One of the few things I miss from Reddit were the extra small communities like the one for QC. I liked being able to chat with the 30 other people who read this comic daily.

🧅^- anion

I put my alarm far enough away that I need to get up to turn it off. By then I’m already out of bed, which is otherwise the hardest part for me by far.

My mom died of cancer a few months ago because she was convinced that a combination of sunlight’s natural vibrational frequency and some expensive “medical” herbal teas would cure her. Placebos affect people, but if you let them believe that they’re an alternative to actual science and medicine, then they’ll use them as such.

Again, selective breeding suffers from the same issue of introducing changes that can be detrimental to the organism itself and its place in the balance of the environment. Look at dog breeding as an example. Pugs were bred for a specific look, and that inadvertently caused them to have severe breathing issues. Dachshunds are another example, with many developing spinal issues over time. The difference, as I said before, is the speed; making a change causes unintended side effects - when you make a huge change quickly, it will produce more side effects than making a small change slowly will.

And… again… as I already said… there should be limitations to prevent rolling out new GMOs without specific testing for safety, both in a lab for potential problems to the organism or - in the event of an agricultural product - its consumers, as well as in the environment as a whole, to determine how it may affect the ecology if and when it is introduced. It may take decades to notice changes if the GMO is released immediately after being developed, but if testing protocols are made and followed, we should have no problem quickly spotting any issues before the organism is rolled out into the world.

Just like newly developed medicines need to go through rigorous testing to prevent things like the Thalidomide scandal that caused an immense amount of birth defects due to lax testing, new GMO’s will need to be tested as well. But, just like you likely understand the benefits of medicine for helping people suffering from various diseases, GMO’s can provide the same level of benefit to people suffering from malnutrition, among a wide range of other positive uses. The key is to study new developments to the point where we can spot and address issues. Throwing away the technology as a whole is not the answer.

The speed is substantial, yes. That was my point. They are essentially the same; one simply uses the organism’s own natural genetic variation mechanisms, while the other introduces new variations manually. Yes, that is a difference that requires separation of the two in certain circumstances, but not when it comes to whether or not we’ve genetically modified all strains of modern agricultural corn, GMO-labeled or not.

Claiming selective breeding is the same as producing a GMO is like saying an eagle and a Boeing 747 are both utilizing mechanisms that allow them to fly, which is true.

Sure, but you could selectively breed rabbits for 1,000,000 years and get a glow in the dark rabbit; GFP is just a protein like any other - if you painstakingly selectively breed for a specific DNA sequence, you’ll eventually get it regardless of your starting genetic pool. Classic selective breeding is a form of genetic modification - modern genetic modification methods are just way faster.

I agree that we don’t currently know enough about genetics to utilize genetic modification without unforeseen side effects, and so there should be limitations on what we’re able to genetically modify until we can show that we understand it well enough to meaningfully minimize potential issues, but those same issues occur with selective breeding - they’re, again, just slower.

I realized that later, yeah. That’s not something that a kid would usually realize is bad on their own, though; if it’s something you and everyone you know has always done, most people wouldn’t think to question it.

For me it was when I was around 8 or 9 and met someone from Kenya. They could speak perfect English, wore normal clothes, and talked about having electricity. I’d literally never been told that those things existed in Africa - every reference to that continent only talked about tribes and jungles, save for Egypt which only talked about ruins and deserts. I asked around and found that most of the rest of the world has the same stuff we have, and most countries have a functioning government. I was so confused - why were we the country of freedom when everyone else has the same thing?

At the time I just assumed that there was something I was missing, or maybe the rest of the world just caught up to our idea, but eventually I came to the conclusion that they tell us we’re the country of freedom - and keep our studies of other countries to a minimum when we’re young - so that we can internalize the rhetoric that our country is the best before we find out that most other countries about the same, and often better in certain ways.

Because if you look closely, there’s some light blue blobs near the top shaped like the great lakes.

I was never full-on incel, but I was definitely headed down that path. I was a late-20’s fat guy with severe acne all over my upper body, and I’d obviously never had a girlfriend. I looked ahead in life and just saw it going further and further downhill. I tried dieting, working out, etc, but none of my attempts at making a change ever lasted.

One day I saw a facebook post that one of my old highschool classmates had gotten married. The guy looked a lot like me, and at first I was mad - I had that classic incel thought of “why is he successful and not me?” But after sitting in that dark place for awhile, I realized that the answer to that question is that I can be successful! I realized that I’d never tried to put myself out there because I always viewed myself as not being worthy - I needed to be fitter, more attractive, better at talking to people, etc - but did I really? I wanted to find out, so I made an online dating account, cleaned myself up, got a friend to take some nice pictures of me doing things I enjoyed, and put myself out there.

I made a goal for myself to never start a conversation with “Hey” or something similar - I went through every profile I found and picked something specific to talk about. It took a while, and I missed a lot of opportunities by being awkward, but eventually I got good enough at holding a conversation to secure a few dates, and in only a few months of that, I found the woman who is now my wife!

I’m still fat, but having someone to look good for was at least enough for me to shower more regularly, which cleared up a lot of my acne. I’m still pretty awkward, but so is my wife, and we both find it endearing. Life’s not perfect - there are still issues - but I’m no longer looking ahead at my life and seeing only downhill trajectory; I have a sense of optimism I didn’t have before, and it mostly came from me accepting myself. I’m not sure if other incels are the same as I was - not realizing that the one they actually hate is themselves - but I hope that if they are, they eventually come to the same realization that I did: that they are worthy.

As someone who works with door hardware, this would be a pretty easy interview.

I lived in Minneapolis during the protests, and someone did light up a gas station just a block from my house, but I wasn’t concerned - I’d already prepared to lose everything when I joined the protests. Fighting back against the government is going to take sacrifices, both from willing and unwilling participants; if we’re too afraid of stepping on people’s toes, then those in power will just use that angle to quash any up-and-coming resistances.

If protests are something people can just ignore until they’re over, then that’s what they’ll do - they need to be polarizing in order to actually get people to make a change. The enemy of positive change isn’t always negative change - it’s often an apathetic population who would rather not put forth the effort to make any change at all. If people are pressured to take a side by a sufficiently disruptive protest, they’ll usually join their fellow downtrodden, but you need to force them to make that decision.

My wife and I usually plan big vacations about a year in advance so that we can follow flight prices and whatnot to get a good deal. We also book a few days at a cabin for our anniversary every year, so we just book the next year’s reservation while we’re there, since reservations can fill up even several months in advance.

Only planning a week in advance seems stressful to me - we planned a last-minute (for us) road trip vacation earlier this month for the long 4th of July weekend, and it was tough to find cheap places to stay that weren’t super grungy.

Yeah, it’s specifically because they’re trying to increase profits for so long that they need to get so incredibly meticulous and complicated with how their business works. Companies that just try to earnestly provide a desired service to people who need it in their area of operation don’t need to worry about such details.

And he’s got 38 degrees in fucking.

I didn’t really see people mentioning that “would” can still be used past-tense outside of “would have,” though it’s not in the same way - you use it when talking about something that happened multiple times in the past. For example, “When I was a kid my friends and I would go to the pool every Saturday,” which means that, as children, my friends and I did visit the pool every Saturday.

Another issue is that information is easy enough to find that people don’t bother to remember things as much anymore, since they can just look up the majority of stuff on Wikipedia or something if they ever need to know it. It leads to people having a smaller pool of background knowledge, which makes them easier to mislead.

Why the long face?

Huh, that’s interesting. Though, how do you pick MLK specifically out of a recording of an orgy, let alone definitively enough for it to be damning to his reputation?