For once I’m glad my fellow Dutchman haven’t colonized this thread yet, and instead we get a German invasion.

The “rationale” behind such atrocities is always based on emotion, not actual reason. Usually fear. Analyzing why you feel that fear, and whether it is justified, will help to avoid falling into such logical fallacies.

Ignoring the fear, and dismissing it as illogical will not help anyone. You have to acknowledge the emotion, and analyse it. Allow it to exist, but avoid acting on it before analyzing it.

In fact, acting on emotions, especially on fear, will often result in such atrocities. Since it is fear, not reason, that eliminates compassion.

Ps. I like the discourse. Please don’t see my comments as a personal attack. Even if neither of us changes their oppinion, understanding the other is valuable.

But understanding, predicting, and reacting differently on emotions are all learnable, and very rational.

For example: don’t punch the TV when you are angry about loosing a game. Instead realise where the anger is coming from. Probably frustration, but why are you so frustrated when you loose? Some frustration is understandable, but what causes so much frustration that it turned into violent anger? And can you predict what actions or circumsfamces may result in that frustration or and anger (e.g. alcohol consumption)?

The most rational fictional species I know, Vulcans, do not lack emotion. Quite the opposite. But they have learned to control their emotions.

Considering std::cout should only directly be used when you are too lazy to place breakpoints, I totally get the decision to auto-flush.

Natural selection.

If you decide to give up on life, you won’t reproduce. Hence, people are naturally selected to have a high tolerance for missery. Humans are evolved to keep struggling and fighting.

If there is something to fight for, such as loved ones, a cause, or a personal goal, then it becomes much easier to keep fighting. Hence, depression is usually not just misery, but also a lack of purpose.

But finding new purpose in life is very doable. Making new connections with people, experiencing new things, and changing the environment you are in are the easiest ways to let externals factors help you here. Hence why people go on trips to “discover themselves”.

As for your example; if during your childhood you are always told how important a job is, it is likely you will set the job as a purpose in life. Then spending all that energy towards it, feels like working towards a purpose and will make you proud. If, like me, you think this culture is horrible, and it should be fought against, then there is cause to fight for. Be the change, refuse those hours, and defy the system by carving out a happy life without adherence to that culture. Be proud of every smile you have!

I’m not saying that finding the energy to get out of a depression is easy. I have been there myself. Especially since a depression is more than a lack of purpose by itself. But I know that if you find even a tiny bit of fighting spirit in yourself left, you can feed it bit by bit. Take yoga lessons, take instrument lessons, find a book club, try a new sport, go on a roadtrip, switch jobs, etc. Don’t expect to like any of the new experiences and magically be undepressed. Just experience something new. It took me years go to from properly depressed, to finding joy in all the things I do and learn.

The Pianist. Which I have a special memory of, since I also saw a play around the same time that I saw the movie. The play was mostly someone narrating or playing the piano with some acting scenes inbetween. Both were really touching and very well done.

But when we tried to get grandma into such a state of being taken care for, it was suddenly considered abuse (by her definition).

I remember a javascript library where the was a function that returned, according to the documentation, “a color”. Did it return an object with 3 fields? Were those fields RGB or some other color scheme? Is it a string encoding a color? What format is that string? None of these questions could be answered without just running the code, and analyzing the object you got back.

The word love would not disappear. Its meaning would just shift to something that feels off when you mean a specific type of love. What you whisper in the ear of your lover in bed, will be different from what you tell your kid when they go off to school. But when talking about the amount of love you have to give, the old word “love” will still be used, since that is usually about any kind of love.

I would split the word “love” into unique words for different kinds of love.

Reddit was a decent solution, till it enshitified to make money. Before then, it was already flooded by the masses. Clearly their method worked fine. Not perfect, but at least fine. So I don’t see why the masses are the problem. I personaly put all the blame on the need to make money of a vital piece of digital infrastructure.

The tricky part, is that we also cannot put it in the hands of a government, since it can become a tool for propaganda. So the EU hosting something like reddit, would also create a conflict of interrests. I’m curious if we can find a good solution to this problem.

Large beer containers are “rare” for the same reason large soda containers are rare: carbonization. If you store an opened bottle of beer for a few hours, it will go flat, killing part of the taste with it. Beer is even worse in this regard than soda. You want to finish the whole thing in one sitting for beer. Very few people consume 2 litres of beer in one sitting. … But … Every single self respecting bar has beer from the tap, right? That stuff doesn’t appear magically. It comes in kegs. You can buy those kegs from a wholesaler, or from the internet. These kegs work by inserting CO2 to pressurize it. So you will need CO2 tanks and a system to pressurize the whole thing. Not super hard to get, but not something you find in your supermarket either. But if you consume enough beer, it can absolutely be worth it to buy a tap, CO2 and kegs instead of bottles.

“Ammo conversation”, for when you let your guns do all the talking, but you need to express yourself beyond just violence.