I think it’s meant to be short for Mega-elements, so millions of elements.

Yeah, that should be fixed as soon as possible. But compared to the hoops Americans need to jump through to be able to vote, 40€ every 10 years to renew your ID card is not that much.

Fascists cosplaying as Christians? If they had ever opened a bible, they might have noticed that one of the gospels’ most important message is loving your neighbors. Not just your cis white hetero normative neighbors, all of them. Even those who might not follow all the rules should be treated with compassion, not hate.

I’m not a practicing Christian by any measure but I think the world would be a far better place if self-declared Christians actually read their fancy book instead of blindly repeating something they heard from a TV preacher.

Edit: there also seem to be huge regional differences in interpretation. Protestant churches in Germany allow gay and trans people not only to participate and get married but even to become pastors. A couple of churches (but certainly not all of them) fly pride flags outside to signal that if God made you queer, you’re more than welcome. The Catholics are slowly coming to the same conclusion but I figure they might still need a decade or two.

Okay, that changes my first sentence a bit but the rest still stands. Because as a German I am required by law to have valid ID and the government is required to issue one to me, it would be incredibly hard to invalidate any ID that they themselves issued without providing a replacement.

I’m still baffled by the fact that for most US citizens, a drivers license is the only government ID they have. It’s not that hard to issue an ID card to everyone and when everyone is required by law to have one, it’s way harder for rogue lawmakers to take it away.

Here in Germany we’ve had mandatory ID for decades and it works really well. Even if our government suddenly decided that being trans isn’t acceptable anymore, the worst that would happen ID-wise is that your card shows your deadname (gender isn’t listed explicitly). Sure, that sucks (a lot!) but at least it doesn’t take away people’s ability to vote or otherwise identify themselves.

Hey, at least this one won’t become a murderer when the relationship breaks apart.

Pretty much that, yes. I remember stopping for a moment and wondering what had just happened. I was of course aware that I had existed before. Who and where I was. At the same time it felt like all that was vague and distant, like suddenly waking up from a dream.

Realistically, it was probably just an unusually intense doorway effect but the fact that I can still remember it so vividly, even decades later, shows how significant it must have felt to 3-year-old me.

When I was about three years old, I walked down the hallway from my room toward the living room. I remember that even in that moment it felt like I had blacked out halfway through and my brain started working a couple of steps from the living room door. Everything before that is blank, yet I have tons of memories from the weeks and months after that event.

To add some more: that’s just not how genetics works.

The reason why humans can decide to be vegans is because we’re already omnivores. We have evolved over a long time to be able to eat pretty much anything.

Most predators aren’t. They are strict carnivores, not because they choose to be but because their whole body plan has evolved that way. Take wolves for example. Their teeth are designed to kill and rip apart their prey. Their stomachs are designed to digest meat. Their eyes, ears and noses are designed to find prey. Their legs are designed to run after prey. Every single cell in their bodies is hyper-specialized on one thing: eating other animals. You can’t replace all that with traits that help it survive on a plant-based diet and expect to still have a wolf. You won’t even have a dog. I don’t know what you would get but it would probably be closer to a sheep.

Several points:

Taking away a predator’s ability to eat meat causes at least as much suffering as protecting prey from being eaten takes away. They are hardwired to hunt. There is a reason why everything from a pet dog to a lion in a zoo needs constant enrichment activities to stay healthy - both physically and mentally. If they can’t hunt (or simulate hunting), they suffer.

Evolution would be stopped dead in its tracks. The reason why we have so many different species on our planet is mainly because they compete with each other. Predators adapt to catch more prey. Prey adapt to not get eaten. At the same time, there is competition between species that rely on the same limited food sources. If we ever managed to make sure every single animal has exactly what it needs (which in itself is utterly unrealistic), there would be no pressure to adapt. Biodiversity would slowly dwindle when species get wiped out by factors we can’t control and without natural selection, nothing new would evolve to fill a certain niche because every mutation that occurs is equally viable. Ecosystems would destabilize rapidly and eventually collapse when your super technology can’t keep up anymore.

And most importantly: it’s not our job to control nature. We’re not god-like creatures who can just force our will onto everything else. Doing so is pure hubris. Nature has managed to regulate itself for hundreds of millions of years. Who are we to decide that the way things have always been is incorrect? Genetically engineering animals not to eat other animals is no more ethical than engineering them to be tastier.

You would turn the whole planet into a zoo that exists only to please your personal worldview. For me, that is the opposite of animal ethics. It reeks of ultra-conservative prescriptivism. Everyone must follow your ethics because anything else is icky and barbaric and certainly you’re doing those less enlightened than you a favor by showing them the light.

No.

Honestly, that sounds absolutely insane to the point where I’m not sure if you’re trolling. Playing God for no reason except forcing our personal morals on animals that neither understand nor care for those morals. Nature is not “pretty awful”. Nature is amazing! Millions of years of evolution have created more species than we can ever hope to even discover, let alone study. Who are we to decide we’re so important and all-knowing that we can just undo that because animals eating each other feels icky to some of us?

Practicability and ethics aside, do people not understand how ecosystems work? What do they think keeps herbivore populations from growing uncontrollably and overrunning our fields? Ask China about the sparrows.

Which is why space suits are white. If they were darker, you‘d get cooked on a space walk. In a vacuum, the sunlight can heat you up but it’s much harder to radiate heat away.

If it hasn’t happened yet, it’s probably just a matter of time until someone creates an NSFW loops instancce.

Very very likely not the first. We‘ve had rovers on mars for about three decades now and all of them had cameras. Mars days are only slightly longer than earth days so there have been over 10000 opportunities to just point a camera at the horizon and take a picture.

I don’t think our measures are that different. I meant “successful as a businessman” which is mostly equivalent to “selfish prick” and very different from being a good person.

Remember: these days, business isn’t about running a company that will generate a modest profit for generations. It’s about convincing people that a polished turd (or enshittification of your predecessor’s product) is the next big thing, then selling your shares and jumping ship before it crashes.

I would say he has been very successful. He managed to become a billionaire by collecting money from investors without even needing a viable product. Even when the bubble bursts, he probably has enough other assets to live a very comfortable life.

Personally, I don’t care if it’s one message or two. The thing that annoys me is people who send a greeting and then wait for a response before telling me what they actually want. If someone sends “hi” and then immediately starts typing their actual question, that’s fine for me, especially on platforms with a typing indicator.

You’re welcome to start with “Hi”, “Hello” or even “Greetings, my lord” but please don’t just leave it at that. Follow up with your actual question immediately so the recipient knows what you need and if it’s urgent.