feel intimidated by you, but cuts through the extra layers of process and can be a refreshing burst of earnestness for many people.

You’ve asked how it’s different from friend interactions. The baseline difference is expectation and physicality. In a basic friendship, there is little expectation and little contact. You might not expect much more from a low level friendship than from a decent stranger. (Pass me the salt) A good friend is someone you can expect more of, and by whom are expected of more. (Help me move.) A best friend is someone for whom you would be expected to take serious personal risk, and who you would expect to take personal risk for your sake. (I need to get across the border, no questions asked.)

Romance takes many forms but the general guideline is friendship, plus physical attraction. Low level friendship plus physical attraction is where friends-with-benefits usually sit. Good friendship plus physical attraction is usually a girl/boyfriend. Best friend status with physical attraction is where you get to long term partner status.

There are a lot of nuances to all of it, so that’s a brutal oversimplification, but it’s a place to start building a framework for understanding.

Saying ‘the response’ is kind of pretending it’s a monolith. There will be a lot of carefully considered discussion, regardless of what the result is, because that’s what adult humans do. Then there will be the great lumps of BS that are projected by party mouthpieces and parroted by the party followers. I’m less interested in the social media chatter as a response and more interested in the response from the other countries.

China’s choice to place export restrictions on things like Yttrium and other rare earth metals, when they control ~3/4ths of the world’s supply, could put companies around the world out of business or under Chinese soft power. Some of America’s biggest blue chip companies are reliant on those materials. China is not going to make it easy if even possible to get those elements for US companies. Companies in Europe and Asia could also be targetted with it as an implementation of Chinese soft power.

Another issue to consider is the recovery itself. The market always craps its pants when Trump speaks because the thing the market loves is predictability and Trump is unpredictable. It’s hard to say how comfortable the investor class will be with taking risks on new investments when one announcement from the oval office can drop share prices to a new 52 week low.

Facing all this, it’s hard to care much about the chatter from party loyalists.

Ignoring whether he is or not, as that is a DEEP dive into world economics, the response would have some variance, because nothing is monolithic, but I expect the prominent responses would be for supporters to cheer and gloat, for the independents to cheer and hope, with timing deciding the midterms, and for the opposition to drop it and focus on all the other problems with Trump.

I’m all for not wasting the resources involved in dishes but cold canned soup is kind of nasty. I’d at least warm it up if that’s an option.

That’s practically the definition of ‘like’ to an infant. ‘This makes me feel how boob juice makes me feel.’

In a perfect world, anyone who attempted to go around hurting people would be removed from society.

I’m not one to say it doesn’t matter. I know the benefit good nursing provides. I’m saying, in modern culture, especially in the circles who have political, economic, and cultural power, there is, and has been for decades, a push to think of a college education as an investment product that benefits the purchaser, with little to no consideration being given to societal benefit. They are acting as if your work is not more meaningful/beneficial to society than, say, a Marketing Director. (a position of similar wage which I would say is, at least, not as beneficial, if not actually harmful to society)

Nursing, for instance, is a profession, or even a vocation, which provides tremendous societal benefit, both in the direct ‘people’s lives in medical settings suck less’ sense and in the indirect ‘people get back to health and productivity’ sense. Despite this, it’s not common, as far as I’ve seen, for governments to offer much in the way of benefits to nurses as reward for their service. There’s even a tendency to, when they ask for a raise, to take an attitude of ‘You should be happy. At least you get to know you’re helping people. We need all these extra profits to help compensate us for doing our jobs that don’t help people.’

Mostly as an aside, I’ve actually thought for years that nurses and doctors who are providing direct care to patients (i.e. not people who went to Med/Nursing school and then went into medicine-adjacent business, but people putting in direct labor to help heal people) should have a significant tax cut. Their work benefits society more than the money it would represent, and a cut would make their lives easier, and help balance the years of tuition and effort it takes to get to that position.

In the current system, education isn’t viewed as a system of societal improvement but as a product to improve the standing of the individual. Because the individual is seen as the only one who benefits from their education, the individual pays for it.

As others have said, there are lots of divides in various cultures. From what I have heard, many people from the Americas look down on those from further south in the Americas. (Americans look down on Mexicans, who look down on Guatemalans, etc.) I’ve heard there are still certain views regarding Han Chinese versus others in China, xenophobia in Japan, sectarianism between subsets of Islam, and a basic level of nativism throughout much of the world. For America, the culture started with the era of ‘scientific’ racism so it started with a color divide. Those old divides remain because certain classes of people keep reinforcing because it helps their narrative. In the same way you can look at what happened with American healthcare through a Marxist, free-market-absolutist, or various other views, you can look at America through various lenses, and the racial one still holds a lot of sway. As long as enough people identify with the grouping, it grants political power to those who have authority in that group. The power is used to reinforce the identity to perpetuate itself and the cycle continues. It takes fairly drastic circumstances to change that.

And it’s only March.

So, if you laid on a large enough block of it, you’d have the perfect shape to make a mold for a customized foam mattress?