Schadrach

I mean the point of all rating systems in the US was fear of government regulation of content and having to fight that particular legal battle. It basically exists because moral busybodies were upset about Night Trap, Mortal Kombat and Doom.

All of this is framed from a US perspective, I apologize to the extent that it’s relevant.

getting paid less for the same work

Essentially not a real thing, and if it is happening at a particular employer it’s illegal and time to sue. The wage gap that’s published is measured as the difference in median total earnings for full time year round workers by sex, and any attempt to constrain it further to be “for the same work” (like adjusting for industry, role, hours worked, experience, etc) rapidly causes it to diminish. It is at it’s heart an artifact of differences in the average life path of men and women - to the point that young, childless, urban, educated women actually earn more than similar men.

and not at all for all the work that isn’t considered work by men like raising kids and running a home

Taking care of one’s home/family isn’t paid work for anyone, regardless of sex. Men aren’t paid for more stereotypically male housework either, like lawn maintenance, cleaning gutters, dealing with pests, plumbing or electrical, that sort of thing. If you do domestic work for another household, generally you do get paid for it.

Also, there’s no third party mandating anything about how your household divides the tasks necessary to keep things going - you negotiate your own division of household labor with any partner(s) or roommate(s). For example in my household my wife and I both work full time, and for most “departments” of stuff that need done we each take a role. She does the laundry, I fold and put away (because her clothes have more complicated cleaning directions, and it’s harder for her to lift and haul stuff around). Whoever cooked doesn’t do dishes. I bring in groceries, she puts them up (the steps and heavy lifting are easier for me). Etc, etc.

again, statistically it’s pretty much all women

Dig deeper into those stats. Specifically, look at the differences in numbers that measure recent victimization versus longer periods. What you tend to see is the more “fresh” the experience is (looking at recent months or years rather than lifetime) the more likely men are to report it (almost as though men are repeatedly told by society that they can’t be victims of sexual assault and doubly can’t be the victim of a woman until they internalize it so they mentally file those experiences away as something else [if you can’t be a victim then what happened can’t be a violation]- I’m speaking from experience on that one) and previous 12 month numbers fare closer to like a 60/40 split presuming you don’t also do some trickery of categorization where (for example) ways a woman are likely to sexually assault a man get filed into a subcategory of “other” to make the comparison less obvious, with women being a majority of perpetrators against men (ignoring the incarcerated of course because then men are a large majority of both perpetrators and victims - there’s a reason term “rape culture” was originally coined to describe prison).

Yes, it’s harder to be a woman.

Depends heavily on context. For example, for virtually anything involving the criminal justice system it’s easier to be a woman. In some careers it’s easier to be a woman (for example, anything to do with children). I could come up with more examples if you want.

My money is on fusion before proper socialism.

Utopia is literally “no place” for a reason, and anything less than a utopia will be deemed “not proper socialism” (like literally every place that has ever tried some flavor of communism/socialism) so my money is on fusion as fusion is more likely than utopia.

…and the fancy steam engine version of solar is probably greener to build that photovoltaics, since it’s basically just a boiler and some mirrors.

Steam has also been hosting numerous outright neo-Nazi groups for many years (PDF) and never really stepped up effectively against them. User reports and media attention has limited effect.

As a general rule, steam discussion boards for a game are moderated by whoever the developer assigns that power to, and steam user groups are moderated by the group owner or whoever they delegate that power to and Steam doesn’t particularly care so long as you aren’t doxing, openly coordinating harassment, or doing something explicitly illegal in the US.

That’s also the general tilt they’ve taken with what’s allowed on the store since they opened the floodgates - if it’s not illegal and it’s not going to get them sued, it’s probably allowed if properly tagged. Which is why you can find Sex With Hitler side by side with Super Lesbian Animal RPG.

Worst they do is block it from specific regions if the local government requests it - see that game where you essentially play as Hamas fighting against the IDF that they recently blocked from the UK, the one where the largest part of the game description is arguing that the game isn’t antisemitic hate speech just because the enemy are Jewish. The call to block it came after a new patch that apparently added a scenario based on the Oct 7 attack.

Epic Game store, good: free games, bad: Epic and Tim Sweeney.

Sums up how I feel about them. I have lots of games on my Epic account. I have paid for none of them, and refuse to change that. If it’s an Epic exclusive, it will eventually either release on other platforms, become an epic store free game of the week, or be an epic store freebie on amazon prime. I have enough games in my library I can wait.

You know what, I’d be all behind a subscription mouse so long as it includes periodic hardware upgrades and unlimited warranty replacements no questions asked so long as the subscription is paid.

