There’s always an equivalent way using a more advanced sentence structure. Parentheses are just the lazy way / bad habit.

Example:

• I went to the store this afternoon (I was out of milk) and I ran into an old friend.
• I went to the store this afternoon because I was out of milk. There, I ran into an old friend.

Competition

Huh. Until right now, I thought rabbit and hare were synonyms.

When I saw my first European Hare, I noted how not-cute and cuddly it looked… and thought to call them “hares” to denote to myself that they were not the cute rabbits I was familiar with. But now I feel dumb because that’s literally what it is.

Estonia is something else. They canceled a Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel project due to Chinese funding. Not sure if it was part of Belt and Road Initiative or just a private entrepreneur. But that would have been great, as right now it’s about €40 each way on a ferry.

In games you are petty-bourgeois and own your labor products.

In practice, no. In theory, liberals believe in the free market while the socdems do not. But both will defend the market as such, which is why socdems are ineffectual and easily duped by bourgeois interests.

Fugue state

Until recently I was a Verizon Wireless customer. Their website is a complete mess. Typos everywhere and I would encounter exceptions every visit. Many times I would encounter loops in their flows and never be able to complete a task. I very frequently had to call in so that a supervisor could just force through what I needed.

And that’s just the front end.

I completely agree with you, the back-end billing and other processing is probably a nightmare. From professional experience I can say it can either be quite manageable, or nigh impossible, to make small changes like this depending on how shitty the foundation is.

I think the ISPs are overdue for a complete overhaul but they can’t/won’t because there is no market or regulatory pressure to spend the money. They literally don’t care how shitty their services are.

“Hey, sorry to bother you, was just wondering if you were dead. Please call back at your earliest convenience.”

You should have GPS without any service at all. You might need data for the map to load, depends on the app. If you’re lucky and the app automatically cached it when you had signal, or you manually downloaded the offline map, then you could navigate home in airplane mode.

All of this is moot because I think I remember reading the rest of this story. The hiker wasn’t really lost, they simply went on a hike without telling anyone, and ignored calls during that time because they were trying to unplug.

That’s actually so stupid. Thanks for sharing

Get ready for every news channel to talk about March Madness for the next six months

liberal

Don’t stop there… commit fully to the dark side

Munch is great. I saw a bunch of his (less famous) works at Thiel Gallery in Stockholm. Always appreciated his work but consider myself a fan after seeing it in natural light. Can see the influence from Van Gogh and Gauguin, but the soul he puts into his works seems anticipatory of the Surrealists and similar movements which prioritized emotion and psychological exploration over precise realism.

Favorites from the gallery:

• The Women on the Bridge was a standout, though hard to pick just one from Munch
• Naval Bathhouse
• Five Portraits

I think I’m gonna have to go to Munch museum in Oslo now…

yup. Human nature as an absolute and static thing is garbage philosophy. Marx had it right in Theses on Feuerbach and Capital. https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch04.htm

[T]he human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

Competition even in theory:

I won the competition, now buy my linen at 10x its value. Btw it costs 1,000 years of the average salary to start up a competing business, good luck lol

Everyone I like is communist

First step is abolishing wage labor and private property. Transitional political forms take on some form of direct democracy, probably something similar to soviet councils.

Whataboutism is a meaningless brainworm which the user invokes in order to ignore their own cognitive dissonance and inconsistent standards. You cry “whataboutism” when @[email protected] was correct to point out your own double standard. “All of this sounds at odds with representative democracy” implies that you believe genuine democracy is something we currently stand to lose.

What you need to understand is that Marxists are not interested in imposing utopian futures on the world. “What do you have in its place?” is the wrong question. Better questions: What currently prevents genuine democracy? What are the material conditions which both produce and maintain it? Then you get to work on changing those material conditions and removing the real basis which produces the problems.

See also @[email protected]’s list of variations on this