Without going into spoilery details, the film Conclave raised a very interesting question about pope eligibility. Recommend checking it out, not just for the topical relevance but also simply because it’s a good movie.

Hours later, even.

As others have said, Francis also stacked the electors who will be deciding the next pope, so it is possible that his successor will also be just as progressive (well, progressive for the leader of a conservative religious institution, at least).

Generally no, but it depends on how you handle the interaction.

This whole situation seems a bit odd and I can’t help but feel like we’re not really getting the full picture. But at a surface level, if someone takes what is really just a misunderstanding or miscommunication and turns that into a character assassination against you without giving you the chance to explain yourself, that is not something you should feel obligated to just accept.

But it depends a lot of how you handle it. If you just take the opportunity to fire back and make this a “them” problem, knowing they have some mental disability that could have caused them to misread the situation, that would be ableist.

What you could do is simply respond along the lines of “I can understand why you’d feel this way if what you believe is true, but I think I didn’t explain myself clearly, and that’s on me.”

I mean sure, if what America wanted to hear was “day 1 dictator”, “mass deportations”, “tariffs”, and “finish the job [in Gaza]”.

He’s doing exactly what he promised. This is exactly what America voted for.

And yet America wouldn’t even elect that, given the choice.

There’s always hope. The feeling you are experiencing is what the people who are causing all of that want you to feel.

Now if everything seems bleak and hopeless all the time, that’s also a strong indicator of depression, and may also be worth talking to a professional about. Or if not a professional, at least people in your life whose perspectives matter more than random internet strangers like me.

I feel like it’s just going to be round 1 of Canada and Mexico all over again. The pause for them didn’t make a difference. He said “let’s make a deal”, Canada and Mexico made a deal, and then 30 days later the tariffs began regardless.

No one is making deals this time because everyone knows they won’t affect the outcome. What is affecting the outcome is making threats. So either he just stubbornly waits it out, getting nothing in return before they happen anyways, or he chickens out and walks it all back.

I think they mean not letting the ideas go unchallenged. If someone is reading through and sees a bunch of Nazis posting hate all up somewhere with no one else saying anything, they might assume that sort of behavior is just tacitly accepted and influence their perception of the community as a whole.

Glad to see more people leave it, but at this point it’s almost more embarrassing to have taken so long.

“If you had just picked a better water bucket, we wouldn’t be in this mess. It’s your fault if the house burns down.”

Humans (and most other animals) see better side-to-side than up-down. Your eyes are spaced horizontally, giving us a wider horizontal field of vision. People generally prefer putting things side-to-side in work environments, maybe also reflecting how much easier it is to move and work within a horizontal plane than a vertical one. So the upper threshold for monitor width would be longer than the upper threshold for monitor height.

That being said, I know reading is best done in narrower columns, to reduce the amount of left-right movement your eyes need to do which can cause you to lose your place when skimming lines. Three columns of text on a 16:9 monitor is way more readable than one column of text that spans the entire monitor.

And then why do we make an exception for phones which are predominantly used in portrait mode? I guess maybe just for easier 1-handed use? Maybe also to give us more peripheral vision of potential hazards and other things happening in the background when using them, since they’re mobile devices.

Ending it as quickly and painlessly as possible then, I guess. I stick by the opinion that a life without agency and with no means to obtain it isn’t really living at all.

It sounds like you have no agency either way, then, which still sounds like a bad deal to me. I’d rather die at 40 living a life of my choosing than live to 400 with essentially no free will.

I’m not sure I understand the question. If the premise is that you become physically incapable of doing any action that introduces greater risk than some alternative, which isn’t even a guarantee of “immortality” as described, then it’s basically a life not lived at all. The safest option would always be to go nowhere, do nothing, speak to no one.

Imagine living life as if everything was covered in California Prop 65 labels saying “This action can expose you to risks which are known to future you to cause premature demise or other bodily harm.” It sounds awful, I’d never take that bet.

I meant more that I know there were other protests outside of the Boston area, too, mainly driven by university students with concerns about similar happening in their communities.

I barely know my neighbors, so I don’t think I’d recognize one if I saw them, and a lot of folks including myself were masked up, so I don’t think anyone would recognize me in a photo either.

Also just need to say that AOC quote is good, but also that “Yankee” is a dirty word here around Boston, haha.

I went to the one in Somerville near the university, was pretty lively. Couldn’t stay for the whole thing, but it was helpful to have a reminder that this is a community of like-minded folks who don’t take this sort of thing sitting down.

I hate to come across as an Apple shill, but specifically for tablets, I may reconsider them and look for an affordable used iPad somewhere. From my own experience, theirs is the only OS that is designed tablet-first and they accordingly have a larger ecosystem of apps that are tailored to that experience. I don’t think you can find a more accessible tablet UX in the general consumer space.

Windows and Android tablets are fine, but you’re going to have a lot of compromises. In particular with Windows, you’re either going to get the x86 OS with short battery life, or the neutered ARM version that barely anything is compatible with but gives you a few hours more per charge. Android at least is more mobile-oriented and is built for ARM by default, but it makes no real distinction between phone apps and tablet apps, so most of what you’ll get is phone interfaces blown up/stretched into tablet ones. Both of these OSes are also privacy nightmares, so pick your poison there.

There are some Linux tablets out there, too, but they’ve got the same core problem as Windows, where for tablet-first experiences you’re looking at pretty small/specialized ecosystems unless you’re up for building something yourself. Starlabs makes a tablet that you can put just about any major distro of Linux on, but it’s also x86, and it ain’t cheap. There is probably cheaper out there, but you’re essentially getting what you pay for.

Blocking users would actually probably be more efficient because the majority of those posts come from just one or two accounts.

They are definitely eyeing Moldova, Georgia, and Estonia.