skulblaka

I enjoy not getting shot in the head, thanks.

We’re very quickly running out of options though.

It’s been Xitter (pronounced “Shitter”) since the rebranding

Nowadays, you can’t fuck the talent

[Citation needed]

I find it offensive that the only effective way to combat this is to fight fire with fire and also make a big bitchy noise about this like the conservatives love to do. I have better things I would rather be doing with my life. But such are the times we live in I suppose.

This gives me a 404.

I should probably be thankful for this.

No, but he did stand near a fryer long enough to get his photo taken once.

Been seeing some of that as well, so I looked it up myself. The actual text of the EULA states:

"You acknowledge that if you fail to comply with the foregoing restrictions Nintendo may render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part.”

That’s a brick. They haven’t actually done it to anyone yet, but they’ve reserved their rights.

Of which, roughly speaking about 23% are under 18 and school-aged if census.gov is to be trusted

Around $40 per student could still do an incredible amount of good across our national school system. A given school’s graduating class might range anywhere from 50-2,000 students and you’ll have 3-4 of those per school. That’s potentially $320,000 for a single large school by this napkin math assuming those funds are distributed perfectly evenly according to student population. If put to more strategic use this could be an incredible boon to lower income schools in many, many areas.

Even run flats aren’t going to take you very far if they’re missing their valve core, which is easily accessible from the outside of the vehicle

I think God made his position clear in the first term, when the sky turned blood red and rained ashes while a deadly plague ripped through the streets of America.

This one is on us

On constant dialysis that you never get unhooked from, I don’t see why not.

If you can just pipe nutrient-rich blood into the brain directly you can probably bypass the entire digestive system. That takes care of the liver, and with the only waste products coming from the body being whatever the brain produces, that should be a pretty light workload for an artificial kidney.

Little bit yeah. UMD is quite a bit more versatile than this though, ours is restricted to scrolls and requires a spellcaster check.

RAW, yeah, you’re right unfortunately. Our DM lets us make the DC check to cast a non-class scroll just like you’d make if you cast one too high level for you. Web searching tells me this is a popular homebrew rule.

I may be making him regret that decision somewhat.

The actual text of the EULA states:

"You acknowledge that if you fail to comply with the foregoing restrictions Nintendo may render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part.”

So no, it’s not misinformation, Nintendo is straight up telling you legally that they can and will do this. This is not a hypothetical. They may not have done it yet but there is no uncertain terminology around their ability and willingness to do so. The fact that they can even threaten this in their EULA is a huge warning flag that everyone in this thread is correct to be upset about.

This is why I instead opt to carry scrolls of damn near every spell 8th level or lower.

It’s a little bootleg compared to a real Wish, but in average circumstances I can give Batman a run for his money on being prepared for literally any eventuality.

Arise now, arise, Riders of Théoden! Dire deeds awake: dark is it eastward. Let horse be bridled, horn be sounded! Forth, Eorlingas!

Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden! Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter! Spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered, a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises! Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!

One of my very favorite scenes in the story. Gives you chills

Good points to think about. Thank you.

I did in fact think that USPS was at least partially tax funded, and despite your (rather good, actually) arguments I do still think it is a good idea to help subsidize them with taxes. They are still a necessary office after all, and as you’ve said, even if people aren’t receiving mail they might still be sending it, so the post office has to check. But if most people haven’t sent any mail that day that’s a huge operating cost that isn’t being returned on stamps.

Going back to your last point about taxpayer funding: should Capital One’s choice to send you an offer be subsidized by the taxpayer? Should they pay less for a stamp because the federal government will be picking up the tab?

If anything I think I lean toward the idea that civilian mail should be free and business mail should require stamp fees. I admit I’m unsure how to balance the cost of a stamp with tax income to the post office, however. But if businesses want to spam you they damn well better pay for it, and high stamp fees on nonessential commercial mail could be an effective stopper for it. But then we run into problems of how to identify essential vs nonessential commercial mail, or solicited vs nonsolicited if you prefer, and ways to prevent abuse of that system… Companies already write “URGENT!!” all over the outside of their spam envelopes so it’s not like that’s going to be a useful identifier. I’m unsure how to solve this problem.

There are multiple ways to solve the “USPS has to visit every house every day” problem though, but unfortunately none that I see being realistically implemented. Just off the top of my head here I’m thinking:

A) Mail pickups only happen on one, or several specific, days of the week, thereby allowing them to shave off a lot of route for deliveries on non-pickup days. We could even alternate mail pickup and mail drop off days, 3 of each in a week with no post on Sundays. This is completely viable but everyone will bitch and complain loudly about this and blame me when they’re late on payments or the like.

B) Mail pickups only happen at specific drop off locations. Every neighborhood would essentially need a mail drop off box like an apartment complex has. I’m less thrilled about this idea because it might make it easier for people to steal your outgoing mail - though it’s not like this is difficult as it is. This combined with option A could lead to massive efficiency gains. Everyone will also bitch and complain loudly about this because they have to walk a block or two to drop off a letter.

