Cigarettes, cigars, and pipes still smell wonderful to me, and if was free and wasn’t going to kill me, I’d absolutely start again. But I haven’t had any real cravings or dreams about smoking since about four months after I quit.

Benzo withdrawal will kill you, but goddamn is it hard to kill yourself with benzodiazepines… You’d think that something with a deadly withdrawal would also be easy to OD on, but no.

I’m pretty sure I know what I smoked.

I quit because I started coughing up dark brown shit every morning; I always had some kind of congestion in my throat. I decided that I didn’t want to do that anymore, so I stopped.

nicotine is the hardest drug to quit.

Wild. I’ve quit smoking multiple times, and thought the first week or so was unpleasant each time, but not awful. Each time I started up again it was because my ex-spouse started smoking again and was pushing cigarettes on me. Since the divorce a decade ago, I haven’t had a cigarette. And that was after about fifteen years of smoking around a pack and a half a day.

I know that quitting drinking all at once can straight up kill you, if you’re a hardcore alcoholic; I’ve known a few people that had the shakes every time they were sober.

It depends on what you’re doing with it.

I use it solely for Ace XR, which is a dry-fire simulator/tracker. Ace XR is available solely for Meta Quest (2 & 3), so I didn’t really have many options. Unfortunately, I’m currently rehabbing a serious injury, and I am unable to practice.

For gaming? Not really. I like the PSVR2 headset more for that; it’s a better headset overall. I’m still working on getting it set up to work with my PC though. As other people have said, getting corrective lenses for a headset really makes them more enjoyable if you need glasses; it’s a pain in the ass to have to put in contacts when I want to use VR. For the Meta Quest specifically, and upgraded head band and spare battery (that also acts like a counterweight) is very nice to have.

Correct; it’s a shitfest, and it’s going to get a lot worse.

A lot worse.

And what, exactly, is positive about it, that has no associated negative outcomes?

IMO, there’s no such thing as responsible AI use. All of the uses so far are bad, and I can’t see any that would work as well as a trained human. Even worse, there’s zero accountability; when an AI makes a mistake and gets people killed, no executives or programmers will ever face any criminal charges because the blame will be too diffuse.

requires a trial.

Not for people that are undocumented. People that are not in the us legally get hearings, but that’s policy rather than law, IIRC. Due process gets a little weird here, because the process in question isn’t a matter of law or the constitution.

Regardless - it’s not going to go well for anyone that thinks that he doesn’t mean them.

The denaturalization concept–stripping naturalized citizens of citizenship–is fa, far scarier than deportation. Once you can strip citizenship from a naturalized citizen, and once you’ve eliminated birthright citizenship, you’ve got a roadmap for stripping citizenship from anyone.

Anyone that thinks that it’s going to be only ‘criminals’ that get deported forget that crossing the border without documentation is a crime. Yeah, it’s a misdemeanor, but it’s still a crime, and the Trump administration is still going to deport them when they can.

They seem to have a foregone conclusion that AI is a positive thing, rather than something that should be eradicated like smallpox or syphilis.

I’m fairly confident that that cat is a Lykoi. It’s a very new breed of cat; they have guard hair, but no undercoat. So far, they’re believed to be a very hardy breed with no known health issues (unlike, say, Sphynx, which have a high rate of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy).

It is, yeah. When you look at accounts like Occupy Democrats and start fact checking them, there’s a lot of bullshit that they post. Like, pants on fire kind of bullshit. I knew a lot of people that followed them. In order to get engagement, accounts need to stir up emotions and get people to react and comment; it’s easier to do that with things that outrage rather than dense policy positions.

I want to believe that the political left is more intellectually honest than the right, but that’s because I’m mostly on the political left. (I’m an anarchist at heart, but with a cynical disbelief in the ability of people to work together in a country the size of the US without some degree of authoritarian control.) So I try to fact-check all of the sources that I use for both factual information, as well as ideological biases.

