Generally speaking, precious metal commodities are a hedge investment; they aren’t a primary investment themselves, but they’re a hedge against a loss in value of other investments, like stocks or bonds. If you are investing in gold as a hedge against inflation wiping out stock market gains, then yeah, it’s pretty solid. You probably don’t want to hold on to it forever though; if you’d bought gold just prior to Carter taking office and the stagflation of the late 70s, you be pretty much break-even with things like index funds.

As far as total societal collapse, you would need to have the physical bullion, not just have precious metals in your investment portfolio. And even then, gold might not have a ton of value in a subsistence society. People might trade for it, but if I had food to trade, I don’t think I’d be trading for gold, since I can’t eat gold. The people that will clean up in a subsistence environment? The Amish.

Huh. I wonder how effective it is at catching the heat from light? If you, for instance, wore a parka made from this material, would it be absorbing heat, and thus warmer than an equivalent parka made with a different material?

Gonzalez, the person that did run against Maduro, almost certainly won.

Maduro refuses to show the proof, and all attempts by non-partisan groups to monitor the election were rebuffed. Meanwhile, Gonzalez released the official tally sheets from poll watchers, and parallel vote tabulation confirms those results, and some statistical analysis of the claimed vote totals is very, very strongly suggestive that Maduro cooked the vote totals. And yet, somehow you’re sure that he won.

Is there any amount of evidence that would convince you that Maduro falsified the election results? Because he’s not providing any evidence.

Also, there’s no doubt that Hugo Chavez was popularly elected. And Maduro was elected by a very slim majority (about 50.6%, IIRC) the first time, in '15 (?). Since then? Eh. Popularly supported? I’m not seeing any independent evidence of that; the people claiming he is are official propaganda arms of communist parties. Was Machado a right-wing candidate? Yep. But if she had so little support, then why was she barred from running? And the fact that she’s done shitty things, is a shitty person, and asked another shitty person to illegally invade does not mean that Maduro is popular with the people of Venezuela.

But if a cop says you’re doing a sobriety test, you don’t have a choice.

Not correct. Field sobriety tests are ‘voluntary’ in all states in the US, although refusing to take one may be used as evidence against you in a trial, depending on the state. Likewise, you can refuse breathalyzer tests, although that may carry significant civil penalties.

Actually, no, there aren’t. As of this moment, there’s no way to know if you’re intoxicated by marijuana, and, since that’s legal in a number of US states, that’s a ‘problem’. (Although, let’s be real, stoned people tend to drive reeeeeeaaaaaalllllllllly slowly, not exactly hugely dangerous.) You can detect the metabolites with a urine or blood test, but that doesn’t tell you how long ago you used it, or if you’re still under the influence.

Unfortunately for me, Starlink is the only option available that’s faster than about 2Mbps.

:(

Maduro is a monstrous dictator. He’s just not the kind of monstrous dictator that Trump likes. Like, y’know, Putin.

The person that won the Nobel Prize recently–Machado–ain’t exactly a great person to be leading Venezuela either, but the odds appear to be pretty damn high that she would have won the 2024 election in a blowout landslide, had she not been barred from running, and the vote count being entirely fraudulent by Maduro.

To elaborate:

Girl Scouts of America–the group people in the US are mostly familiar with–is part of The World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. The GSA was founded in 1912, prior to WAGGGS. The first counterpart to the Boy Scouts was Girl Guides, founded in the UK in 1910, the year after Robert Baden-Powell started the Boy Scouts/Scouting movement. GSA was founded in 1912, WAGGGS in '28.

The org that you’re referencing–scouting.org–is the group that org formerly known as Boy Scouts of America is part of. Different national groups do things differently; I recall that Scouting in Europe was co-ed in the mid/late 90s, but the group FKA BSA didn’t start allowing girls until 2017, when it formally dropped ‘Boy’ from their name. (I think that it’s just Scouting America now?)

Since Scouting is internationally a co-ed group now, it would be a little ridiculous for them to ban transgender youth. AFAIK, GSA specifically is open to allowing transgirls (I’m not sure about transboys?), but it might depend on which organization is sponsoring a troop.

That said, IMO WAGGGS should disaffiliate Girl Guides UK from the international org.

Possibly, yes. But the page would have needed to have been archived, and not everything has been. For a random subreddit that isn’t massively popular? I dunno.