C) Start putting solar powered signalers in the mailboxes that tell when they have the flag up. You could piggyback this off of cell phone towers or build your own separate infrastructure to prevent bandwidth issues. That way the post office knows remotely who has a flag up or not and adjust the routes accordingly, even adjusting with live data if you want, we definitely have all the technology to do this. This is by far the most expensive of my half baked options, but it isn’t like we couldn’t do it if we wanted to, we’ve had all the tech required to do this for 20 years. Once again, everyone would bitch and complain about this for various reasons, but they’d get over it pretty quick. I view this in the same light as when we cut over from analog TV to digital back in 2009. Everyone gets upset that A Change Is Happening and talks about it for 6 months and then it’s just life as normal.

Unfortunately all these things cost some amount of money and are likely to be initially unpopular with voters so I don’t really see any of it actually happening. Most people would rather limp along with a half-broken system than replace it with something new. I’m also quite confident that anything I could invent to address these problems will be soundly abused by corps with little trouble.

Seriously though, great points, good discussion, thank you. You’ve given me a lot to think about.

Ehh, personally I don’t really see banking as being a natural extension of the post, but I can kind of see where you’re coming from with that in context of the rest of the argument.

However, USPS is not a business. It is a tax funded service. It was never intended to be profitable, it was intended to perform a necessary service for citizens. You cannot have a functional society without a way to transfer mail. Therefore, it is a responsibility of every government to provide a postal service.

The fact that USPS has been forced to become profitable in order to survive, largely because of their federally mandated $72 billion money pit, is exactly why they have to accept a bunch of money to deliver you a bunch of garbage. If they weren’t beholden to draconian financing rules that literally no one else is subject to, the cost of stamps alone could power the entire USPS (and did, for over a hundred years).

However I’m not sure that’s the entire problem though. I don’t believe that USPS has the legal right to just decide not to deliver mail to you that they don’t like. If Capital One wants to mail you a credit offer and they spend the money to send it, I’m pretty certain that the post office is legally obligated to deliver it. So even if they came out and said officially “we will no longer deliver spam” I don’t think that’s a thing they’d be allowed to do. And that’s a good thing! Just, as usual with most things now, corporations are abusing it to death. Effectively outlawing paper spam would reduce a lot of the USPS’s active income, but it would also massively reduce their workload. No longer requiring USPS to be profitable enough to build a nest egg should go the rest of the way to pretty much even that all out in the wash, I think. But this is legislation that would need to take place on the corporations’ side, not the post’s side. The post is legally required to deliver all mail that is legal and deliverable, and this is good and right. Making spam undeliverable is a better solution than making the post office decide what they want to deliver or not.

The real problem with the postal system is that the telegraph and phone systems were not placed in their purview 100+ years ago. The FCC is now performing the role that the postal service fulfilled at the nation’s inception, and the postal service is being squeezed out of relevance. They are no longer the primary route of public communication that they were 250 years ago […] To re-attain the original role for which they were created, the postal service should also be a universal access internet and phone service provider. Which, like universal banking access, is desperately needed in the public space.

Absolutely agreed here, 10/10 no notes. The fact that much of our important communication has now moved to the internet is a brilliant argument for expanding the USPS to also become a federal universal internet provider. I think that’s an excellent idea. 99% of phones are VOIP now anyway so they barely, if at all, even have to worry about a telecoms department specifically.

I think we’re both mostly on the same side here, I’m just under no impression that the post office needs to be profitable. It is a public service, it’s by definition an expense that taxes are intended to cover - and one that I’m happy to put my tax money into, even now. I’m also upset at the sheer volume of waste of postal garbage that is going around, but I’d rather have a post office with some trash in it than some trash with no post office in it.

They should retire the trash delivery model that props up their package delivery service, and switch to universal access banking services as their core competency.

They don’t need to switch to anything so long as they’re properly tax funded like they’re supposed to be (they aren’t, Republicans have been bleeding their finances for decades). For instance, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future. This burden applies to no other federal agency or private corporation.

Remove R oversight of the post office and roll back their ridiculous demands and your problem is already solved. Postal struggles are a problem manufactured by conservatives in an effort to sell you a solution to the problem they caused.

Not having to finance that overmassive backlog of cash, combined with a little bit of updating advertising law to the modern age, solves your problem three ways over.

But naturally this will never happen because that $72B is specifically earmarked to be looted by the government once they finally manage to kill and privatize the USPS. That’s the real reason that pension fund exists.

Yeah, after a few times of that your parents get a visit from the truancy department and get threatened with prison time.

For some reason it’s perfectly legal to home school your kids (and teach them nothing during that time) , but if you register them to a public school and they don’t attend, straight to jail.