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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Glass bottles aren’t a free win. Glass is very heavy to transport and extremely energy-intensive to manufacture. It made sense back when people hardly drank any soda. It still makes sense for things like condiments (soy sauce, vinegar, etc) and alcoholic drinks but it doesn’t make any sense for everyday drinks like water or soda.

    We should be investing in better municipal water treatment facilities so that tap water doesn’t taste awful. Where I live the tap water is horrible but I’ve visited places where the tap water tastes perfectly clean and pleasant. If we had universally tasty tap water then people would stop buying plastic water bottles.

    As for soda, I could see glass bottles being excellent if we could bring consumption down to a reasonable level. Many people guzzle soda as if it were water which is both terrible for their health and the environment.





  • Is that the poverty only experienced by a true Scotsman?

    I’ve never had to live on the street, if that’s what you’re asking. I was raised by a single father. We had as many as 4 roommates at various times, including alcoholics and drug addicts. I’ve had to call the police on some of them. I’ve had to stay at my grandparents’ while my dad drove across the country as a salesman just to pay the bills.

    I dropped out of high school at age 16 and only managed to go back and finish in my 30s. I got into university and graduated with a degree, thanks to generous government loans and grants. Now I got my first job post-graduation working in a mail room at age 41.

    Was my life easy? No. But I wasn’t living in a slum in central Africa drinking contaminated water and suffering from Guinea worm disease. I think anyone in North America who grew up in a working class home is a long, long way from that kind of poverty.





  • A gilded cage is still a cage. I’d rather work and pay rent and live in a modest apartment than be imprisoned in a luxury hotel that I’m not allowed to leave. Prisoners in Halden prison don’t get to set their own schedule, don’t get to quit being a prisoner and move across the country, don’t get to code with whom they live and associate.

    Even with a minimum wage job you can save up enough money for a plane ticket to anywhere in the world and just leave. Or even just a bus ticket across the country to live somewhere else.

    Or how about taking your girlfriend/boyfriend out on a date to a nice restaurant? Or rent a cabin in the woods for a weekend and just relax? Or go out to the bar for a few beers with a friend? Or volunteer to spend time with some elderly folks at a nursing home!

    Being in prison sucks, no matter how much they dress it up. The vast majority of things you might do are closed off to you just because you can’t leave. Every single one of those prisoners knows they’re being punished. Every single one of them counts the days until their release.




  • On the one hand I agree with them because having a Q&A site full of repetitive beginner questions will ruin its usefulness as a resource. On the other hand they handle it in the worst possible way. Instead of leaving around a bunch of “corpses” of closed questions they should just merge the beginner’s question into the original, already answered question. Just n Move it to the bottom of that question’s discussion thread and redirect the beginner to the answer at the top.

    The way they decided to do it essentially codifies all the things people hated about asking for help on IRC and later Discord.







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