We were taught a similar trick in physics - point your right-hand thumb in the direction that current (or electrons, same same) is travelling and the curling of your fingers shows the direction of the resultant magnetic field that the current creates.

It’s the political extremism ouroboros - any political ideology that is based upon hate inevitably ends up eating itself as they need to keep inventing things to hate and eventually turn inwards. I love to see it.

You guys can use €0.50 coins?! Over here in Australia it’s either a $1 or $2 coin. I wish I could chuck a 50¢ piece in the trolley.

It’s really sad to me that Americans get put in the awful position of choosing between tipping, which supports the low wages, and taking responsibility for ensuring another human being has a living wage. It’s just such a terrible position for a consumer to be placed in, having to make ethical and moral choices about how much money to pay for goods and services.

They’ve been doing that for a long time - ever heard of Apple Pay?

https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/apple-pay-costs-for-australian-banks-revealed-20221209-p5c527

https://youtube.com/watch?v=796VtspzH0I

While I loved PropertyCity while I lived there, my early years in RuralTown showed that’s where the real Country really is. We had a herd of FarmAnimals and would always go down to the WaterBody on the weekends where the LargeMammals roamed free and wild!

I had a little chuckle-up myself

The first thing I played when I bought mine was Losing My Religion - so much fun to jam out to some REM on these beautiful lutes. Looks like you’ve got yourself one sexy sounding songmaker right there!

Such an interesting perspective, thanks for your contribution! I guess our ‘shopping centres’ are essentially the first condition you’ve described that also have grocery stores attached, and it’s likely the grocery store (in Australia this basically means one of 3-4 companies) that are keeping these structures going in the modern age. Our shopping centres tend to be built ‘up’ rather than ‘out’, with 3-5 storey shopping centres (with up to 7 storey parking lots) being fairly common within city limits that are closely accessible to more than 50% of the population.

That being said though, I live fairly equidistant between two of the largest shopping centres in Sydney and still choose to go to my local, smaller, single-storey shopping centre which is very small by Australian standards (<40 stores) which feels much more like a ‘mall’.

Do you guys have a lot of standalone grocery stores that you can drive right up to, park, shop and leave? Because that’s definitely the minority here!

That’s really interesting! In the Australian content, we would only ever call a strip of shops a ‘mall’ if they weren’t connected by some interior structure. In fact, our ‘malls’ are almost all outdoor connections of shops. So interesting how our vocabularies vary!

Exactly right; sex work has always existed (relative to the existence of currency/bartering tribute and some semblance of homo sapien societies) and will always exist in some form. There have always been those who are willing to be in relationships with sex workers and those that won’t. The landscape has changed, but the world’s oldest profession remains.

Out of curiosity; where are your grocery stores, pharmacies and post offices? Because here in Australia, most of them are in shopping centres (Aussie for ‘mall’). The vast majority of us go to do our weekly shop, grab medication, send back returns from our online shopping etc. so they’re still very much alive and well.

Simps don’t suck; they do the dating world a service. Anyone whose concept of self-esteem is so external that they derive it from the admiration of strangers is not someone who is ready for a serious or monogamous relationship. Simps help identify those people and weed them out of the regular dating pool.

Straight men can, and should, touch each other more often (CONSENSUALLY. I can’t stress that enough). Hugging, holding hands, playing with one another’s hair, giving a gentle backrub etc. between straight men should absolutely be more normalised. We’ve been conditioned that any physical affection between men is a sign of sexual attraction, when history (and many extant cultures) show us that men can physically love one another without any sexual attraction whatsoever. The only reason we’re touch starved is we’re too afraid to be vulnerable with other men.

Being an incel is a choice; mental illness is not. You wouldn’t refer to incels as disabled and it’s similarly unfair to refer them as being mentally ill. Being an incel is just another form of bigotry. Racists, sexists, queerphobes etc. aren’t mentally ill. The most generous descriptors I could give them is that they’re either misguided, brainwashed, or both.

Monotremes FTW

I also think it’s not great to equate incels with mental illness. I have CPTSD, depression and anxiety and none of those make me act like a fucking misogynistic twat. Inceldom isn’t mental illness, and equating it to or calling it mental illness does a whole lot of people a massive disservice.

Speaking from an outside perspective; malls (what we call shopping centres) in Australia didn’t die anywhere near what has happened in the US. We have a very different geographic landscape (hyper-concentration of population in city centres) and definitely don’t have the same level of penetration that companies like Amazon do, but we have shared a lot of the same economic headwinds that the US has. From my armchair perspective, this would generally suggest that it’s less to do with economic position and more to do with idiosyncrasies of the US, but I have absolutely no data to back that up.

And it’s also only banned on work devices. There’s no ban on government employees having TikTok on their personal phones, although I personally don’t.