All the time. If it’s a company I dislike and I see them advertising on Google, I know I’m costing them money. Google uses an auction house system for ads, so common words can have a lot of competition. You could be making that company pay a dollar or more for that click, and at the same time contribute to a headache for their marketers who are keeping a close eye on their cost per click and customer acquisition costs.

Yeah, google wins in this scenario too, but there’s not much I can do about that.

As has medicine and most other technologies. And yet… the question is never asked about the long term threats posed by people who aren’t personally hunting and tracking and foraging.

And miss out on the reminder that my existence is precarious and dependent on the good-will of the able-bodied? Nah, that’s head-in-sand stuff. I prefer to remind everyone of what this line of questioning has led to in the past and the human consequences of discussing the rights of a group of people in the abstract.

Exactly, and yet the question is never “is agriculture a long-term threat to humanity?”. It’s always the people with medical issues who are acceptable first choices as society’s sacrificial MacGuffin, long before we question any technology that benefits the person who is “just asking questions”.

It’s like we didn’t already do Social Darwinism the first time. Super frustrating.

Even if we ignored the entire history of the word cripple, it still would be remarkable to not consider hunchback or dwarf as physical descriptions. Given that your next question references video games and then we fall down Godwin’s slippery slope, I’m not convinced you’re honestly engaging with the concept of connotation.

the words only have deragatory meaning to those who have decided they are such.

Yes, and when the people who have to live with the consequences of discrimination tell you that you’re speaking in the same way as those who have discriminated against them, it’s worth considering. Even momentarily.

Have a great day, I’m going to go be a cripple elsewhere now. Nah, just kidding, it will still be my couch. Just not this thread.

If you wanted to emphasise the challenges he dealt with, adjectives for his physical appearance were not a good choice. The challenges he would have dealt with may have included chronic pain, limited mobility and discrimination. You could even have said he suffered from kyphosis. But words which have been frequently intended to be derogatory don’t do much to create a sense of empathy.

could be applied to anyone.

And it’s nice to see disability being normalised, even if that wasn’t your intent.

steinmetz was a hunchback cripple dwarf

I never want to hear anyone say again that “nobody calls someone a ‘cripple’ anymore”. Perhaps consider this somewhat less grotesque alternate phrasing: “Steinmetz was a person who experienced significant and debilitating disability”.

natural selection does not choose whats best overall, just those that can reproduce.

That’s not only an incorrect understanding of natural selection, i’d add that Steinmetz chose not to reproduce. If he hadn’t been the topic of your next sentence, I wouldn’t have felt the need to emphasise his personal agency. Or his existence as a person

Oh cool, it’s time to find out how much of a burden on humanity I am and whether I should have been left to die. Just hypothetically of course, I wouldn’t want anyone to misunderstand. I always enjoy this question with my morning coffee.

Now there’s something I haven’t heard in a million years. Thanks for helping me rediscover it!

A song evaded me for maybe 5 or 6 years once. I ended up having this same conversation about evasive songs with someone and did my best at an impression, because it’s instrumental.

“Doo-d’ Doo Doo, Doodoo Doo, Doo-d’ Doo Doo, Doodoo Doo…”

The person I was talking to instantly said it was Eple - Röyksopp, and was entirely correct.

Which kind? We’ve got bunches. The sulphur crested are the most famous, and they are great but can be vandals

Oh no, i got to see them. This was a decade ago, and I was told even then that there used to be many more. I was happy to see any at all though, I had only ever seen them in movies and they almost seemed mythical. They are pretty magical, it’s very sad to hear they’re almost gone.

Seeing a chipmunk was the same for me. And goddamn are they cute, I had no idea they were so small and precious. Alvin and the chipmunks are monstrosities by comparison.

The bin chickens are my kin, I’m in the small minority here who appreciate them.

