HelixDab

Not strictly necessary. If his parents were US citizens--and they aren't--then it wouldn't matter where he was born. Kind of. I think that there might be residency requirements for children of US citizens that are born abroad, e.g., if your parents are expats and you live all your life in another country, you might not be a citizen, but it's complicated. You'd def. want to contact an immigration attorney if that was the case.

BUT...!

The point is that Musk, since he wasn't born to US citizens, and since he wasn't born in the US, isn't eligible to run for president.

It's an open question as to what happens if he ran anyways, and how votes would be tabulated, etc. It would get messy, but I don't think that it's ever happened that someone ineligible has run for president and won any significant amount of the vote.

There was a woman that I was in love with a little over 20 years ago. She was my idea of physically attractive--definitely not most people's idea of attractive--and was so entirely fundamentally broken that it triggered intense feelings of being protective towards her along with desire. She was smart, sarcastic, liked cats (yeah, that's pretty important), and was also entirely addicted to opiates and cocaine. She was very open about how fucked up she was. I was fucked too; I was not a mentally or emotionally healthy person in the least.

If I had ended up being in a long-term relationship with her, I would almost certainly have ended up dead by now; I either would have gotten equally addicted to opiates, or I would have killed myself at some point. Thankfully, since I couldn't supply her with drugs, she wasn't interested in anything long-term with me.

I look her up every so often on Facebook. She's still alive, and posts the same kind of angsty cringe shit she would have posted if Facebook had existed 20-odd years ago (and, to be brutally honest, the kind of angsty cringe shit I used to post before I quit doing anything except lurking). If I spoke with her again, I'd probably have to deal with the same unresolved feeling again, because there really isn't a resolution to them. It would be dangerous to me to get close, and so I don't.

There have been several women like her in my life; I am not in contact with any of them, and I do not plan on having anything other than--at most--electronic communication with them at any point in the future.

Feelings are not enough to make a functional, coherent relationship. Feelings are necessary, but are not the only thing. You can love someone completely, even recognizing all of their many, deep, and varied flaws, and that doesn't mean that it's going to be good or healthy for you. Or for them. Mistakes happen, and you hurt people. You can apologize and be a better person in the future, but you also can't unwind the past.

I would strongly suggest that you work on your current relationship rather than revisiting something your past. There are some things you've said about your own tendency towards avoidance, and about your relationship with your wife, that lead me to think that perhaps you could use some help with communication and intimacy. That's not a bad thing; relationships can almost always be improved. If you are certain that you want to resume contact with this person, I would, at a bare fucking minimum, set very strong and clear boundaries about what is and is not appropriate to talk about, and I would suggest that you should ensure that your wife be a part of this contact--which is to say, a chaperone--so that the risks of going to an inappropriate place are reduced.

‘Cities should be better designed so that we don’t have to use cars’

...Which I agree with. And it's incredibly frustrating to me that, on the one hand, Republicans actively don't give a shit about sprawl, and on the other hand, Democrats don't want to ruin the charm and character of their lovely urban single-family neighborhoods with half acre plots of lawn in order to build dense housing that can make light rail economically viable. E.g., the people that should be on board with this shit talk a good game until it's their own neighborhood.

I recognize my own hypocrisy here, because I moved to a rural area to get away from a city, and I am now finding that it isn't rural enough because I can sometimes hear my closest neighbors. I just want to live in a shack like Ted... :(

As far as pay goes, doing from web development to dispatch is (probably) going to be a pretty big step down in most cases. Going from warehouse to EMS dispatch is probably going to be largely a lateral move (although likely with better benefits, if you're working directly for a municipality).

As far as my own pay rate is concerned, I would be fine with the amount that I was paid if it was annually adjusted for inflation and cost of living. As it stands, I make less money--in terms of purchasing power--now than when I started five years ago.

Likely, yes. Which is why the PLCAA was originally passed. While I'm certain that people who believe they are on the political left don't see why this would be a problem, it's easy to apply the same principle to any business that someone on the right disagrees with, in order to eliminate business models that social/economic regressives disagree with.

Well. Yes. This is true though. And that's a 'problem' with a lot of things; they can be 'true' when looked at from a certain perspective, but not necessarily useful in any meaningful way. For instance, pain is a sensation, and that sensation is not, by itself a 'bad' thing. It's just sensory information. Pain in the context of BDSM can evoke positive judgements in the person experiencing the sensation. An identical sensation experienced in the context of being physically abused by an intimate partner will likely evoke a negative judgement. Your judgement about those sensations is based on your context and past experiences.

But at the same time, looking at a larger picture here, if times are getting tougher, then rather than looking inward to the self and your own perception, it makes more sense to look outward to community, to try and change circumstances in a way that is positive for the entire greater community.

It really depends on where you are though. Much like other public policy debates, a lot of this comes down to where someone lives. People that live in dense urban areas can very reasonably go without cars, and trains (specifically light rail) make a lot of sense. Once you get out of urban areas, suddenly trains don't make any sense at all, and the ability to realistically take public transportation evaporates.

This is compounded by urban planning that doesn't prioritize dense housing. Everyone says that we need more and better housing, but no one wants high rise apartments and condos in their neighborhood of single-family homes. That ends up leading to the kind of urban sprawl that makes public transportation impossible to work. Until zoning is taken out of local hands--so that wealthy communities can't prevent high-density housing--you aren't ever going to see this kind of thing change. (BTW - this is overwhelmingly happening in the US in communities that have a Democratic supermajority; that's why housing is so expensive in California, because new housing isn't being built.)

When you die, there's no you anymore. Your conscious existence ends when you do. Your experience of life is fully rooted in the materials; without the brain and stew of neurochemicals, there is not -you-. So it's not rest, or stress-free, or fun, because you've ceased to exist; you can't experience anything because you aren't anywhere anymore.

Depends on the disagreement. "I don't like shoes that have separate toes". Yeah, okay, that's your choice, I love my VFFs anyways. "I think Jews should be murdered", no, sorry, you don't get to have an opinion about the rights of other people to exist and occupy space.

First: Dispatch pays shit.

Second: the PTSD is usually a bigger problem than the depression, since you're going to hear people die as you are trying to talk to them.

Oh, fuck off with that.

Rights are right, period. If you're denying a right to people that you disagree with politically, then it's not a right.

Sure, train everyone. But the right to keep and bear arms is, and should be, an individual right, not one that can only be exercised if the gov't decides that you should be permitted to do so. That's authoritarian bullshit.

No, you were quite clear; you aren't actually interested in real solutions, you're interested in gun control for the sake of gun control.