But what if you grind the head into sausage? How do they deal with that? I guess the sausage grows into a new head without memories?

They never die! That’s the absurdity of “death isn’t a thing but otherwise nothing else changes.”

Their face is still burned! You’d have to reduce them down to a brain in a vat. But then all they have is the memory of that searing pain.

The claim is no death. That means if you burn someone at the stake their body turns into a charred husk but they’re still alive and now they’re trapped in this state of unimaginable agony forever, unable to die but also totally helpless and in constant searing pain.

Burying someone alive. Or trapping their feet in cement shoes and throwing them into the ocean.

The love for the Nazi flag comes from white identity politics and white nationalism. The confederate types and the Nazi types have begun to rally together. White nationalism is spreading like a wildfire not just in North America but all over Europe.

You don’t think that’s one of the root causes of all these issues? Pride and resentment and a deep inferiority complex met with sneering on the other side?

Also known as kicking the can down the road.

If you don’t fail a kid in elementary school they’re gonna fail in high school. If you don’t fail them in high school they’re gonna fail in university or in life in general.

Life has consequences for making mistakes and not learning from them. If we try to shelter children from their mistakes and bad habits then we raise adults who are poorly equipped for handling the challenges of life.

When I was in first year of university I met so many nice, seemingly-well-adjusted people who hit a brick wall with their coursework. I believe around a third of my peers failed to graduate at all in their programs. Many dropped out or transferred to other departments or other universities.

But here’s the thing: my peers had already been subject to a rigorous selection process to get in (only about 10% of applicants were admitted). If you had put all applicants through the rigours of the coursework far more would have failed.

The really tragic part of this whole story is when you factor in the degrees of the consequences for failure. In elementary school the consequences for failure would be very low. Children who are older than their peers tend to outperform them anyway. In university, however, the consequences for failure are very high (thousands of dollars wasted on failed courses that need to be repeated).

The consequences for failure outside of school (real life as they call it) are even higher: unemployment, homelessness, incarceration, and even violence and death.

And then finally 1 kid caring for 2 parents and 4 grandparents. 1 worker and 6 dependents.

You’ve made a very vague statement without any substance, sorry. “People in power” are not the reason a person who does not speak the language spoken in an office finds it difficult to get a job in that office. Language barriers make communication (and therefore collaboration) difficult or even impossible. It is no one’s fault that language barriers exist but immigrants without the necessary language skills are at a disadvantage.

If there’s anyone to blame, it’s the people in power in the home country of the immigrants who created the conditions where immigration into such a disadvantaged situation is preferable to remaining at home.

Learning the local language is a survival skill. It doesn’t require forgetting your first language nor does it mean the end of your culture.

The issue is that groups of immigrants can form enclaves where they speak their own language but not the local language. This has the effect of making them “second class” and limiting both their economic opportunities and their overall contribution to society.

Yeah but no more of an “in” than knowing English. Immigration policy is controlled by the federal government which only cares if you know one of the two official languages of the country (or not).

Where are your statistics? Do any cursory searching and you’ll find that South Korea is desperate for care workers. There’s a huge shortage.

Maybe in the west. Not in places like South Korea or Japan. Even if you got the populations to buy in to immigration 100%, you’ve got an impossible task convincing immigrants to learn the language.

English’s hegemony over the world makes immigration to non-English-speaking areas a huge problem. Quebec, for example, tries mightily to force immigrants to learn French and the results are quite ugly in Quebec politics.

The problem with declining population is the huge bubble pop you get when the population is mostly elderly people and few workers.

I didn’t own a laptop at the time. I wasn’t going to take my big desktop to school regardless.

I felt the same way when I first got online in the mid-90s. I thought it was gonna bring all people together. Seems pretty quaint at this point!

Things are obviously pretty bad right now but for me the jury’s still out. It could be really good a hundred years from now!

I used Arch Linux full time from about 15 years ago to 8 years ago. I stopped when I went back to school to get a degree. I was tired of fixing things all the time and I didn’t want to have to deal with that when I had assignment deadlines looming, so I bought a MacBook for school.

I’ve since graduated but I really haven’t looked back. I’ll probably start using Linux again for some hobby projects and maybe to build a SteamOS computer for gaming, but I doubt I’ll switch back to Linux for my main computer (a MacBook M1), especially since the public blowup of Marcan over Rust for Linux and the uncertainty that brings to the Asahi project.

Yeah. Sometimes I think people are so used to media (TV, movies, video games) and the distancing effect of being in a vehicle (looking out a window at people) that they’re actually capable of travelling to another country without actually believing that they are there in person.

Apart from stories like this, there are countless other stories of clueless travellers who walk around treating locals like NPCs, not really realizing how annoying and offensive they are. These big blowback stories are just the tip of the iceberg on that whole genre of stupidity.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Thailand’s lèse majesté laws are very strict. The government treats insults to the monarchy as a harm to the entire country.

Just don’t do it! If you’re not a Thai person then what business do you have with the monarchy anyway?