Before you roll any dice, the chances of rolling two nat 1s are 1/400. But after you roll your first die, whatever it happened to be, your chances of rolling a nat 1 are 1/20. The chances of the entire scenario have no impact on the probability of the individual rolls

You’ll notice that the 4s are all hugging the exits – it’s the most lucrative spot. Yes, you have to squeeze in when the doors open to let people in and out, but you also get to gtfo first. You’re not subject to the Showtime kids doing flips, when the Mariachi band walks in you can run out to another car at the next stop, and you aren’t in the urination/defecation areas. Sitting is a trap.

Do you happen to read Brust? This reads very Brust.

What is a ‘banna’? I thought you might have meant ‘banana’, but you tripled down so now I’m not sure. The internet only tells me of the Banna Strand, a beach in Ireland

Your disdain for these manuals of style is blatantly visible in your omission of the serial comma, which all three recommend using ಠ_ಠ

Oh, no problem then! The AI bubble will carry us through far enough until it all comes crashing down in… I want to say 2027?

Higher infant mortality, and higher maternal mortality to boot, all while chasing the $5k bait with poor insurance coverage at public hospitals. Meanwhile, the haves can afford better private care. Since that’s where the money will be, they’ll be pulling better doctors and nurses to it, thus avoiding becoming statistics.

Edit: it all boils back down to “survival of the fittest”, where “fittest” has been redefined to mean “has the most money”.

I introduced a “small one story structure, its walls no wider than the span of a single door” next to the farmhouse my players were investigating. They didn’t believe the owners who told them what it was for, and went to check it out for themselves, hackles up and weapons drawn.

It’s an outhouse.

Just an outhouse.

I think it turned into some amount of shit slinging that stopped being relevant to the shit at hand. I’m guessing mods decided to close that sphincter before the verbal diarrhea overflowed the rim of the post ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The poop knife is irrelevant until and unless one plans to flush, which this question did not ask.

Also, why do you assume the nurse is a lady?

AI can draw fingers, Midjourney fixed that in their model over a year ago now.

So I’d say we have a real race on our hands!

Is it bad that my first thought goes to “have you tried a federal database that keeps track of guns, gun owners, and gun ownership applicants?” And yet I know this new idiocy is far more likely to happen than the much more reasonable yet somehow illegal federal gun registry.

“Would incest be okay if we could guarantee no reinforcement of bad recessives?”

“I want space travel, to live forever, and make an AI human for… Reasons.”

“Get off my lawn, big government!”

That tracks.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion

The fusion of light elements up to a certain nucleus size releases energy. However, fusion only occurs at very high temperatures and pressures. The goal is to 1) create the conditions for nuclear fusion (which they did), 2) have the fusion reaction produce energy that sustains those conditions (they did for 48 seconds), and ideally a tiny bit more, 3) gather residual energy that isn’t critical to the reaction itself, which is the part that looks like a steam engine.

Alas, “lies like a rug” is entirely an English idiom, and is not what she said.

https://gramota-ru.translate.goog/biblioteka/spravochniki/spravochnik-po-frazeologii/vrat-kak-sivyy-merin?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

She used “lies like a grey gelding,” which is tantamount to calling him “too old and incompetent to be trusted to do the work required of him.”

Something about English wants me to say it should be “Battle of the Santas Clause,” but not knowing any of the rules, I couldn’t tell you why.

Give https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html a read. Might sway you, might not.

If dropping a database scares you, you are either unaware of the disaster recovery process, or there isn’t one. Edumacate yourself, or the org, as appropriate, so as to increase your confidence when dropping databases.

Post office too. Really any government office where the public is allowed inside.

Underpaid workers trying to explain bureaucratic minutiae (for which they are not responsible) every single day to people who are not versed in that minutiae, do not want to learn it, cannot learn it, and are preemptively frustrated that they have to have this interaction in the first place. There is no winning–mental health isn’t cheap, do the workers’ resilience only lasts for so many years/months/days before they default to hating the clients, and the clients don’t trust publicly available instructions, thus dooming themselves to the shitty interactions.

The only way to fix this is to take both people out of the equation–preprocess everything that might need to happen for everyone, to the point of turning every transaction into a single trasaction. That requires for every city, county, state, national, international agency to federate, so that you never have to file multiple documents to do a thing.

Capitalism has been touted as superior to the alternatives (Socialism, Communism, etc) b/c it has been claimed to be “self-regulating” and “self-correcting” and “even if we don’t understand why, it fixes itself”–basically the only choice among bad ones that, given our collective small brains, has any chance of sustaining itself and society in the absence of an ability of individuals or government to do so intentionally.

What it really is is an opportunity to stay anonymous while gaming the system, all the while convincing everyone else that they too can game the system (thereby being gamed). It is not a net benefit to society when taken to extremes.

Capitalism is great for the consumer in the micro. If there is a coffee shop on your street that sucks, and you start a coffee shop two blocks away to compete with it with your better coffee, you are participating in the version of capitalism that “works as intended.”

It doesn’t work in the macro. When, instead of continuing to manage your mom & pop business that barely breaks even, you vertically integrate, buy up or otherwise destroy your competition, and then reduce the quality of your product to bare minimums in favor of profits and shareholder value and growth, you take capitalism to an extreme that makes everyone else (the consumers, the workers, the would-be-competitors) have a worse quality of life.

People prefer better quality of life. Capitalism in the modern age is so far in that macro extreme that it no longer makes people’s lives better. East Palestine train derailment as an example… why would they prioritize safety over cost cutting? Bam, a town is cancerous. It’s not unreasonable for people to point at a corruptible system and blame it for the corruption that exists.

Problem is, people are corruptible, so whatever alternative we think is better, someone will come along and ruin it for personal gain.