There’s a reason so many poker players wear sunglasses.

Anyway, try to preempt your emotional reaction. There’s always many different flavors of reactions we can have to something really negative, which normally depends heavily on mood. By default, this all just runs unconsciously, but it doesn’t have to. Of the many potential options, like anger, sadness, condescending disdain, arrogant bemusement or surprise, you can try to consciously pick one and channel your feelings towards it instead of just letting your feelings run wild.

Or you can just practice a proper poker face, but that can be really hard. Doable though, just takes a lot of practice. Playing poker would be an effective way to get that practice.

You know getting a progressive President wouldn’t have gotten us any closer to abortion rights? Unlike Trump, we actually follow our separation of powers principles, which means the Pres has limited authority. You expect us to just ignore court orders and the legislature like Trump does or something?

A law enshrining abortion rights would require a filibuster-proof Senate majority and control of the House.

I’m all for being critical of the DNC, but we should be clear-eyed on how governing actually works. Also, pretty hard to say Harris was less progressive than Obama, her Senate voting record was pretty damn progressive.

There’s degrees of difference. Wheat goes through a new generation every year. Faster if you have a greenhouse. People go through a new generation every few decades. Wheat can thus change 20-30 times faster than people.

A century is, at minimum, 100 different “iterations” of the wheat genome. A century is ~3 “iterations” of humans.

Agreed. I understand people’s desire to look at the fact that both women lost, but we should also remember the fact that they both failed to unify their own coalition. This is a pretty big deal, if you can’t even unify your own coalition, your prospects are pretty damn challenging.

That charisma element is very valuable for that, as is tossing your own faction members enough policy bones to satisfy them even if you’re not fully pleasing them. Clinton and Harris both failed to do this, and took their coalitions a little bit too much for granted. Harris came close with the Walz pick, but Gaza weighed very heavily on her with progressives. She needed to do more to distance herself from Biden to thoroughly win them over.

Ultimately, I think our problem stemmed from them not understanding the appeal of the far right. This caused them to underestimate the strength of their opponent and fail to run as dynamically and aggressively as necessary. They played it too safe. With Harris in particular, I wanted to see the prosecutor prosecute the case against Trump, with the voters as the jury. Instead her stump speeches and interviews remained frustratingly soft. Hilary did this too.

We the people can look at Trump as some big joke, and make fun of him and his supporters as much as we want. But the opposition candidate has to take him deathly seriously, and give him the gravity he is due as a potentially fascist leader of the worlds most powerful military. That is no laughing matter.

This sort of speech by AOC is what we needed more of, and even it is a little bit soft: https://youtu.be/OO7SE4Zpd9s

Bernie could have done it too, I think. He did come fairly close in the primary, even though he was fighting upstream against lingering negative sentiment about “socialists” in middle America. I think the country has changed enough in the past 10 years, partly due to his trailblazing, that that’s no longer as much as an albatross as it once was though.

Certainly. But we still cannot say that should mean every beneficial mutation for their lives was likely to be adopted. Like I said earlier, the majority of possibly good things are left on the table, even when drawbacks are not considered.

Including drawbacks muddies it up even further, we can look at how cardiovascular shock occurs and how the particular traits that create it were a bit of a double edged sword.

But what is the likelihood of this autonomous stress relieving function arising, how many mutations would be required to implement such a thing? Would it have any significant drawbacks or side effects in other aspects of our biology?

You can’t look only at the propagation side of things.

Another thing, stress isn’t event based per se. It’s more of a floating value that always exists to a certain degree and provides both positive and negative effects at different levels and in different situations. The negative health impacts come in when it remains high for a long period of time. So what we’d really want to look at is something like the frequency of headpats given to your dog or something, and the effects of this compared to other potential stress relieving activities like meditation.

Lastly, I would check your data on pet availability, I think it’d be far, far higher than 10%.

Negative health outcomes are an evolutionary pressure.

Also, evolution does not work from a plan, we do not spontaneously generate all the things that would benefit us over a long enough timeframe. Instead, random things happen and certain ones propagate while others don’t. Because it is not a conscious force operating from any sort of plan, and instead works via random mutation and propagation of beneficial traits, it leaves a whole bunch of potentially beneficial things unadopted.

Otherwise all life would just move towards some sort of optimal form, maybe crabs, instead of evolving greater and greater diversity that can better handle changing environments.

