In Iran, gender reassignment is legal, and they'll even change the birth certificate to match, from what I learned a decade ago.

Homosexuality, however, is a capital offense, so many gay people are pressured to transition.

Some conservative societies seem to have the attitude that it's better to go from one role with rigid expectations to another than it is to fail to meet the expectations of your original role.

Sure, both sides are not the same. But the "good" side is still part of the system that allows the "bad" side to exist.

So by all means, vote for the party that will do less damage in the short term. But oppose FPTP voting at the same time.

My parents didn't specifically tell me if Santa Clause was real or make-believe. They wanted me to come to my own conclusion, I guess. My dad is a rationalist person, and my mom's from a culture that doesn't traditionally celebrate Christmas.

So what I believed was that the appearance of presents on Christmas was an unsolved mystery, and Santa Clause was just a hypothesis to explain it.

I suspected the real explanation probably involved the tree working as an antenna for some kind of cosmic energy that triggered the appearance of presents. Perhaps in ancient and more superstitious times they discovered this phenomenon by accident and continued to put up the tree ever since.

I like having a keyboard and mouse. Doing things on a smartphone is a last resort.

Outrage bait. Too much of reddit was stories and videos of people acting badly.

Matrix? That's the open source and federated equivalent to discord. And it's end-to-end encrypted.

Also, it's not uncommon to call a creation after it's creator ("that painting is a Van Gogh"), so calling him "a Frankenstein" works too.

This is what I never understood. The principle of respecting the autonomy of other cultures is good imo, but what "cultural contamination" could be worse than the total extinction of the civilization you're trying to protect?

Applying the Prime Directive in such extreme circumstances turns it from an anti-imperialist ideal to a Social Darwinist one.

No, 9 months community service.

There's one aspect of it that I didn't expect, and that's its exclusivity. Seems like this is a small, but vibrant, community of geeks, just like the whole internet was in the 90s and 2000s.

I'm not 100% sure it'll be able to replace reddit in the area of getting advice on niche topics, but I do believe I'll enjoy being here.

But that's true, isn't it? Putting aside volume and shape.

I see, so the idea is that they're responding to external pressure from governments and financial institutions? I guess I could see that, though it shouldn't be hard to prove by pointing to specific policies and loan conditions.

But also, some of these companies own those buildings. If they’re not in use, their value in the market drops.

How does that work? Why would a buyer care if the seller was using the building? If anything, I would think using them would depreciate their value due to wear and tear.

There is, or at least was, at least one place catering to your friend's tastes: https://urnotalone.com/...

Edit: More recent article: https://www.tokyoweekender.com/...

That's not true. The Hoover Dam contributes to Vegas's power supply, but it's nowhere near "almost entirely powered" by the dam, except in Fallout: New Vegas.

If only that was still true. Internet users used to be a niche counter-culture. Now they're just normal people.

So one dog is named Rǝx and the other is just "thǝ dog."

But it's redundant in that sentence because it began with "at."

Also not a psychologist, but I would say that's only true if the fear keeps them from enjoying life

As adults, we design our living spaces to be comfortable to us. We don't intentionally make them scary so we can overcome.

Kind of fascinated by the subtle linguistic differences in this comic. Mainly saying "See the..." instead of "Look at that..."

It was a breath of fresh air after the disappointment of Discovery and proof that there are people who still believe in Star Trek's optimistic vision of the future. I think for that reason I and many other fans gave it a pass for a lot of it's flaws.

My biggest problem is that I feel the social commentary is rather poorly done. I've gotten into some nasty fights on reddit for saying so.

I'll start by saying what I think it does well. It's good at humanizing people who live in an oppressive society and portraying their point of view.

But the ideas it discusses aren't especially original or insightful. The world building doesn't exist to support them. The Moclans might be a fine allegory for trans and intersex issues, but they only work as an allegory and make no sense at face value. And they're portrayed inconsistently to allow whatever kind of episodes the writers want.

I feel like one issue is that McFarlane does not share the ideals of Star Trek. I don't get the impression that he sees the value of non-interference, for example. But nevertheless, the Union believes in it because the Federation does. Politically, he's a more conventional thinker than the classic Star Trek writers.