bss03

If you knew anything about The Culture, you'd know it's not that simple.

Attitudes individual citizens have towards death are varied (and have varied throughout the Culture's history). While many, if not most, citizens make some use of backup technology, many others do not, preferring instead to risk death without the possibility of recovery (for example when engaging in extreme sports). These citizens are sometimes called "disposables", and are described in Look to Windward. Taking into account such accidents, voluntary euthanasia for emotional reasons, or choices like sublimation (abandoning physical reality), the average lifespan of humans is said in Excession to be around 350 to 400 years. Some citizens choose to forgo death altogether, although this is rarely done and is viewed as an eccentricity. Other options instead of death include conversion of an individual's consciousness into an AI, joining of a group mind (which can include biological and non-biological consciousnesses), or subliming (usually in association with a group mind).

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Death

I want optional mortality, but am also comfortable with death, and I can imagine situations of survival where I would prefer death.

I think you are running a risk of No True Scotsman, but I agree that detoxified masculinity rejects controlling persons.

"sign jokes" are probably written by "the room". Everyone tosses out 2-3, and the whoever is running the room for that episode picks one. They might even keep a backlog for these since they don't really have to be related to the episode plots/topics. Simpsons and Futurama also have them in many episodes, but Bob's Burger's is the only show I know that always has one (two if you count the "Burger of the Day").

Agreed. I tend toward more literal translations for instruction/explanation -- it made things stick better for me when learning Spanish. But, yes, in context "harder" is a definitely a more useful translation.

"tres bien" is "very good"

"si vous plait" is like "please"

"plus fort" is like "more strength"

I've never studied or learned French, but you can pick up some of this stuff from "throwaway" French in other context and the etymology shared with other languages.

So, basically just the stock U.S. porn phrase translated to French.

It wouldn't surprise me if Miller was one of those "Skinny guys [that] fight 'til they're burger."

I thought he might have been the source of Elmu's black eye for a while.

I want to live in a world where no entity gets to use my organs without my consent. I want to live in an equitable / just world.

Therefore, I want to live in a world where no fetus gets to use any person's uterus without their consent. I support access to abortion.

He agrees; no one should take health advice from him.

The Ubermench does not serve the undermench!

/s

I disagree that an IQ restriction would be an improvement. It would just be another tool used by authority to marginalize. Competency tests have been used as such in both the U.S. South and Nazi Germany.

Improving the electorate and having the output of the voting process reflect their will is the only way forward.

I think the subway stabbing is the main focus of the Cracked video I linked. But, maybe it's a different subway stabbing.

Honestly, I don't like either programmability approach (vimscript/lua OR emacs-lisp), but I'll probably just stick with neovim, because when I'm on a system without my configuration, I'm more productive there, and I don't want to learn enough emacs-lisp "APIs" to reproduce my somewhat small vim configuration.