Presumably ambulances and other such emergency vehicles would be exempt from such devices? But I agree with you anyway since ambulances are expensive and having to choose between driving slow in your own car with a limiter and calling for an ambulance and going bankrupt should not be a choice someone has to make in a split second during an emergency.

It’s hard to come up with a specific answer for this because everyone is different. I think you might be better served by asking this same question to a qualified therapist who can help you work through it. It could be as simple as “You need to force yourself to get up and get more exercise” or as complex as “You have clinical depression and you should be medicated if you want to feel normal again”.

For me, I used to feel the same way after work. I would just come home and veg out, not care about much of anything, and take very little joy even in things I liked. The thing that snapped me out of it was my failing health causing me to be forced to switch up my diet and go to the gym a few times a week. It wasn’t easy to get started, but once I was about 2-3 weeks into my new routine I was feeling more energetic and motivated. I noticed I was getting better sleep too which made me feel ready to tackle the day every morning that I woke up for work rather than dread going in.

Again, your mileage may vary, I would strongly advise to speak to a doctor if you are having difficulties with this issue to the point where it’s negatively impacting your quality of life. Don’t put it off until your health is impacted like I did.

Looks fantastic! That’s a hanger for sure.

There is a procedure for this. To simplify the answer, Kamala Harris will become President on inauguration day in any of your listed scenarios, since she’s the current VP/VP-elect.

It’s theoretically possible that if Biden drops dead today, that the DNC could manage to pivot to a new contender, but there are two significant problems with that:

1. It’s suuuper late in the process. They already called the primaries for Biden, so he has the delegates. If he dies, they go to his VP, so it would be up to Harris to give them to someone else at that point if anybody else were to be selected (essentially dropping out of the race herself). This is a bad move because giving delegates to someone who didn’t even primary will seem undemocratic, coronating somebody that the people did not even endorse for the ticket.

2. Replacing Biden with someone else doesn’t give them much time to campaign. A big part of the election cycle is traveling to swing states to convince those people to vote for you. It’s not that those people are suddenly going to go vote for the other guy (Trump, in this case), but they’re far more likely to stay home because they won’t be energized for this newcomer who didn’t have enough time to court their votes, or to convince them to turn out for their policies/platform rather than be apathetic about the outcome of the election.

I’d like to make a counterpoint here, but first I want to acknowledge that you are 100% entitled to your opinion and maybe souls-like games are just not for you. It’s a shame that people are kicking downvotes your way because this is in no way a new or controversial opinion, but like you said, the community can sometimes take their love of the game/series too far and blame the consumer for not liking the same stuff they like, which isn’t fair and just makes the souls community looks like clowns.

Anyway, my counterpoint is that I don’t feel like these games are as difficult as people make them out to be. IMO, older games were just as hard, if not harder to complete even when playing optimally. In the framework of just about every Souls-like game, you have tools that you can use to almost completely trivialize the toughest encounters if you want. DS1 can be beaten by a complete amateur if you do the gravelord speedrun (which doesn’t require any real speedrunning tricks and there are many youtube tutorials that you can follow along with, takes about 10-15 minutes from character creation) and get the gravelord greatsword which can inflict Toxic on all the bosses, so you can just hit them a few times and run away for the rest of the fight, waiting for the poison to finish them off. That’s just one example. Just about every installment of FromSoftware’s Souls’ series has some overpowered cheese that you can research to essentially trivialize the game. Some people might argue that you’re not beating the game in the “intended way” if you take such shortcuts, but I disagree. Any way you make it to the end is the right way.

For a lot of people, part of the fun of a game like Dark Souls is the adventure, the discovery, and yes, pounding your head against a tough boss trying to beat it over and over. If you’re the type of gamer who gets easily frustrated to the point where you feel like quitting when encountering a challenge that feels unfun or unfair, I can see it not being an enjoyable experience. The thing that keeps most people coming back is the dopamine hit that they get when they do finally overcome that challenge and they are rewarded with more stuff to explore, new items to pick up, and so on. I think if there were any argument to be made against making the game easier for yourself by exploiting broken game mechanics (or with an easy/story mode added or modded in), it’s that you probably won’t be super invested in the outcome and get bored easily. Without the challenge aspect, the Souls games are very much a bare bones experience. It’s essentially a generic fantasy RPG with a story hidden behind item descriptions and cryptic NPC interactions. That doesn’t exactly make for the most compelling gameplay, so there’s no trail of breadcrumbs to keep the gamer uninterested in the challenge going. There’s a sort of intrinsic value in these games that can’t be quantified, because everybody gets something different out of it.

Trump is a lot less great than that.

Been saying that for years. It’s been a quarter millennium, how about we get the best and brightest minds from every field of academia, science, philosophy, and yes, even *shudder* religion, to get together and literally hold a constitutional convention? Just toss that old scrap of parchment out and re-write it from scratch, with modern language that is unambiguous and straightforward. If the rights enshrined in the Constitution that we hold so dear to us are actually that important, I’m sure they’ll make the cut for Constitution v2.0. But while we’re in there, we might as well clarify some stuff. Let’s clarify that 14th amendment, let’s define what a “well regulated militia” is, and so on.

Of course, the people in power like the ambiguity. It means that as long as someone somewhere could interpret the constitution in some way that is favorable to them, they can have it mean whatever they want when it suits them and as long as they keep the populace at each other’s throats with an unending culture war they know we’ll never organize enough to change that. It’s a bit of a pessimistic outlook. Our fates are controlled by people who like the dysfunction and that sucks because we could very easily fix a lot of the problems by unifying, but I don’t know if that’s possible at this point.

Has he tried claiming that he hasn’t been excommunicated and storming the Vatican?

I think this is unironically how they need to spin it. Convince the Republican base that this ruling is actually better for Biden than it is for Trump by repeating their own false narratives back to them - that the Biden Crime Family will get away with everything. Albeit, the things he could actually get away with are limited to what the court determines is an official act, and given the current makeup of the SCOTUS it’s unlikely that they would side with him even if there were precedent, but he would be still almost untouchable under this new ruling no matter how you spin it.

Have a case against Joe Biden? Sorry, all of that evidence is now inadmissible in a court of law because it happened while he was president. Too bad, Republicans! Maybe if you were to… I dunno, pass a constitutional amendment that revoked that privilege. But oooooh nooooo, that would be horrible! Please, anything but that! All our nefarious plots would be undone and Biden would go to prison!

The left functionality doesn’t exist in this country. We stamped them out in the Cold War and replaced them with the new Democrats who were all for social progressivism but economically were beholden to corporate interests. Then you have the conservatives who are so socially regressive they think Sharia Law is a roadmap and are so in bed with corporate interests that they’d be fine if kids died in coal mines as long as someone at the top is getting paid.

We can’t have the true left back until we get voting reform. Ranked choice or approval voting is essential to allow 3rd parties to have a chance to flourish without causing a spoiler effect. That will also pull the Overton window back to the left again as the two major political parties will have less of an incentive to court extremists and will see better results at the polls if their platforms appeal to as many people as possible.