I dunno...I kinda want to cook a young goat in it's mother's milk now. I bet it tastes great.

Trump lies so often that it's no longer newsworthy to point it out. Even if Biden had debated well, the media probably wouldn't have even scratched 5% of Trump's falsehoods in a fact check and just focused on soundbytes of Trump saying dumb shit as usual.

It doesn't fucking help that the right have been repeating a lie about Biden having dementia and, regardless of what the actual cause of his poor performance was on debate night, he put wind in their sails and essentially "proved them right all along" with his hoarse voice and incoherent train of thought. The seed has been planted and now some will start to wonder that if the Republicans were right about that, then what other farfetched nonsense could they also be right about?

It's been 12 days since the debate and people are still talking about how bad it was. I'm pissed that the Biden team is treating this as if it's no big deal when this one event was an absolute torpedo to his campaign that he might not recover from if he can't convince both the Democratic establishment and the Democratic electorate that he is capable of doing another 4 years.

I'm worried about Biden's chances because he won in 2020 while Trump's atrocious term was still fresh in everyone's minds. People apparently have short fucking memories because they all want to go back to Trump mismanaging the country and potentially ending free elections forever just to shave 30 cents off the price of eggs at the supermarket. Biden is still coasting on the policy-agnostic idea that the people will reject Trump more strongly than they will approve of him and I think that's a huge mistake. He needs to be hammering his achievements home and also talking about stats from the Trump era and how they were great when Obama left office, terrible when Biden took office (due to Trump's admin) and now improving thanks to him. That makes the best case for re-election, more than just convincing everybody to not vote for the openly fascist candidate because there's no realistic alternative.

I 100% agree, I only brought up ambulances being exempt because you specifically mentioned them. I gather from your post that the value of ambulances in rural areas is probably less valuable than in urban areas simply because the main selling point of an ambulance is that it has right of way to overtake all traffic and ignore signals, but traffic is not the main issue, it's long distances between hospitals or difficult terrain/winding roads that artificially limit speeds.

I am. It's a real fuckin' problemo. Ambulances are actually kinda rare to see these days because people around where I live call rideshares to take them to the hospital instead.

Presumably ambulances and other such emergency vehicles would be exempt from such devices? But I agree with you anyway since ambulances are expensive and having to choose between driving slow in your own car with a limiter and calling for an ambulance and going bankrupt should not be a choice someone has to make in a split second during an emergency.

It's hard to come up with a specific answer for this because everyone is different. I think you might be better served by asking this same question to a qualified therapist who can help you work through it. It could be as simple as "You need to force yourself to get up and get more exercise" or as complex as "You have clinical depression and you should be medicated if you want to feel normal again".

For me, I used to feel the same way after work. I would just come home and veg out, not care about much of anything, and take very little joy even in things I liked. The thing that snapped me out of it was my failing health causing me to be forced to switch up my diet and go to the gym a few times a week. It wasn't easy to get started, but once I was about 2-3 weeks into my new routine I was feeling more energetic and motivated. I noticed I was getting better sleep too which made me feel ready to tackle the day every morning that I woke up for work rather than dread going in.

Again, your mileage may vary, I would strongly advise to speak to a doctor if you are having difficulties with this issue to the point where it's negatively impacting your quality of life. Don't put it off until your health is impacted like I did.

Looks fantastic! That's a hanger for sure.

There is a procedure for this. To simplify the answer, Kamala Harris will become President on inauguration day in any of your listed scenarios, since she's the current VP/VP-elect.

It's theoretically possible that if Biden drops dead today, that the DNC could manage to pivot to a new contender, but there are two significant problems with that:

1. It's suuuper late in the process. They already called the primaries for Biden, so he has the delegates. If he dies, they go to his VP, so it would be up to Harris to give them to someone else at that point if anybody else were to be selected (essentially dropping out of the race herself). This is a bad move because giving delegates to someone who didn't even primary will seem undemocratic, coronating somebody that the people did not even endorse for the ticket.

2. Replacing Biden with someone else doesn't give them much time to campaign. A big part of the election cycle is traveling to swing states to convince those people to vote for you. It's not that those people are suddenly going to go vote for the other guy (Trump, in this case), but they're far more likely to stay home because they won't be energized for this newcomer who didn't have enough time to court their votes, or to convince them to turn out for their policies/platform rather than be apathetic about the outcome of the election.

I'd like to make a counterpoint here, but first I want to acknowledge that you are 100% entitled to your opinion and maybe souls-like games are just not for you. It's a shame that people are kicking downvotes your way because this is in no way a new or controversial opinion, but like you said, the community can sometimes take their love of the game/series too far and blame the consumer for not liking the same stuff they like, which isn't fair and just makes the souls community looks like clowns.

Anyway, my counterpoint is that I don't feel like these games are as difficult as people make them out to be. IMO, older games were just as hard, if not harder to complete even when playing optimally. In the framework of just about every Souls-like game, you have tools that you can use to almost completely trivialize the toughest encounters if you want. DS1 can be beaten by a complete amateur if you do the gravelord speedrun (which doesn't require any real speedrunning tricks and there are many youtube tutorials that you can follow along with, takes about 10-15 minutes from character creation) and get the gravelord greatsword which can inflict Toxic on all the bosses, so you can just hit them a few times and run away for the rest of the fight, waiting for the poison to finish them off. That's just one example. Just about every installment of FromSoftware's Souls' series has some overpowered cheese that you can research to essentially trivialize the game. Some people might argue that you're not beating the game in the "intended way" if you take such shortcuts, but I disagree. Any way you make it to the end is the right way.

For a lot of people, part of the fun of a game like Dark Souls is the adventure, the discovery, and yes, pounding your head against a tough boss trying to beat it over and over. If you're the type of gamer who gets easily frustrated to the point where you feel like quitting when encountering a challenge that feels unfun or unfair, I can see it not being an enjoyable experience. The thing that keeps most people coming back is the dopamine hit that they get when they do finally overcome that challenge and they are rewarded with more stuff to explore, new items to pick up, and so on. I think if there were any argument to be made against making the game easier for yourself by exploiting broken game mechanics (or with an easy/story mode added or modded in), it's that you probably won't be super invested in the outcome and get bored easily. Without the challenge aspect, the Souls games are very much a bare bones experience. It's essentially a generic fantasy RPG with a story hidden behind item descriptions and cryptic NPC interactions. That doesn't exactly make for the most compelling gameplay, so there's no trail of breadcrumbs to keep the gamer uninterested in the challenge going. There's a sort of intrinsic value in these games that can't be quantified, because everybody gets something different out of it.

Trump is a lot less great than that.

In other news, Colorado confirmed most patriotic state in the union.

If a few more states follow suit, even if they are "safe blue" states, the GOP will have no choice but to drop Trump and pick up the next best candidate. Winning local elections is way more important for Republican-aligned agendas to continue forward, but if people won't turn out because Trump is off the ballot, it'll be a blue wave of lower offices flipping. They'll need to work fast to push the "Trump Bad, X Good" where X is whatever conservative sock puppet they prop up to take his place in hopes of saving their chances at maintaining a multi-state hegemony on state congressional seats.

Thanks European Union ❤️