One I can think of would be stress relief. Stress contributes to a lot of negative health outcomes, and cuddling with a pet can help mitigate some of that stress. Wouldn’t surprise me if amount of stress also has a more general effect on overall decisionmaking.

Dual citizenship is probably a bit premature, I doubt you need to concern yourself with that just yet. I would probably have a few places picked out as likely options for a work visa though, after doing some basic research into pay grade vs cost of living and how much you like/would fit in with the local culture.

You probably already have a vague idea of which countries you might enjoy living it.

Yeah, that’s kinda silly. I can see an argument that WWE wrestlers are athletes, no problems there. But they don’t actually perform in any sort of athletic competition, which makes thinking of it as a “sport” a little weird. If WWE is a sport, then so is ballet.

The study of history is done by many, many different people over many, many centuries. It would be illogical to say that just because some make a certain mistake, all do.

Additionally, you cannot say nothing changes when the understanding of history constantly changes, as our archeological abilities steadily improve.

Lastly, even scientists need to fill in blanks sometimes. Einstein was rather famous for filling in some critical blanks in Newtonian physics, for instance.

So let me get this straight, you think the field of history fails to consider that people can make up bullshit?

Then I’d just go with the examples the other guys gave, it’s good stuff, and they’re probably more current than I am. Banter is fun, you’re doing really well if you’re both laughing. I liked that shoulder squeeze litmus test thing one guy mentioned, that’s a good move. Anything you can back off from pretty easily like that without feeling like a dick is fine.

We’re all being vague intentionally, though, nobody can give a script for it. Any script is a bad script, it all just varies too much. Back to what I originally said, this isn’t really answerable in a forum discussion, not well anyway. Everything has to be either really vague, or risk being wrong for you. And I’m not some self help guru willing to take that risk of giving advice that very well might not work, just so I can sell a book or get youtube views or something.

I wouldn’t sweat it too much. It’s the sort of thing everyone needs to learn by practicing, that’s how everybody who is any good at it got there.

If it worries you, maybe start with innocuous compliments, things like that whatever looks cute, you have a pretty voice, stuff like that. Don’t have to press, you’re not trying to get anywhere or anything, just build up some starter confidence in expressing yourself. Like the other guys said, if someone doesn’t seem receptive, don’t sweat it, just back off. Nothing wrong with a compliment.

It’s a trial and error thing, though, and you’ll develop your own style over time.

The other people in the thread provided some solid advice that included some loose examples. It’s a tough thing to go into detail on without writing a book half full of caveats though. I don’t want to try recommending a method or anything, because there kinda is no method to it. That I can think of anyway, that will be any sort of consistent.

This thread is really making me realize how many people just don’t know what critical thinking is… :\

Problem solving is not the same as critical thinking. No puzzle or strategy game, that I can think of, has any significant critical thinking component to it.

Wait, just thought of one exception. Social deduction games, like Among Us, when played with live chat, will train critical thinking. Critical thinking is about figuring out if this information is lying to you (edit: or otherwise flawed in some way) or not, and if so, how.

tbf that’s often where they start. It goes something like: I like Rome–>I want to see that today–>How can someone build an empire in the modern world–>Oh yeah, a few guys did try that…

I think racism is more of an independent correlation than any causative element. The cause seems to be an oversimplification of the world into “natural laws” that are poorly understood, usually surrounding a shallow understanding of survival of the fittest and hierarchical structures in animal behavior. This root branches out into both racism and authoritarianism independently.

Those are clearly whiskers. gtfo.

This isn’t really answerable in a forum discussion, as it all varies too much depending on circumstance.

I guess the basic idea is to make someone feel good and wanted without going overboard and coming across as any sort of creepy. This is a fairly fine line, though, and where it is fluctuates wildly depending on the person, situation and expectations of the moment. You’re also juggling body language and tone in addition to your words, so really anything can be made flirty, or go overboard, all depending on recipient/mood, delivery and circumstance/timing.

The first thing I’d probably start thinking about is how to identify the times and individuals where any flirting will be welcomed, which is also going to vary quite a lot. Dates are a pretty safe place to start, for obvious reasons.

You’re probably operating from outdated information, we don’t have the same budget we had 10-20 years ago. Here ya go:

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/