What's your pet peeve in RL?

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

I didn't know you lived in New York.

I don't but I want to live there less now. The prohibitive price of renting a place there would have gotten to me long before the soda thing.

I will keep my humble tarheel apartment and its freedom of beverage choice for now.

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Other peeve: Reinstalling my PS2 HDD into a new PS2 to find I never backed up my save for Digital Devil Saga before selling the previous PS2.

Now I have to play this twice to do the optional megaboss.

[Taskmage]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

(In)Security questions. Practically all of them have answers that are easily guessable by anyone who knows me, or easily discoverable by anyone willing to do a little research. Peeve +1 if the site makes me choose a bunch of questions and answers, thereby guaranteeing that anyone from either category could get access to my account. Yet I've been bit in the ass by filling in garbage information when sites require you to answer security questions just to log in and not for password retrieval. So now I have to choose obscure or not-quite-correct answers or use questions with multiple possible answers to balance the insecurity I'm adding to the account with the possibility that I will need to guess the answers myself to get access.

[Feba]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

NY passed the sugar ban without a public vote - what the fuck?

We live in what's called a "Representative Democracy". That means that the people elect people to represent their interests, without voting directly on issues.

Bloomberg would probably have a heart attack if he saw what I did with my tea. I pretty much drop a quarter of a bag of brown sugar in there each time. Tastes damn good, too.

I'm sure it makes your uterus incredibly happy.

[Aksannyi]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

Taskmage, I had a friend who used "bullshit" for every single question and answer. His ex-wife didn't know this so she couldn't access his accounts, but he remembered it. Mother's maiden name? Bullshit. First dog? Bullshit. Street he grew up on? Bullshit. It was easy enough for him to remember to answer any and all questions, but off the wall enough that his ex couldn't guess his shit. I always found it amusing.

[DakAttack]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

We live in what's called a "Representative Democracy". That means that the people elect people to represent their interests, without voting directly on issues.

A public vote might have gone like this: "Hurrrr, I vote we make the cups BIGGER so I don't have to get off the couch so often."

[cidbahamut]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

I picked up Magi Nation today at eStarland's retail outlet and it turned out to be a dud. It came with an instruction manual though, so it's not a complete loss.

[Raydeus]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

Peeve: Microsoft updates screwing up permissions (again. )

This time after I installed the updates I have a bunch of programs that can't even run due to messed up permissions. And setting ownership and disk permissions didn't work this time around, because it just refuses to let some programs do anything. Worst part is it's working awesome otherwise, but I'll have to reinstall again and go through the updates one by one to skip those causing these troubles.

/yay




PS > See you on the other side... In about 6 hours or so. orz

[Aksannyi]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

My peeve is that I have to leave tomorrow.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

We live in what's called a "Representative Democracy". That means that the people elect people to represent their interests, without voting directly on issues.

Right. And what politician runs on a platform of being anti-soda?

Because, man, those people enjoying soda at restaurants and at the mall are totally ruining my day with their possibly genetic obesity. By mandating that only 16 oz. sodas be distributed you have TOTALLY curbed obesity and saved the future of all humankind from the evils of high-fructose corn syrup - which is in everything and harder to break down and metabolize than cane sugar.

Oh well, at least its not aspartame.

[Feba]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

There will be pro and anti big drink candidates, if it's an issue voters care about.

We don't have health initiatives because sick people are annoying, we have them because they contribute to our overall society. If Americans were skinnier, we would see economic benefits. It's like public school, you don't have to have a kid to benefit from it; we all benefit from the fruits of a more educated society. Same for health.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

There will be pro and anti big drink candidates, if it's an issue voters care about.

We don't have health initiatives because sick people are annoying, we have them because they contribute to our overall society. If Americans were skinnier, we would see economic benefits. It's like public school, you don't have to have a kid to benefit from it; we all benefit from the fruits of a more educated society. Same for health.

Terrible example. Our education system gets worse the more money we throw at it. Single teachers who were making twice what many middle-class families do just went on strike for this week in Chicago, leaving kids out of school and other places overburdened and all for bonuses, I believe it was. Tenure and unions are abused to create an non-competitive environment where shitty teachers stay and good teachers have a damn hard time replacing them.

What NY's sugar ban is going to do is the following:

Its going to lower the price on on the 16 oz soda, so people will now buy more soda or get more free refills (which many places do and thus defeats the purpose of the restriction anyway). Concession stands at NFL, NBA and MLB games, movie theaters, concerts will see more traffic and we all know how expensive those already are. Good for business, perhaps, but annoying for people and employees in general. Also, more litter to clean up afterward. More waste.