I’d call that 2/3. Bugonia is a remake of the Korean “Save the Green Planet”, so he’s wrong about that being original. “Weapons” is indeed an original film; the director being hired top make yet another Resident Evil film doesn’t detract from that. “Marty Supreme” may be a biopic, but it’s still an original film, rather than a remake of an earlier film. That does mean that it’s an original project.

Hokay, here goes.

I love my PS5. Unfortunately, it’s hooked up to the TV, and has Netflix. So my partner is often watching the shows they like, esp. since I have severe enough ADHD that it’s gotten hard for me to finish television shows and movies. So I don’t get to use my PS5.

I’ve got a pretty nice computer, but right now the only game i have on it is Outer Worlds 2, which is pretty rad. I play for a few hours every other weekend or so, when I’m not too busy with shit that needs to get done right now.

I kinda miss playing on my PS5, but, oh well.

Yeah, stick drift is annoying as shit. I need to see if I can fix that.

People that have an avoidant attachment style are likely to have a difficult time communicating effectively when things aren’t going well.

Nice! I got permabanned for saying that hus-brenna was the proper way to deal with neighbors flying Nazi flags.

I honestly don’t know. I don’t know if I would try them again, but a new game that was similar concepts and story, but had difficulty levels that allowed me to progress–despite generally sucking–might keep me playing it.

You don’t have nearly enough ability to make them afraid. You may be able to wield enough violence to save your life from an immediate threat. But not a determined campaign

As I said before: Afghanistan, Iran.

You simply do not have the ability to wield violence on a scale that would actually make them afraid enough to give you equal rights–rather than increase their desire to exterminate you and people that believe the way you do–so you need to convince them.

Gay people got acceptance because they started becoming visible in popular media, people started publicly coming out of the closet, and that humanized gay people. It’s easy to hate gay people with they’re just a concept; it’s much harder to hate gay people when it’s your neighbor that’s been helping with your backyard BBQ for the last decade. We went from gay people getting fired simply for being gay to marriage equality in less than 30 years. (Yes, Trump et al. are trying to undo that, but at this point support for marriage equality is 68%, and even though it’s going down with Republicans, they’re still at 40%.)

TBH, many of the people that buy his products at this time are leftists. Or at least anti-authoritarian, and deeply suspicious of gov’t control over individual liberties. His position that civil rights are for EVERYONE has meant that many people on the political right have no interest in doing business with him. And he’s absolutely right; if rights aren’t for everyone, then they aren’t rights.

It shouldn’t be a radical position to say that all people in the US should have the rights that they are promised by the US Constitution, and yet we currently have a gov’t that is doing their best to wipe their ass with the constitution and flush it down the toilet.

Who is responsible for the death? The person that intentionally drives a van into a crowd of peaceful protestors, the rental company that didn’t do a full psychological screening and criminal background check before they rented a van to the person that committed the murders, or Ford for making the Econoline van with steel body panels instead of covered in 5’ of closed-cell foam?

What it was designed for, and what it’s used for, are two different things, as you already agreed. Even if you truly, absolutely believe that the only purpose of a handgun or removable-magazine-fed semi-automatic rifle is to kill other people, then you would also have to admit that the overwhelming majority of them never are used to fulfill their purpose; the number that do are, compared to the number that exist, practically a rounding error. There are literally more guns in non-police/non-military hands in the US than there are people. There are far, far more defensive gun uses annually–regardless of who measures it and how–than there are gun homicides.

And bluntly, I absolutely DO NOT trust the gov’t to be the only ones with access to firearms. If you can look at Trump, ICE, Hegseth’s DoD, cops in general, and say, oh, yeah, I shouldn’t be armed, but those guys are cool, well, I don’t know what to tell you. And I don’t trust ANY gov’t to not harm the people, because there’s no way to prevent fascists from taking control without also becoming authoritarian.

You don’t convince those who dont consider you human hy begging.

Correct. You start by convincing them that you’re human. That’s a large part of the reason that there was a very rapid sea-change in gay rights.

I say this as someone from part of a group it’s very hard to keep from voting and expects men with guns to drag me out of bed and take me to the camps any month now: […]

As a 2A enthusiast, THIS IS WHY I’VE BEEN TELLING LGBTQ+, WOMEN, NON-WHITE PEOPLE, AND RELIGIOUS MINORITIES TO GET FUCKING ARMED FOR THE LAST DECADE. Unless and until you can build a coalition that agrees that you are human, and have rights, you need to be able to use violence as a tool to protect yourself, and your community. This is why I’m a firearms instructor, this is I offer free training to and LGBTQ+, non-white, non-christian, or non-male person that wants it.