Barbarian

This seems to be the earliest article about Vasile Gorgos, and it seems to be missing a lot of details from this retelling. I think this means that a lot of these details (wearing the same clothes, the same train ticket he left with, the mysterious car speeding off) were all added later.

EDIT: In the video, they actually show the train ticket. It's from 2021, from Ploesti to his home village, and his daughter-in-law says a friend of his picked him up from the train station after recognizing him. Also, unlike this version, he didn't say he'd been at home, he said he wanted to go home. He does look and sound very visibly senile.

Also, unlike this version, the original does not give him a clean bill of health. It specifically says he has neurological problems and can no longer recognize his son or his son's wife.

If you'll allow a bit of speculation, my guess is the guy abandoned his family, went off and lived life, the police never really took the missing persons case seriously and never really looked for him. Decades later, he starts becoming senile. A befuddled old man, still with his unchanged ID card, ~~gets picked up by a good samaritan who drops the old man home.~~ gets a train ticket home and gets recognized at the train station.

separately, it would be a travesty to say that the so-called "tribes" [...] were "given to us by chance"

What I meant by that is that you don't decide where you're born or who your parents are. That is "by chance" from the point of view of the individual.

Humans are a tribal species. Whether we're talking culture, ethnicity, nationality or any other method of defining who is inside or outside the group, the fact is we have an ingrained tendency to separate "us" from "them".

Modern psychology says that the process of becoming more and more inclusive and tolerant is the process of expanding your mental map of who your "tribe" is.

This means that to truly accomplish our goal here (you and I seem to 100% agree on that goal), we need to expand people's mental model of their tribe to encompass all people.

While I do hope that eventually we get to one humanity-sized tribe, until then humans still seem to want smaller tribes. While trying to convince people to see all humans as part of the same tribe, we can simultaneously try and improve the smaller arbitrary tribes we were given by chance.

Thanks, I'll add that link to my comment too. I think it's important for people considering signing this to have all available information. Those arguments did not convince me, but I think it's only fair to make it clear there are counterarguments.

Are we sure we want this? Here is an indie game dev I trust going through why this petition is a bad idea.

EDIT: OP has shown me that Code Monkey has a counterargument to Thor's argument. I don't find it super convincing personally, but I highly recommend people watch both and make up your own minds.

Yeah! That's Tampon Tim! How dare he provide tampons to kids for free? Back in mah day they'd be lucky to have lint wrapped around wood!

Nope. Court cases are continuing, he's still in Romania. As soon as the court cases conclude, he'll be extradited to the UK.

In the article, it says they're also preparing for what a Kamala victory would mean for the EU. This just seems like pragmatic preparation for both eventualities.

Playing smart or charismatic orcs is totally fine in Shadowrun, it's not that suboptimal. You have to spend a bit more karma at the start to overcome the lower starting charisma, but it's not bad at all.

Your fundamental mistake here is assuming any SMEs have the scale and creative accountants to truly take advantage of this. In practice, SMEs have their lunch eaten while the mega corps really take advantage. Those large companies don't even buy robots with these handouts, generally. They use it for stock buy-backs to enrich shareholders.

I do get where you're coming from, and this is why comedians like Jon Stewart have been so careful to seperate out "good weird" from "bad weird", but unfortunately for you it's a fabulously successful rhetorical line that strips away a lot of their artifice.

The reason it bothers them so much is because they want to claim the "silent majority", who thinks like they do but don't say it out loud.

When they're the outliers, they can no longer do that. That's why it gets under their skin so much.