Rules and leaders don’t have to be harmful or coercive though. Even very egalitarian communities need norms. Hell even an anarchosyndicalist commune will have some shared set of expectations of its members.
Like you said, cults are about control. I have a hard time seeing much of a parallel between the necessary structure and norms of a community or club, and the coercive nature of a cult.
Support groups for sure, but I was more thinking of things like sporting clubs, dog parks, skate parks, artistic communities, soup kitchens, men’s sheds, book clubs. Third spaces.
Anything where participation is voluntary, hierarchy is absent or minimal, and people come together to share interests, resources, time, or company.
Community.
They’re all groups of people with some kind of shared purpose or values. Cults are harmful and power based. Communities are helpful and consent-based. Religions can fall either way, or somewhere in the middle.
Protein is protein right? I’m sure any half decent chef could figure out how to make insects tasty with a little trial and error.
Well the problem is that “bug” is not a scientific term right? Or even if it is, colloquially I think it could easily refer to either insects specifically or arthropods more generally.
Certainly a lot of people refer to spiders as bugs despite them not being insects.
There is probably little practical help you can give, but don’t underestimate the importance and impact of social and emotional support.
When someone is in such a shitty situation, just knowing that there are people who care makes a huge difference. So just be a good friend. Listen and empathise when they need to talk about shit. Give them a laugh when they need cheering up or distraction from the bullshit.
I’ll never forget dialling into a work meeting with the corporate infosec team who we needed some guidance from.
Their rep shows up and it’s a fem-presenting person with pink cat-ear headphones.
I’m like oh fuck they sent the big guns, this is exactly who we needed to talk to. And I was right, we got exactly what we needed.
What about the public service? I don’t know about where you live, but in my country the public service doesn’t care what degree you have, just that you have one. Look into the graduate programs of your local/state/federal governments.
There’s also one called “Personal blocklist” which is very handy.
100%. At that point your life is over already. Dose me up on morphine and let me sail away into the void peacefully.
At 10 he’s alllllmost at that age where anything a grown-up relative buys for him is gonna be cringe and not the right brand/style/whatever. You can’t go wrong with a voucher so he can get exactly what he wants. Maybe a voucher for a skate shop? You could even take him there and help him get something so it’s still an uncle/aunt purchase.
Part of the point (the whole point?) of rhyming slang is that it’s opaque and convoluted. That’s what makes it fun. It also makes it a bit of a shibboleth - you only understand it if you’re part of the culture.
If you’re eating with an Australian and they ask you to “pass the dead horse”, it means they think you’re Aussie enough to know what it means. Or they know that you won’t know what it means and they’re fucking with you intentionally.
Borat voice my wiiiiiiiife
Wow, haven’t seen a roflcopter in a long time.
My take is irrelevant. Here’s a reputable news source about the issue: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-04/paris-olympics-imane-khelif-clinches-medal-in-boxing/104181158
Tl;dr: she is and always has been a woman. The source of the controversy is the International Boxing Association, which claims she “failed an unspecified eligibility test to compete last year over elevated levels of testosterone.”
Later in the article, in reference to the IBA: “the Russian-dominated body — which has faced years of clashes with the IOC — has refused to provide any information about the tests, underscoring its lack of transparency in nearly every aspect of its dealings, particularly in recent years.”
Mate I appreciate that you seem to be coming at this with honest curiosity, but do yourself a favour and get this information from reputable news sources.
This whole thing is so polarised and so full of misinformation that anything you read from randos on social media you have no way of knowing if it’s credible or complete bullshit.
Nonograms are great for puzzles that are hard enough to be satisfying when you solve them, but easy enough to be relaxing. I use Picture Cross Color on iphone.
Completely disagree, but upvoted for having a well-argued, unpopular opinion which is kind of the point of this thread!
We’re way ahead of you mate, all tobacco advertising was banned in Australia 30 years ago. Plain packaging is just the latest in a long line of moves designed to de-normalise smoking, and the tobacco companies have fought against it every step of the way.
This is a thing people miss. “Oh it can generate repetitive code.”
OK, now who’s going to maintain those thousands of lines of repetitive unit tests, let alone check them for correctness? Certainly not the developer who was too lazy to write their own tests and to think about how to refactor or abstract things to avoid the repetition.
If someone’s response to a repetitive task is copy-pasting poorly-written code over and over we call them a bad engineer. If they use an AI to do the copy-paste for them that’s supposed to be better somehow?