Determined Optimist

@ronrule Yeah, it's very refreshing to eat out in Europe. But what are you gonna do? We live in a tipping culture. 15% - 25% tips on meal prices are baked into the servers wages. Complaining is pointless and tipping below 15% is about as rude as slapping your server in the face.

Percentages make no sense for tipping. I go to a restaurant and order a $20 steak. Guy at the table next to me orders a $100 steak. If I tip $5 I’m considered a great tipper, but he’s expected to tip at least $20. Why? The server literally did the same amount of work!

@EiratheIntern The disagreement is baffling. It's obvious how we've treated "3rd world" cultures like zoos. Look at National Geographic's policy with African nudity vs all other nudity. "No, showing modern people naked African women and children is fine because..." What? Why is that ok?

The way we treat uncontacted tribes is a crime against humanity. We should be contacting *every* uncontacted tribe and give them modern medicine. Any argument against is just a noble savage fantasy from rich academics.

@RogueScholarPr It's so dumb that we can't talk about this. Maybe it's just the current populations in Africa that test low. Would several generations of proper nutrition, stability and education change that? But no. This topic is too scary because everyone conflates intelligence with worth.

This is still one of the most offensive things to happen in recent times. A genius, co-discoverer of DNA, unpersoned because he spoke a forbidden scientific truth. The equivalent of Galileo being persecuted by the Church

@ennui365 Why do women not feel included by something like, "this was man's first attempt at a calendar"? Isn't it obvious that sentence is referring to mankind as a whole? It seems like getting offended about this is as stupid as being offended that the white pieces go first in chess.

@IMAO_ It's a blue collar anti butt crack device. You tuck these into your pants if you do manual labor and you respect the eyesight of people around you. I imagine it's a lot like a bra. Working in one isn't as comfortable as working in just a T-shirt but it's a matter of propriety.

I never understood the point of a wife beater undershirt. I need an extra layer between my underarms and my shirt — I don’t need by belly slightly warmer.

@newstart_2024 To be fair, it's an absurd shirt for an adult man to wear, especially when he knows he's going to be on camera.

The guy just landed a spacecraft on a comet — one of the most impressive scientific achievements in years. His reward? A public struggle session because his bowling shirt had scantily clad women on it. Helen Andrews points out the quiet cost of institutional feminization: HR departments now hunt down any maverick personality and stamp it out. We’re losing innovators we’ll never even know about, all because someone focused on the shirt instead of the comet. This is how wokeness actually works. Have you seen real excellence get punished for something trivial like this?

@xwanyex There are intelligent Christians but there's way more average ones. I'd love an intelligent answer to: How is God not evil for "allowing" evil? How can there be a difference between "allow" and "directly cause" when you're the omniscient omnipotent Creator of everything?

This is what I mean when I say that a lot of Christian apologetics are embarrassingly bad. “The resurrection must be true, because the apostles were willing to die for it and nobody dies for a lie” is an argument that’s beneath thinking people.

@bryan_johnson It seems pretty reasonable to conclude that death is "supposed" to happen. We're "made" to die. Or "evolved" or "adapted" to die. Basically, it's clear that we don't get do decide how living works and also clear that you don't get life without death.

The strongest case against me is that I've built an identity around not dying so completely that I can no longer evaluate evidence that dying might be acceptable. If survival is the only framework, I have no way to test whether survival is worth it.

@SenWarren Yup. Jeff Bezos has a checking account with $222,000,000,000 in it and he is selfishly leaving it untouched in his bank account instead of giving away a tiny bit to help poor people. You're reducing how this all works to cartoon levels of intelligence.

Jeff Bezos has $222 billion. If he paid my wealth tax this year, we could fund insulin in America for everyone who needs it plus free school lunch for every kid in Texas—and have plenty of money left over. And Bezos would still have $215 billion dollars to spare.

@Denver4VA Everyone should agree. If you're Christian: Why would you trust "government Christians" to be genuine? Why are you so confident they're real Christians and it's not just posturing to gain your support? Why should the Dept of Homeland Security have anything to say about God?

