If I were your partner, although it might not feel like it in the moment, the sooner the better.

If you aren’t going to commit to them, that’s your choice to make, but free them up to find someone that will. Every ounce of love and time and attention they pay you from the moment you make the decision to leave until you find the gumption to do it is a waste for them. The most respectful thing you can do is not waste the precious and finite moments of their life.

Let them know what you’ve decided. Have the courage to tell them plainly and honestly that you are leaving and that you won’t be the person to love them. Let them get over you so they can find the person that will love them.

And don’t you dare double back unless you mean to stay. If you stay do it because it’s what you want not because you feel bad. That partner is a human being, one that deserves the truth and to be loved. If you can’t do that, or don’t want to do that, that’s your choice.

This is the least we owe our partners, to be honest with them, to love them or let them find love elsewhere.

I know you are getting a lot of downvotes. Choosing to leave someone you love is not a popular opinion. I could not do it and I think most couldn’t. In time I suspect you will find one of two things to be true.

• You will find someone you truly love and you will recognize that this relationship had affection and care but was different.
• You will find that what was out there wasn’t worth what you gave up, that this was love, and you will wish you had it back

This is life though, the hard decisions, and only you get to make them. I hope you make a good one, and above all, if you want to be a decent human being, treat your partner well. If that means standing by their side in love, great. If that means being honest with them so that they can be happy, also fine. Just don’t lie to them, don’t be needlessly mean in ending it, have the courage of your convictions and tell them the plain simple truth. Don’t make up a reason that feels better, don’t blame them for the relationship falling apart, don’t trick them into hating you.

You owe them that at least.

Explain your situation then.

Sounds to me like you love your partner and they love you. You’d like to leave to go have other life experiences.

It’s pretty easy, which do you value more, the love you have for your partner or these life experiences you could have?

I don’t know you, but my guess is that if you are thinking about it enough to want to find an answer, then you already have your answer. You value the life experiences more, you care about your partner, and you don’t want to hurt them.

I’ve been married to my wife for over a decade now, I love her with all my heart, I can’t think of any kind of life experience that would make me want to leave her. I imagine that love is not a binary on or off type thing that there are degrees and kinds of love. It’s very well possible that you love your partner but not enough to want to stay together forever.

This is really a question that only you can answer. Which do you want to do, it’s your one life, you get to choose. But don’t stay with your partner because you are afraid of hurting them because if that’s why you stay, you will become bitter and resentful and the idea of “what could of been” will always be this perfect thing that they kept from you.

Stay because you want to stay or leave because you’d rather leave.

In general you can’t be responsible for someone else’s emotions.

If you were having a casual relationship and the other person has big feelings you don’t reciprocate, that sucks but it’s not your fault.

If, however, you reciprocate those feelings, or pretended to and led them on, then you do bear some responsibility.

The actual salient question though is if you love this person that loves you. If not, you aren’t doing them any favors stringing them along. That person deserves to be loved like anyone else and you will be causing them more harm than good if you pretend you love them just to save them some heartbreak.

The correct course of action is to be honest about how you feel and also recognize how your partner feels. Whether or not you intended them to fall in love with you, recognize that that is significant and your loss in their life will be painful. There’s no two ways about that, so be kind and compassionate to your partner.

But do not fool yourself into thinking that what’s right is to just keep them around because you don’t want to break their hearts. If they love you, they want to be loved back, and if you can’t do that that’s fine.

Pretending you love them so you won’t hurt them will cause the greatest pain of all.

Headline makes it sound like they just plan to stab people.

I’m neurodivergent, let me take a crack at this.

First off, disclaimer, autism is a massive spectrum so this whole thing is a gross generalization.

Neurodivergent people act differently than neurotypical people for 3 broad categories of reasons

• different stimuli processing
• different thinking patterns
• different skills

First, is stimuli processing. Have you ever been in a crowded room and there’s lots of people talking but your brain does you a cool favor and ignores all that noise so you can focus on the person in front of you? Did you do anything to make that happen, probably not. It’s just a thing your brain did for you when processing all that stimuli, you placed your focus on the speaker in front of you and your brain filtered the rest. What if you couldn’t do that?

