MouldyCat

Definitely not, lol. Nearby countries with fast rail - France, Spain, Germany - would perhaps give a slight bemused smile in the direction of HS2. Those are big countries where high-speed rail makes actual sense - as just one example, from the German town of Karlsruhe right by the border with France, you can take a TGV to Lyon, about 350 miles away. It takes around 5 hours and will probably cost you less than €100.

However all those countries are all too familiar with their own governments mismanaging public works. So they wouldn't be shocked at the huge sacks of cash that are being tipped into great holes in the ground, and any laughter would be at the idea that this ridiculously unnecessary governmental vanity project is even being built at all.

I was trying to make the point that there is no Good and Bad baked into the universe. There is no meaning to those words inherent to the universe - they are not like positive charge and negative charge.

IMO what people generally mean when they say a person is "good" is the person makes decisions based on what is beneficial to society at large, while a "bad" person makes decisions based solely on what benefits them. The idea of Good and Bad, the idea you can judge someone as either Good or Bad, these are ideas which have arisen under evolutionary pressure, it's a mechanism whereby you can enforce a particular behaviour across a community.

There's nothing magic about it. If a person is good, they help make their community stronger: if they are bad, they weaken it. People raised in a traditional religious household seem to cling on to the misplaced idea that there is an absolute Good and an absolute Bad sewn into the fabric of the universe.

However, there is a way to determine more rigourously what actions are good and what are bad. It requires clear thinking, objective appraisal of the situation, and an unbiased enumeration of the choices available. Then you can hope to come to a realistic assessment of each choice, and finally make your decision.

You won't be certain, you shouldn't be certain. You should be aware of the limitations of your understanding, and always ready to adapt to new information. And you certainly will not be influenced by what you might imagine the Devil would make of it all.

why Netanyahu came to Mar-a-Lago June last year to see trump

Interesting point. Mossad psyop teams helping promote pro-trump disinfo on the social networks?

Americans definitely all seem to be patriotic, like they say stuff like, "I'm as patriotic as the next guy, but was carpet bombing all those villages worth it?"

FYI I've had this issue on my old XFCE laptop for a while, and I'm still using X there. I thought it was a sign of failing hardware, given that it happens at the very last point of shutdown (and also, if the system was going into hibernation, it wakes up from it successfully even though I had to force poweroff the machine).

I thought we switched to libre

Maybe some people did. Thing is there's a whole rest-of-the-world out there, and they didn't necessarily get the memo or are happy with the existing way.

You do have motorbikes with electric engines that are otherwise treated by law just the same as a petrol motorbike (riders need to have a motorbike licence, wear helmets, have insurance, the bike must have an MOT and be road-worthy etc).

Then you have electric bikes, which don't legally require any licence, insurance, safety gear. However they can't be very powerful - they can't go above 15.5 mph without pedaling and only have a 250W motor.

You'll also get electric bikes which have been modded to exceed those limits - e.g. a more powerful motor has been swapped in. That bike is then illegal and could be seized by the police.

These kinds of gangs often do use illegal bikes for their anti-social activities. It's just too difficult for the police to catch them.

Gardiner Bryant is great. So great, you don't have to suffer YouTube to keep up with his videos, he also publishes to PeerTube:

https://peertube.wtf/w/omBg7MPgFSZAB7YkWEYGdu

It's an American study, not sure if you are or not. When the authors describe some of the study's shortcomings, its clear they are not suggesting these results to be generalisable over the whole world, or even the whole USA:

“This study followed one cohort of people born in the late 1980s over time, providing fine-grained detail about their lives and relationship to religion,” Schnabel noted. “That zoomed in detail is great for some things, but ultimately it tells us about one cohort of people in one country rather than how religion is changing globally or even among other cohorts of people in the United States. We can infer some things and connect the patterns for this group to others, which could allow us to see potential explanations when we see similar patterns among other groups.”

We could.. weigh them? And, if they weigh as much as a duck, then we know they are kiddie fiddlers!

alright, but is the world really as black and white as that? Is there really a clear Good Side, and a clear Bad Side?

A collective can be a great way to run a company, for some cases. I lived with a girl who worked at a cafe that was run as a collective - it meant that people had a fair say in decisions that affected them. They could vote on their own wages, working conditions, and no one was barking out orders bossing them around. The owner was an old-school left-winger who was doing this out of pure idealism. He was still the one with the financial risk, he dealt with banks, ensured taxes were dealt with, and all the other tasks involved in running a business such as that.