And yeah, the flying foxes are a surprise for most foreigners. They’re also pretty big and often fly low at dusk, so they can be slightly startling too, even though they’re just adorable fuzzy harmless nectar drinkers. It’s a pity they screech too, it might be easier to reassure non-locals that they’re not dangerous.

People are also often surprised to see all the other Sydney city wildlife and how much of it there is, especially rainbow lorrikeets. Everyone loves the lorrikeets, but people from the northern hemisphere are especially awestruck when they see them. It’s understandably almost a little surreal to have such brightly colored parrots hanging out in the middle of a city, if you’re someone who comes from a city that is just pigeons and sparrows.

If you want to see a croc, just go walking near the shallow water of the top half of the country’s coast. You won’t see the croc for long, and it will be the last thing you ever see, but it will be up close and very personal.

Seriously though, you don’t go to see salt water crocodiles in the wild or even go near any body of water on the northern coast. If you can see one with the naked eye in the wild, you’re already too close. They’re extremely fast, extremely aggressive, and the males get up to 6m / 20ft long and 1000kg / 2200lb. They are very much a zoo only thing.

I was excited to see squirrels, lightning bugs and a racoon in the US.

When people come to Australia they obviously want to see kangaroos, koalas and platypus and quokka. Koalas are very rare to see in the wild, and a visit to a zoo will score you a sleeping ball on a branch. Kangaroos are frequently roadkill if you go outside the city. Quokka require a long trip to a really remote location. You’ll also almost never see a platypus, even the ones at the zoo you might catch a water ripple at best.

But if you’re headed to Sydney city, guaranteed you’ll spot the almighty and much maligned “bin chicken”, our Australian white ibis. Often not quite white from the bins. At night they serenade you with their collective honking from their tree, which can be easily spotted by the masses of white poop underneath. And you’ll see fruit bats in the evening. Hopefully not the daytime corpses hanging from electrical cables while they slowly rot, but that’s not altogether unlikely either, unfortunately.

If you want your funeral to properly represent you, write your own eulogy.

Die antwoord also adopted, abused and abandoned an albino (Edit: my mistake, he has hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia) child, Tokkie, who spoke out a few years ago. They’re truly awful and Tokkie’s documentary is worth watching.

Also Marilyn Manson has been evicted from my music library for sexual abuse. I have no interest in supporting known exploiters, and I can’t listen to their music without thinking about how awful they are as people. No regrets, there’s plenty more musicians out there worth my time.

so they could be edited out of the episode and then the user could also download said episode where ads are cut out of the final audio file.

This is the part that might be problematic and I can see being part of a civil suit (I am not a lawyer). Depending on how you collect and store the episodes (which you may not actually have to do to achieve your goal, but is the easiest solution) you would likely run afoul of “distribution” precedents in the US that may result in a judgement against you.

But even if you didn’t actually break the law, the media lobbies globally are well known for filing huge numbers of lawsuits over anything that even looks a little like it might be costing them money. Defending yourself at all is hard time-consuming and often expensive. It’s not something I would recommend going into casually.

https://torrentfreak.com/category/lawsuits/ is a great site for learning about the current lawsuits from a tech perspective, and has helped me out many times over the last decade. It’s one of the gems of the internet, in my opinion.

I channel the despair, anger and misery into working on solutions to help marginalized peoples. I don’t have all the answers to the world’s problems, and I can’t solve it all, but I can show the people who might have the answers that there is someone in their corner who supports them in their efforts. Even if those people haven’t been born yet, demonstrating the power of empathy and collaboration sets them up to choose constructive paths. If I give up on them, then it becomes much easier and more likely that they will choose the same anti-social self-interested motives that are destroying us all. But, if they are going to be able to make that choice at all, they need to be in a position where they aren’t in survival mode all the time.

We’re all just organisms who exist for a brief flash of time on a galactic scale, ultimately this is all meaningless. But as someone who identifies as a bit of an existentialist, I make my meaning. You can too.

It also enables me to leave the weed for wind-down time, mostly. Depends on how badly my health is doing, and it’s pretty variable.