But the moment someone starts saying they identify as opposite from their birthed biological chromosomes you’ve lost me.

There are two things you appear ignorant about.

First, while gender and sex are not the same thing HRT can be absurdly effective and adjusting the latter to match the former. There are humans out here who look and act “obviously” manly or womanly, despite privately being female or male respectivly. And that’s before we consider surgical options.

Second, human sex is not that simple. Take the IoC’s “trans women” ban, where they are now testing for the SRY gene. Except that there are cis-women who are XX with a copied SRY from their fatber’s Y, and XY humans for whom the SRY gene is dormant, or whose testes never developed, or who are testosterone resistant – and have appeared feminine since birth. Its entirely likely the IoC will wind up banning more cis women than trans women.

Taken together, these facts lead most people to conclude that the only fair thing is to take people at their word. Sure, doing so means you may need to treat some apparent “bearded women” and “men in dresses” contrary to your initial perception. But most adults do that anyway for literally every other aspect of humanity, and unless you’re a sexist jerk the sum total of what you’d need to change is just pronouns and salutations.

Money is fungible. $1 from pot tax, lottery tax, or DMV fee spends the same in the general ledger, and any pretense to the otherwise is just make believe.

(If your state implements a lottery “for education” and raises $10 million, the near immediate result is reducing general fund outlay to education by $10 million.)

Sexualities are only useful as options on the dating app.

Whether you describe yourself as “asexual” or “demisexual” (or "straight’ or “gay”) only matters when you’re looking for a new partner and need to choose how much “what do you mean by that” you want to put up with.

The EU is about twice the size of the USA…

In FOSS you’re paying with your time and plausible feedback / contributions.

You nailed it in one.

Wars are fought to knock down opponents. No war has ever had an actual goal of “make that country happy”.

As I said before, the war part of Gulf War 2 was a resounding success that ended the Bathist tyranny in Iraq. That chaos replaced it was not a failure of war fighting which might have been solved by more bullets and bombs, but rather a failure of the post-war peace.

If Gulf war 2 was a “loss” because it led to chaos and civil war, then WW1 was the biggest loss in history since its end led directly to.tne Nazis. Which i suppose is a reasonable philosophy., except that it would utterly neuter statements about the USA not winning many wars with “nobody else does either.”

Social media sites live as advertising vehicles. Being able to show numbers related to users showing links helps them sell advertisements.

It’s reportedly why Bluesky redirects links in the app to a referrer – so websites can see how much traffic they get from there and have a reason to post on the network.

Whether or not this is a good thing, and how much tracking is acceptable, is an entirely separate discussion. (Which should really include words like “I regularly donate to my Lemmy instance” or their equivalent…)

It’s not so much a philosophical challenge as a grammatical question.

Was the egg that the very first chicken hatched from a chicken egg, even though it was laid by a non-chicken?

If I waved a scientifically-advanced biotech wand and impregnated a chicken with a small dinosaur, would the resultant egg be a chicken egg even though a dinosaur came out?

I think you underestimate how long a telegram can be.

Not everyone who sent telegrams was as poor as Victor Hugo inquiring about the English sales of Les Miserables by sending a single '?"

The “global war on terror” ended with a rather dramatic raid that killed bin laden. And the war part of Gulf war 2 was an obvious victory.

But winning a peace is a fuckton harder. And we haven’t done that since Vietnam.

No, I would not keep seeing a doctor who demanded I consent to AI to continue being a patient.

Just as I’d stop seeing a doctor who said they now want to ban all vaccines. Or who demands that patients go to their specific church. Or requires that we give blood.

A doctor who asks to use it, however, is entirely tolerable. I don’t mind if my doctor has an LLM look at my MRI scan to help find precancerous growths, and neither should you. But “talk to this chatbot instead of a triage nurse” is an unacceptable level of care.

One of the virtues of the EU is that it counteracts the balkanization that let people make ignorant statements like “[ part of] Europe is better than [the average part of] America”

If you separate America and Europe into similar-scale subdivisions (local schools, postal codes, sports teams, etc) you’ll find the two areas are broadly scattered on most metrics which aren’t things like “native English speakers”, “uses metric”, or “has a passport.”

“Europe” has a bunch of countries that do some things better than the typical American experience, but there are a lot of things that the USA and it’s internal states do better than the typical European experience.

(For the easiest example, look at trans rights. Some parts of the USA are Iowa and some parts are fiercely transclusive; some parts of Europe are as LGBT friendly as NY and some are TERF island. )

A ferry or other regular short-run vessel can be electrified too. The tour boats at Niagara falls switched to pure-electric a few years back, and they’re plugged in to recharge during onboarding and off boarding.

If a boat travelled as fast as a plane the extra resistance would likely make it less efficient. And the whole shape would be designed to be most efficient at speed, so you couldn’t carry that much in the first place.

For an aircraft to travel as slow as a ship it would also need to be radically redesigned, and would likely be a lighter-than-air design since low speed makes reliable lift hard.

Zepplins, derigibles, blimps, and balloons are fairly efficient per surface mile. (Less so depending on how they achieve buoyancy…)

This is really dependent on how many people are taking the same trip you are.

There’s a rail line that goes very regularly between my state capital and my state’s eponymous megacity. (And more along the entire corridor on south to the national capital). If it’s just one or two adults doing that trip it’s cheaper to ride the rail, since the two round-trip tickets cover gas, fuel, tolls, parking, and depreciation. Not so if it’s enough people to fill the car.

Did you ever manage to get steam to let you import a gog game and install mods from steam’s modding community?

Stellaris mods are essentially only on steam, and my “buy from GOG whenever possible” rule means I have a gog copy instead of a steam one. And non-steam downloading of steam mods is a PITA.

I misremembered. The last one I looked into isnt FOSS, but is thick with AI.

https://alistaircrowe.com/

LibreOffice is sick with LLM plugins, and at least one FOSS word processor that I looked into as a word alternative advertised a thick AI integration.

Any rational adult Christian needs to have an answer to “why does God let bad things happen” to be all three of those things.

Some assert that bad things are entirely due to mortal choices. Others assert that God lets bad things happen to setup later good things. Both are reasonable answers, though I don’t happen to believe either applies to all instances.

I personally think God lets bad things happen for the same reason that authors let bad things happen to their characters. God can see our whole mortal existence unconstrained by time, and from His point of view in Heaven our temporary suffering or painful end are just part of a four dimensional whole most comparable to a role we played on a stage.

Thankfully, the moment of suffering is something Christians assert God Himself incarnated and endured, even going so far as to doubt and fear as he was being killed. Most of us say God lived as one of us and felt all the same wretched emotions humans feel, including exactly the anger and frustration that you describe.

Literally setting cash on fire has a higher return on value than war.