Admittedly, I’d be trying to figure out the most interesting ways to actively destroy mice to make them rue the day they thought a mouse subscription was a good idea, but that’s beside the point. Why no, I can’t return the damaged mouse, it’s at the bottom of a hole in the woods no human has been down since the civil war. Just like it was none of your business how I found out that the mouse isn’t resistant to hydrofluoric acid.

Which is true, there are parts I like about being a man, and there are parts I dislike about being a man.

…and these days there is probably some specialized label to describe that that isn’t merely “man” because that would be too easy.

just constant quarrels between instances, defederations and crap like that

Sounds like you picked the wrong instance. The one I use doesn’t defederate, from anyone. So when some drama about "should we defederate from some server because they are a big corp/because they are right wing/because they are tankies/because they allow loli/whatever, I basically get to watch and laugh knowing it’s not going to effect me.

I think nowadays they just use Facebook groups to shame men they don’t like. Are We Dating the Same Guy is the usual name for them.

Anyways, why the fuck was he driving people out of the plains? Homies were just chilling in their iron chariots.

For the same reason as now - because Israel wanted their land.

Tusday was maybe the best a thousand years ago but who cares?

Closer to two hundred years ago, since the law in question was passed in 1854. But the point was it’s that way for a reason, and that reason was a good reason at the time it was done. It seems so weird now because of social change that has since made it inconvenient.

It can also be changed if Congress wanted to, as it’s just a regular law and not part of the Constitution or something else that would be harder to change.

On my instance you just click “Communities” at the top and it gives you a list of communities with three options at the top Subscribed/Local/All just like the main feed. Click all and you can browse or search the list of all communities, though the search is not great.

It’s on Tuesday because that was actually convenient with the flow of business at the time. Most were Christian and wouldn’t work or travel on Sunday if possible, it often took a day’s travel to get to the nearest town with a polling place, and Wednesday was market day.

If Sunday and Wednesday are right out and you need a day’s travel time (which also can’t be Sunday or Wednesday) you’re basically left with Tuesday or Friday. And if you’re going to be in town for the market anyways then Tuesday makes more sense.

It is in November because that’s after the biggest harvests, but not so far after that the weather is likely to be rough. And it’s the Tuesday after the first Monday so that it can’t overlap with All Saints Day.

On the upside it could be changed with a regular old law, it doesn’t require an amendment or anything.

Whereas I miss the old Aldi “single use” plastic bags because I’d use them a few dozen times (not necessarily at Aldi) before they either got holes or a strap broke or something. I’ve still some stashed in places for when I need a decent plastic bag to hold something.

I think the difference in geography makes a, well, difference. It’s just a lot of people stuck in tiny towns that are several miles long in one direction and around 150 yards in the other, most of them up different hollows or branches of hollows. Mass transit that’s actually workable would be difficult. Hell, I used to date a woman who was a social worker who did in home adult education and more than a few of her clients had directions to get to them that involved things like turning off the road to drive several miles up a creek bed, because neither federal, state, nor county considered it a place worth running a road to.

I kinda think running a ferry line that went up and down river and across, with each line going from one set of locks to the next with a shuttle to take you from one side of the locks to the other and local busing could work, but only for the places on the Kanawha. But even then going from where I used to live to Charleston would look something like bus->ferry->shuttle->ferry->bus. Going to be hard to make that look attractive compared to a 20 min drive.

And mind you I actually like mass transit. The times I’ve been to Boston I literally just grab a 7-day pass for the T and take it everywhere, but something like it just doesn’t seem practical given the geography and population distribution here.

I have a dog door, they let themselves out when they feel like it, for the most part when and for how long they’d like (it’s a fenced yard). The cat learned the dog door by watching them, she also lets herself out.

Sure. Let them out so they can fight stray cats, get preggo, get flees and ticks, and all of that fun stuff…

Mine’s spayed and wears a seresto collar (which is easily the most effective flea/tick control I’ve seen - they’re pricey for flea collars but being good for 8 months helps mitigate that. Both dogs and the cat wear them.). Now, she does occasionally get into fights with other cats in the neighborhood but that’s largely unavoidable. If it’s not going well she runs inside to her dog for comfort.

She was supposed to be an inside cat, but we put in a dog door for the dogs and she figured it out from them. It’s a pretty basic one without the bells and whistles and electronic lock controls and triple the price. If it were it wouldn’t slow her down much, she’d just come and go under the taller dog.

K. I want you to look at somewhere like rural WV and imagine what public transit infrastructure or bike infrastructure that would actually be useful would look like. Preferably that wouldn’t cost more than the entire state budget to run and would be useful for people to use to get to work and to at least one major grocery store and one place to get appliances or furniture.

Say, Powelton, WV. Or Dry Branch, WV. Or Webster Springs, WV. Or Amma, WV. And these aren’t even the hardest examples in the state, but they’re ones I know well enough to likely be able to comment on your answers.