Yes, I understand that. But on social media you aren’t necessarily getting right-wing propaganda, as there’s plenty of left-wing propaganda and misinformation as well. That’s why I’m saying that they’re low- or no-information voters that are working solely on feels.

Even if you’re a relatively disconnected right winger

I’m not talking about relatively disconnected right wingers; I’m talking about people that are largely centrist, and not paying attention to Fox, NBC, CNN, or any newspapers, and gets all of their ‘news’ from social media. I guess you’d call them the hoi poloi; they’re low-information voters (or no information voters), and mostly apathetic as long as they feel like they’re getting by. Policy won’t matter to them very much; they’re voting on feels.

any right winger that obsessively follows the news is literally ben shapiro or alex jones.

That depends. There are a number of people that are extremely fiscally conservative that have zero interest in culture wars issues. Most of them have defected from the Republican party entirely though, because they see that the current iteration of the Republican party is deeply harmful to the kind of conservatism that they stand for. But that kind of conservative hasn’t really been popular since about the time that Newt Gingritch was trying to stir up the country against a president that didn’t keep his dick in his pants.

We can probably tolerate a little more disinflation, as a treat.

No, not really, because deflation (not disinflation) tends to be self-sustaining, much like hyperinflation does. If the dollar I have today will buy two dollars worth of goods next week, then I’m going to hold onto my dollar to make any sort of discretionary purchase until next week. When everyone does that, all at the same time, it’s like building a dam; the flow of money just grinds to a halt. Companies don’t have money coming in, so they can’t pay workers, which leads to layoffs, and the people laid off have no income to buy anything now, which feeds right back into that cycle.

I agree with you that corporations need to be reined in, that executive salaries are out of control, and that things like stock-buybacks are the bane of a functional economy. But that’s literally going to take legislation in this country to fix, in the same way that it did when the economy crashed in the 1920’s, and I guarantee you that there’s going to be zero political interest in that for at least two years.

It’s not even a propaganda problem, per se, because most people aren’t obsessively following the news and economic reports.

It’s how they feel about money.

That was the biggest single issue.

People looked at grocery store prices and said, this is nuts, I was paying half this just four years ago.

It doesn’t matter to them that global inflation skyrocketed along with inflation in the US, or that we’re doing better than the rest of the world right now. They want to see prices go down, even though that would be deflation, which is incredibly bad for an economy.

Yeah, but does he like his step dad? Maybe he’s planning on ratting his dad out, ever think about that?

Since the ACA was passed, Democrats have not held all three branches of the gov’t. (In fact, Mitch McConnell refused to take up Obama’s nomination of a SCOTUS justice because he thought that eight months was too close to the election. Or, that was his claim.) They haven’t had any opportunities to make significant reforms to the ACA–or pass something better–because they haven’t had the power to do so. Republicans came close to overturning it, but blew their chances in 2018. So, to be more accurate, the party that wants to fix healthcare has not had the political ability to do so.

Short of a political change, there is no way to change the system.

If Trump wins, expect it to be much, much worse. The ACA/Obamacare guarantees that certain things must be covered, that you can’t be denied covered based on pre-existing conditions, and that you can’t be charged more due to age, gender, etc. It also gives subsidies to people that are buying their own covered on the marketplace, which was set up by the federal gov’t.

Under Trump, expect all of that to be tossed out. If Trump wins, it’s highly likely that Republicans with flip the Senate, and retain control of the House, which means Republicans will have all three branches of the federal government captured, and there will be no brakes to repealing the ACA and going back to the old, much shittier system.

If Harris wins, don’t expect to see many changes. If she wins, it’s unlikely that Democrats would also have control of both the House and Senate. While it’s true that she was in favor of a single-payer system five years ago, it’s unlikely that she would be able to get that through the House and Senate unless they were both controlled by a Democratic majority. (In the case of the Senate, they would need to nuke the filibuster, which–IMO–is not a good idea in the long run).