The motive may have good intentions, but its overreaching and really just makes things worse rather than better. They have in their heads that if they try to control the consumption of soda people they believe are too dumb to think for themselves will start making healthier choices, children will become less obese and the world a better place.

This stupidity goes right along aside another "health" decision Bloomberg and company made earlier this year - to ban food donations to homeless shelters with no nutrition labels or too much sodium in them. Yep, homeless people being deprived of food, folks. Brilliant. I mean, never mind the fact the body actually needs salt more than vitamin C and a lack of sodium weakens the body and the mind. Yes, high sodium is bad, but couldn't shelters and soup kitchens just be encouraged to use methods to mitigate the damage high-sodium donations might do? Might add a little tedium to the work, but its better than turn food away or letting it go to waste.

What's really necessary here is pushing for subtle changes at the food companies and restaurants, but there's also the problem of lobbyists. We dropped cane sugar from soda when it wasn't as bad as the stuff that replaced it. But farmers have lobbyists and they want to sell corn for all kinds of things. HFCS is big money but its also really bad for you and in too many things. We're now starting to see a slow trend away from it, the rise of gluten-free labeling and such. Restaurants and food companies are lessening the amount of salt they put in foods. Turns out there's a threshold for salt - its really just a flavor enhancer so once that point is found you really don't need more of it.

TL;DR - stupid laws aren't the solution, subtle change is.

[Feba]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

"We spend money on the general welfare for the benefit of all of us" has nothing to do with how well those systems are performing. Our schools have problems. Not having them would be one of the fastest ways to destroy our country.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

So basically, you're saying general walfare is good and if stupidity and inefficiency result, it was OK because we tried.

So if soda bans are something you can get behind, maybe you can also get behind a stupid law my college town had and is still on the books today:

"Any house with more than four women constitutes a brothel and will be broken up."

This law is ancient, decrepit, misgynistic and did little else but overburden the student union - home to many existing student clubs - with loads of sorority traffic. Now given the circumstances the sororities totally had the right to use the student union building, but this sexist law arguably caused problems like sharing space with other clubs overburdening food services in the union building which was not, in fact, the cafeteria building. I mention this because the sororities of my campus also managed to do 95% of all Greek community service while I might have read a fraternity's community service PSA over at the radio station twice a year. Sororities had tons of PSAs for me to read. The inbox was practically bursting with them. These girls do all this work and can't have their own sorority houses still!

But because of a stupid, outdated law was created to promote the general health of the Boone populace, do-nothing fraternities can have their own houses, sororities cannot and the exposure of other student clubs is marginalized. Meanwhile, hasty bad decisions regarding sexual intercourse still happen and STDs result.

And this in the same town that just expects you grit your teeth and bear it when the snow comes because the roads will not be salted, plowed or maintained. Snow just happens there. They expect you to be competent enough to watch out for yourself because this is a tourist town and snow is part of the experience. The town I live in now won't even let the roads go unsalted at the slightest hint of sleet in the forecast, so when the real blizzards do hit nobody really knows what to do because the're not conditioned to prepare for it. They've been nannied so much they won't do anything to prepare. But they will cancel school, rush the grocery store, buy out all the bread and just stay indoors because apparently snow is scary. People from the mountains and up north would laugh at this shit. I laugh at that shit still.

I can actually agree with Boone's stance on road conditions because there's just no way to keep those roads clear once the snow rolls in. I still can't get behind their ideas regarding housing for women, though, nor can I really get behind how much Winston-Salem babies its citizens when cold weather happens.

[Feba]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

I'm saying that general welfare is the entire reason for government, and whatever issues it may have, it is still better than the alternative. I think you would be hard pressed to argue that our society would be better if only children of rich parents could afford an education for their children, and poorer children would be put to labor.

Not even talking about soda; honestly, I'm more okay with that on cultural grounds. If you want to drink a lot of soda, yes, you can still get it. On the other hand, at least if getting a single-serving container for a week's worth of soda isn't a normal thing to do, it points out to you that maybe you shouldn't be having that goddamn much. It is harder to get as much water in other countries as you get in soda at American restaurants.

[Taskmage]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

I'd complain about this turning into a politics thread, but people don't tend to bitch too much when threads inexplicably turn into sex threads, and I'm usually involved in that, so I'll keep my damn mouth shut.