Stimuli processing issues can present in both dimensions, both over processing and under processing. Neurodivergent people are often placed into situations that are relatively easy for neurotypical people to process but can be very challenging for neurodivergent people to process. If you want to do a thought experiment (or actual experiment) select a stimuli you can’t ignore, pinch yourself hard every few seconds and try to carry on a conversation. You will notice it takes a lot more energy to focus on your tasks and ignore this unwanted stimuli.

Second, different thinking patterns. We all process the world differently. Neurodivergent people can have very different ways of processing information, I know first hand of three patterns that are common and that I exhibit.

• Perseveration. Perseveration is when you can’t stop thinking about a topic. Kinda like getting a song stuck in your head, but for me it’s having a difficult technical problem and literally being unable to carry out other functions because I can’t keep my brain from working on it. I wake up at 4am thinking about technical problems and then can’t go back to sleep. A puzzle might be a fun diversion for you, it can be a dangerous trap for me where I know my brain will continually turn it over again and again no matter what I want.
• Hyper literal thinking. I think about things in very black and white terms. It can be very frustrating for things to happen outside of the rules I’ve established. There are rules that make obvious sense and the contravention of those rules is distressing. For example, you aren’t supposed to hurt people’s feeling but you also aren’t supposed to lie, this makes white lies distressing (I find all kinds of deception distressing, and it’s amazing how much you are just supposed to lie to people in many social situations).
• Hyper focus. Neurodivergent people often have special interests that they can focus on for extended periods of time. If people were to leave me alone, I could write code for days, only stopping when hunger or some other undeniable physical pain occurs.

Third, different skills. Frequently neurodivergent people find social skills difficult. I said to someone recently that neurotypical people seem completely insane to me. The complex web of contradicting rules make little sense. On top of this, rules are often predicated on being able to ascertain the feelings of the person you are interacting with. Many neurodivergent people find this difficult to impossible.

The best I’ve been able to come up with is it’s like being color blind. I struggle with understanding facial expressions, body language, tone, etc. I also have problem displaying the correct things in kind. To operate in the world, many neurodivergent people adopt a system of “masking” where we learn what we are “supposed to do” and carefully study people and make sure to make our faces look right and make our bodies look correct. This is extremely taxing even if you get it right, so neurodivergent people end up sometimes getting it wrong and also spending a huge amount of energy doing this.

So to sum up. Neurodivergent people are asked to operate in a world that is constantly bombarding us with negative stimuli, spending extra energy trying to understand social signals that come naturally to others but our brains don’t pick up. Following these weird scripts requires a ton of energy and it’s easy to mess it up and then someone wonders “why are autistic people so weird?”

Look the government just doesn’t have any money. None for usaid, none for Ukraine, none for science or education or healthcare, there’s just no money.

Except I guess for performative bullshit like painting over this mural.

Did you know that a tree will turn sunshine and carbon dioxide into oxygen and shade, for free?!

The tree doesn’t even try to maximize its economic value by charging for this service? It does sell the oxygen or comfort of the shade at all, it doesn’t have a subscription service so that you can pay it monthly for oxygen and shade.

It’s downright unamerican.

Yea I feel bad for him too, you can tell when the officer tells him he has no choice to arrest him that he’s realizing how badly he just messed up.

In his mind he was about to lose his pardon and go back into the prison system.

But to me that also makes me think the officer is justified in his use of force. People that think everything is ruined are unpredictable and he was reaching for violence. While he was saying he was going to turn that violence on himself, there’s no particular reason to trust what he’s saying. I think there’s a very real possibility he gets the gun saying “I’m shooting myself” but then once he has it maybe shooting the cop sounds a bit better.

If I’m the officer I’m not rolling the dice to see if he points the gun at his head or mine.

