Assuming that your backup isn’t also infected.

Doesn’t have to be in the bank either; if you’re traveling with your life savings in cash, then if you get pulled over cops are likely to seize that money. Just because fuck you, that’s why.

I opt for bitcoin because it has more utility value for me.

My bank makes it an enormous pain in my ass to buy things from overseas vendors; they won’t process any payments that are going outside of the US border. The rationale is ‘fraud’, even when you’re dealing with well-known and trusted vendors. Even when I try calling my banks and telling them to pre-authorize the charges, they won’t go through. The only way I can get around that within the established financial system is by using a 3rd party payment service; those 3rd party services make their money by lopping off a percentage of that purchase. E.g., if I’m buying something for $1000 from China (and we’re going to ignore tariffs, duties, taxes, and shipping costs for the moment), then I may have to pay $1040 for it, because of the fees that are taken out. On the other hand, if I’m buying from a trusted vendor, and I use bitcoin, I can just send it to them. Bitcoin doesn’t care where it’s going, and–assuming you don’t care about speed of confirmations–transaction fees can be quite a bit lower than using any other payment system. (And, BTW, transaction fees are built into all payment processing systems; it’s just not apparent to individuals on the purchasing end. That means that if something costs .001btc, then I have to send, say, .0010001btc to the vendor, but then the)

Speculation doesn’t play a role in it for me.

I have no direct use for gold; I can’t plate connectors.

Yes.

But many people–and I’m not saying you do this–but many people get gold, silver, and diamonds confused, and think that their intrinsic value is linked to their perceived value. does that make sense?

…Except that gold, like the dollar, and like bitcoin, has the value it does because people believe it does. Sure, gold’s a great semiconductor. But if that was all we used it for, the price of gold would be a tine fraction of what it is. Diamonds are great as abrasives and in certain cutting applications, but that’s all synthetic now. Natural diamonds only have high value because of artificial scarcity and advertising.

I never had a chance to try Earthdawn, but it looked like a lot of fun.

See, this is why you don’t let your vegetarian spouse raise chickens. Because before you know it, you have to eat a dozen eggs a day just to keep up, and you can’t even give them away to your friends anymore.

Yeah, that’s actually kind of true. When you’re working, you can shut off a lot of that stuff for a while, and power through. Then that’s nine hours that you don’t have to think about X, Y, or Z. It gives you space, so that emotions aren’t as raw, and it gives you a structure. I would never suggest work instead of therapy, but I know a lot of people that went to work the day after their spouse died because they couldn’t stand to be alone with just their thoughts.

Getting fired for being in a ‘bad mood’ when my ex-spouse told me that they wanted to separate took me from deeply depressed to suicidal, and I got to spend the next four days, three nights in a hospital. If I hadn’t been fired, I would have… Coped. Not well, but I wouldn’t have tried to taste-test a shotgun.

I’m a fan of old-school Shadowrun (2nd ed.); it didn’t matter how bad-ass your character was, you could get killed by a lucky shot from a punk with a zipgun. It kept the grime of Cyperpunk, and added fantastical elements to it. IMO, it required more role-playing than is strictly necessary in a lot of D&D games, because going in guns blazing all the time was almost certain to lead to death; properly played (IMO), the GM should be brutal in how they handle stupid players.

The downside was so many six sided dice.

IIRC, this hasn’t been debunked per se, but it was a very small, very limited study, and doesn’t really do a great job of explaining homophobia in a broader population. (I mean, you’re talking about 64 people in total; depending on your inclusion criteria, that could be a meaningless sample size.) Penile plethysmography is a proxy for sexual arousal; it’s useful in some instances–like predicting whether or not someone will commit more sexual offenses in the future–but isn’t even that great in those instances. If I remember correctly, there’s strong evidence that disgust is a trait strongly associated with conservatism, and homophobia is a an extreme disgust reaction.

FWIW, I was casually–but quite virulently–homophobic when I was younger. I’d been raised in a very conservative, evangelical religious group, and I believed all the bullshit that I’d heard about gay people. That changed once I lost religion, and actually met people that were gay. That, of course, is only anecdotal evidence, and does assume that I’m neither gay nor bisexual (and I don’t believe that I am), but it fits with what I’ve seen from conservative thought.

It depends on how you’re looking at homosexuality; are you looking at it as sexual attraction, or as behaviour? If you’re talking about behaviour, then a lot of that is certainly environmental, e.g., if you’re raise a non-permissive location, you’re much, much less likely to engage in homosexual behaviour. But if you’re talking about sexual attraction, then it seems very unlikely that it could be anything other than primarily genetic.

I think that the fact that there’s a difference between how people act, versus how people feel, is what confuses so many people about being straight, gay, bisexual, transgender, etc., and why conservatives feel like there’s a ‘gay agenda’ to make kids gay (or trans) when a permissive society allows more people to act freely on the way that they feel.

If you need to regularly scratch your anus, you probably have parasites. That’s one of the prime ways for some species of parasites (roundworms, I think?, probably tapeworms too?) to spread.

Finland first, New Zealand second. Both have gun rights. Finland has a lot of empty space in the north, and Finns are, in general, not super interested in being highly social, despite historically having pretty solid social safety nets (although I hear the right is rising there, and that may not last). The largest barrier is that Suomi is a very difficult language to learn.

By that ‘logic’ everyone needs a taste of white supremacy, Christian nationalism, Nazis, and so on.

Certain opinions aren’t worth giving any consideration to because they’re so stupidly, pig-headedly wrong. The street corner preacher frothing at the mouth over LGBTQ people is one, .ml and the former hexbear (world’s smallest violin plays a sad song for their passing) instances being prime examples.

Arrive to raids […] out of uniform.

…This is already happening.

The beauty of such subtle magic is that you would be happy to be changed in such a way. :)

I’ve read history books that aren’t full-blown propaganda. If you had read any, you would know that oppression and violence is the foundation of ALL western countries, and most non-western ones as well. The difference being that countries in the EU are more comfortable forgetting that their wealth was built on things like the exploitation of the Congo, the British East India Company, et al.

The founding document of the US though, which is what I was clearly referring to, established certain civil rights that the gov’t isn’t supposed to infringe. Religious liberty is one of those. This is notably not a right in most non-US countries; many EU countries have state-funded religions, and citizens are often taxes by the gov’ts to pay for those religions.

I’m an atheist and a Satanist. I agree that these people are, by the measure of what the Jesus Christ of the Christian Bible is claimed to have said, hypocrites. At best. And yes, Jesus said that you should pray in private, and that people who pray in public so that they can be seen to pray have already received their reward. (Matthew 6:5 - “And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.”)

But it’s still a foundational civil right.

Yeah, no. That was never the intent of 1A. Individuals, or groups, are more than welcome to pray in government buildings, as long as they aren’t forcing that religious expression on unwilling people, using it as a religious test, or something similar that would amount to the establishment of a state-sponsored religion.

Students can pray in schools; teachers can pray in schools. Teachers can not compel students to participate in prayers, nor are teachers supposed to lead students in prayer (as that’s implied compulsion).

Constitutional freedoms–including religion–are a foundation for our country. If that’s not what you want, feel free to repeal the constitution, or move to a country that has a state religion instead.