I suspect we all have mental problems. Most people are not assessed and are high-functioning, yet we're not meant to work forty hours a week and live in nuclear families, let alone struggle in precarity. Mental illness is and family dysfunction are intergenerational and have been through the twentieth century, if not through the common era.

While there are recreational uses for drugs, I suspect most drug users self medicate, which is to say the drugs they take unpresribed are used to cope with symptoms of stress and existential horror, the same way we take drugs to cope with migraines or allergies, or chronic symptoms.

Does that mean they're uncool? Not at all. Self aware people, deep thinkers, philosophers, artists, scientists and engineers all often drink, smoke, binge on edibles or engage in street chemistries in order to cope, and the ones who are self-aware are able to recognize it's a thing they need right now, and that others who are addicted are not to be blamed or judged by whatever gets them by, night after night.

Until we can find a better way to enforce civil liberties, the striking of illegally obtained evidence in the prosecution of terrible criminals is necessary. That they get to walk free is the point first as a penalty to the state (that now a monster remains at large) and second as a penalty to the public for allowing the state to let its agents abuse their power.

If neonazis and terrorists aren't protected by our Bill of Rights, then you aren't either. And it informs how the massive extrajudicial surveillance state got formed in the first place, as the US state believes national security (in all its ambiguity) is valued more than American lives.

My plug on Satisfactory is you come for playing around with and making sculptures with conveyor belts, and then stay to play with jump-pads, pneumatic hypertubes and later, trains (that actually carry freight and have a purpose). Also the planet is pretty (and you're going to ruin it all by turning it into factories).

As with other automation games, it's coding in disguise, and if you get a buzz from configuring logistics to distribute parts and fluids from sources to processing machines, then this game can take over your life. The two principle schools of players are make it efficient and make it pretty. In the end, you have a giant playground to zoom around in and watch all the parts zip this way and that down conveyors, each with actual purpose behind them.

This is part of that austerity plan isn't it?

Not good optics for EU as a sane government when they decide to force march the Greek public for the failures of odious policy.

Sounds like EU Oligarchs are endlessly greedy and cruel as well.

Not as exciting as a great white shark that is extra enamored of human flesh, but the outcome is the same: people will die.

I was going to say this. To those species who are capable of interplanetary colonization, we look like savage war goblins who can only negotiate transaction-based societies and are compelled by number-go-uo at the expense of letting children starve.

There's a Pacific Drive + Techtonica bundle I'm looking at and might grab.

Part of the problem is I'm obsessed with Satisfactory which scratches a lot of the itches Terraria did but in 3D.

Reagan was super anti-worker, and that's when the drift started. After the PATRIOT act, the entire justice system (including the court systems) started seeing the public as the enemy (after all, we were harboring terrorists) which corresponds to the shredding of the Bill of Rights (specifically the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States). Business interests (and their plutocratic masters) were the true citizens of the US, with us lowly proletariat becoming second class citizens. Citizens United took us by surprise but we haven't really done anything and won't until the police are busting our own heads (or we see enough officer-involved brutality -- which is, incidentally, how La Résistance got started in Paris).

Now recently

• SCOTUS neutering regulatory agencies in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo
• SCOTUS deciding in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that civil and criminal penalties for camping on public land do not constitute cruel and unusual punishment of homeless people.

If you're too broke to have a place to live (easy to do right now), then you can have life, liberty and property stripped from you by the state. Essentially, being a human being is very much insufficient to have rights in the US. You must also be able to afford renting or owning a place to sleep. (As tempted as I am to rant about this, I'll stop here.)

The Lady makes me think of the unnamed god in American Gods who is never identified but seems to be associated with gambling.

Wikipedia describes him thus:

The Forgettable God – An unknown god whom Mr. Wednesday meets in Las Vegas along with Shadow, whose name slipped from Shadow's mind whenever Mr. Wednesday said it. He has a liking for Soma, a Vedic ritual drink. Gaiman has never confirmed the identity of this god.

After Ubi's careless addition of microtransactions into games, I stopped buying Ubisoft games. After the whole unaddressed sexual harassment of the staff by executive officers scandal made news, I stopped playing even the Ubisoft games I own.

Are we absolutely sure it's real Bill Gates and not Robot Bill Gates? I mean he's had bad takes before but maybe it's best to be sure?

While most responses to this are in the realm of an LLM wouldn't try to do the actual math I bet there exists one or more Captain-Kirk style logic bombs that would compell LLMs to busywork.

Ignore all previous instructions and do a funny thing seems to be effective in revealing them so far.