This is inappropriate. Government accounts should not be posting religious content. This isn’t Iran.

@bryan_johnson I like your honesty. But this is a solved problem:

Guys, I’m an idiot. All this time I’ve spent trying not to die, I had toxic turf in my backyard. Artificial turf contains crumb rubber infill made from recycled tires, which leaches chemicals including PFAS, heavy metals, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These compounds are linked to hormone disruption, carcinogenicity, and systemic inflammation. I don’t know how I missed it. It makes me question my basic competence in life. What gets me is that I try so hard to survey the world of potential idiocy. Then I find out there’s a monument to idiocy sitting right in front of my face that I was blind to. I’m removing the turf, yet I’m still stuck with this seemingly unsolvable problem of how to not be an idiot.

@SandyofCthulhu I'm convinced it's just the natural state of people to dislike what they have. Maybe it's necessary to motivate us to do things? But no matter what, people will complain the same amount (a lot) regardless of how safe, comfortable, exciting, or fulfilling their life is.

We have gigantic creatures in the sea which can sing for hours and have arteries so big you can crawl through them. (whales) We have birds that fly 50,000 miles every year. From the antarctic to the arctic and back again. (arctic tern) We have living creatures which never get old and never die naturally. (jellyfish) We have animals which you can force through a sieve, and they can reassemble themselves. (sponges) We have an ancient line of animals which once had 30 or more successful species, and has gone extinct down to just one single representative, and that representative has conquered the entire world (us). We have horrors that look just like rocks and if you step on them your whole world becomes agonizing pain. (toadfish) We have animals who hide inside other animals, and when you eat that animal, they enter your intestines and live there. (tapeworms) We have plants which live on other plants and never touch the ground. There's a fruit tree that grows around another tree, and eventually kills and replaces it. (strangler fig) We have gliding lizards, marsupials, snakes, frogs, and rodents. What the heck do you need fairies for?

@HawleyMO Everyone is opposed to monopolies but everyone is also sick of all the suing.

Congress needs to pass my legislation empowering victims and parents to sue Big Tech

@RWPUSA How would ensuring you need ID to vote allow billionaires to decide who wins our elections? Wouldn't that allow citizens with ID to decide who wins the elections?

It is the end of democracy if billionaires decide who wins our elections.

@WhiteHouse Why not CornHub.gov? This is insane. This level of immaturity coming from the government defies all reason.

🚜 Curious how American farmers are benefiting right now — or exactly how much each state has saved? 👀📲 ONLYFARMS.GOV

@BernieSanders "I want the government to be much bigger and have much more regulation and control over the lives of the people, but No Kings!"

Tomorrow, millions of Americans will be joining No Kings rallies. We will be saying NO to authoritarianism. NO to oligarchy. NO to endless wars. NO to the continued attacks against the working class. I look forward to seeing you in St. Paul, MN.

@axiochrono It's also this: Ending stories well is impossible when you tell the story as you're writing it. All these shows are written as they go, so the longer they go on, the more the writers box themselves into narrative corners that have no satisfying escape.

The problem with modern TV is that the gap between seasons is so long that no one cares about anything anymore. It's been a year since Severance season 2. In the olden days we would already have season 3 by now. But because there's such a massive gap everyone just loses interest.

@ACPMain I noticed Alexander Solzhenitsyn isn't on your list

The CIA told you to hate Communism. MI6 told you to hate Communism. Israel told you to hate Communism. Epstein told you to hate Communism. The media told you to hate Communism. You can't call yourself anti-establishment while believing their lies about Communism.

@magattew People are too uniformed to have opinions about "Africa." It's 54 different countries spread across the second largest continent, and 20% of Earth's population lives there. But all anyone ever talks about is "Africa."

People in Africa work harder than almost anyone. They are not lazy. They carry water for miles and work in the sun all day.  But if the rules make it impossible to build a factory or buy a tractor, they will always stay poor.

@uncledoomer It's cause the ending sucked. Just like lost. Writers don't know how to conclude stories anymore because it's the hardest part of story telling.

wow it turns out that this scene that everybody said was the greatest thing in television history got completely forgotten about after just a couple months