I honestly have no recollection. It was about 10 years ago. I probably just used like half the seasoning packet with salt and pepper. (Because that seems like something I’d do.)

I once forgot about it in a crock pot using the fast cook method and basically boiled the whole thing into mush. It made for a delicious bean dip.

I wouldn’t trust Trump, either. But the BBC probably fact checked him.

Update: Confirmed dead by Trump.

That’s kind of on the ‘people genuinely that stupid’, isn’t it?

I also feel that if we don’t understand an obviously asinine statement in a way that allows us to laugh with the commenter, we can just roll our eyes and move on, rather than try to police their speech.
The tendency of commenters to insult the intellect of others because they miss a joke is so gross and smug and speaks of poor socialization.

What if, instead, you had responded with:
“Careful, though! The police are way too eager to help. The last time I jumped out of my car with a knife to cut away one of these straps, they started shooting, but their aim is terrible. They didn’t hit the strap at all! Ow.”
It conveys the same point (don’t come at cops with a knife) and says two different things. If the person you’re talking to is actually stupid, they’ll maybe question the logic of coming at the cops with a knife, and if the person reading is in on the joke, they’ll give it a sensible chuckle and move on with their lives, without the nasty aftertaste of someone attempting to show how smart they are.

G’day mate!

My first Linux issue was that it didn’t support the USB hub I had at the time that was just always plugged into the windows machine I was installing Linux onto. So in 2003, I took my bulky tower to a friends house and it booted on the first try after weeks of failures trying on my own at home.
I was both relieved, and incredibly annoyed.

My overactive imagination: They used a speargun designed to fire RJ-45 shaped bolts through walls, pulling high tensile strength networking cable with it.

In this case, it’s just me having a ‘Spider-Man meme’ moment with your comment and being excessively cavalier/silly in my response.
Medical diagnosis’ should not come from anonymous people on the internet. I could be a dog, for crying out loud.

You have Hyperactive-type ADHD and Anxiety. (Possibly)

So mote it be. (Maybe)

Awkwardly gestures prophetically.

Wait. You’re telling me the pocket cartel even has a stranglehold on diaper bags?!

Tagline: Love is a battlefield!

Increasingly, I’m reminded of this: Paul Bunyan vs. the spam bot (or how Paul Bunyan triggered the singularity to win a bet). It’s a medium-length read from the old internet, but fun.

The promise of money — even diminishing returns — is too great. There’s a new scraper spending big on resources every day while websites are under assault.

In the paraphrased words of the finance industry: AI can stay stupid longer than most websites can stay solvent.

You know, I posted that comment sort of unthinkingly, but you are right.

There’s a book called “Why does he do that? Inside the minds of angry and controlling men” that’s on my reading list. (A good summary of the book is available here)
The author repeatedly highlights exactly the point you brought up - that abusers will wield therapy language to perpetuate their abuse. He instead suggests the only real way to change abusers (who are not necessarily the same as sociopaths, mind you) is to put them in programs tailored to abusers to more or less make them realize how much they need to learn empathy, and equip them with the ability to use that empathy.

I mean, the alternative was to crumble.

I mean, fuck. I was just thinking it through -
In the U.S., Most millennials started out in the wake of the war on drugs and the damage it did to communities. From there, you have the racial tension of the 90’s, the death of truth with Fox News, the rise of school shootings, 9/11, the start of the rightward/authoritarian swing of the U.S., the ‘08 recession, citizens united, loss of democracy, COVID, another recession, inflation, housing insecurity, the loss of the illusion of democracy.

I remember back in 1999, when I was a kid, hearing folks talk about how in just a few years weed was going to be legal and so was gay marriage. I remember thinking that the future was going to be bright and not some authoritarian hellscape. Now there are license plate readers at the grocery store parking lot.

I mean. If we didn’t know how to manage the feelings we have about the future we were promised and lost, and all the trauma we’ve experienced along the way, I guess we’d all wind up driving Dodge Rams with U.S. Flags on them.

Every millennial I know is in therapy.

I do not associate with people who decorate their vehicles that way. I find they act like sociopaths.

Ergo, people who put flags like that on their cars are in need of therapy.

I’ve declared it to be true. Spread the word.

I’ll refrain from correcting anything else, to not be a dick.

Always a good call, besides, why be a dick when you can be ridiculous?

I’m not a mathemagician or a physexiest, so it’s safe to assume my assumptions are wild and my calculations suspect.

• Blue whales weigh between 90,000 and 180,000 kg. Let’s go right in the middle at 135,000 kg.
• A deviantart post from 2014 says Blue whales are as dense as water (approximately).
• According to an online calculator, seawater weighs 1,021kg/m^3 (I figure whales are salty, because of climate change and the centuries of being hunted to near extinction).
• If we assume that weight equals volume, then the same calculator puts our whale at 132.1m^3
• And, obviously, that doesn’t work for my porpoises. So we grind the whale into a slurry, and freeze it into a ball. Using an online tool to find the radius of a sphere from the volume, we come up with 31.6, which I assume is meters.
• Doubling that (in my head!) to get the diameter, we’d wind up with a ball that is about 63.2 meters across.
• Using this online calculator of unknown provenance, we put in a diameter of 63.2m, a velocity of 9.8m/s (earth’s gravity!), an angle of 90 (because our masticated and spheroidified whale would of course be dropped from space like a cartoon anvil), and selecting ice as the material, it says the crater would have a radius of 324 meters, with ejecta spread about twice that.

Not enough to destroy the whole thing, but enough to wipe out St. Peter’s Basilica, and do a lot of damage to the rest of it.

I’m not mad at you at all. I’m mad at the motherfuckers who think they have a right to my attention.

But to respond - it’s not better, because either option is detestable. I reject both.

You correctly called it that we’re answering different questions. I reject the question you’re answering, because I do not accept advertisements in my vehicle, that I own, as a foregone conclusion. You accidentally’d a step in accepting their bullshit.

I literally would rather threaten legal action, or show up outside their advertising executive’s house with a megaphone to try to sell them some scammy bullshit while they expect privacy. Maybe I’d even read off the advertising I get on the console. (Not that I’d ever buy a RAM truck, but still.)

New Business Idea: Buy unzoned property that can be used to block scenic overlooks around the homes of scummy advertising executives. Put up billboards.