And as much as I can empathize with the feeling of fear and loss in that moment, ultimately he made a bunch of choices that led to that. He did whatever he did to get his license suspended, he drove on a suspended license, and even in this instance he broke the speed limit knowing that the results of even a minor infraction could lead to the loss of his freedom.

At some point he has to be responsible for the consequences of his actions.

Police Activity posted the bodycam footage.

https://youtu.be/zf6BgUd86I4

It’s under 7 minutes and when the shooting happens it’s blurred out. It’s relatively tame from a gore point of view, but it’s still a video of someone being shot so watch with care.

Here’s my synopsis of the footage for people that don’t want to watch it themselves, you can skip the preamble if you just want to understand the shooting. In my opinion the officer acts reasonable, friendly, and professional throughout.

Preamble

• Officer pulls the guy over for going 70 in a 55
• Guy offers up unprompted that he’s a J6 defendant that was recently pardoned
• Officer doesn’t seem to care one way or the other asks for license
• Guy says he’s coming from church and his mother’s grave. He doesn’t have a license and has been trying to get a hardship license, produces an expired license
• Officer asks how often he’s been caught driving suspended
• Guy says “in my life”
• Officer clarifies “recently”
• Guy indicates not much
• Officer goes back to his patrol car to run the guys information.

Shooting

• Officer asks the guy out of the vehicle, they go to the rear of his vehicle
• Officer explains that he’s reached habitual traffic offender status because of driving suspended.
• Guy begs for leniency
• Officer explains its now reached the point of being a felony and he has no choice but to arrest him.
• Guy says he’s not going back to jail
• Guy runs away from the rear of the vehicle and jumps back into the drivers seat
• Officer gives foot chase back to drivers door, he provides verbal commands to stop
• Before the officer can reach the guy, he says “I’m shooting myself” and reaches for something in the passenger seat.
• Officer says “no no no” and fires three shots at the guy.

This is shown from his bodycam and also from his dashcam.

A felon retreated into a vehicle, stating he wouldn’t go back to jail, produced a firearm, and threatened violence. Was the guy lying about shooting himself, was his plan to fire the firearm at himself or the officer? Based on my view of the video, the officer acted within his lawful authority, was polite and professional, and only used force consistent with what the situation required. But I’d encourage you to watch the evidence and make up your own mind.

There are a ton of bad cops and awful shootings. I don’t like J6 but I don’t see this as justified because the guy is an asshole, but justified because of his actions at this traffic stop.

I mean I’m sure the forms aren’t identical but is having to tell the same information so much of a burden that removing it materially changes anything?

It seems like to work would be in tracking the spending and then once that is done what all is there to save from only having to hand that data to one watchdog instead of two?

Unless of course one of those watchdogs, being a smaller state agency, could be cheaply bought and have their reporting requirements gutted.

When powerful people want small government what they really want is cheaper bribes.

This has real “let them eat cake” vibes

Eggs have traditionally been one of the cheapest staple sources of protein for the working poor.

The right is living out their wet dream right now, in charge of almost every facet of the federal government.

And your concern is that people aren’t being nice enough to them and their supporters.

Collaborators can eat shit

There’s no way a busty woman talking about bitcoins could honeypot any of these people. No sir. These young men are definitely above that sort of thing and no enemy of America would be wise enough to take advantage of these young lads.

Nope, totally safe and secure. We should all sleep soundly tonight knowing some 19 year old has access to our national treasury under the order of a ketamine addict.

You know what they say when you are at the top of a global order and reap substantial benefits from having that coveted position?

Blow it all up and hope that it’ll come out better by having you… at the top… which is where you already were… hold on.

I still remember being taught about how politics is America is a pendulum.

It swings too far to the right and people get pissed and send it leftward. Then it swings too far to the left and people get pissed and send it rightward.

I have waited my entire life for the swing leftward, and I think I identified what broke America.

Let’s say that this pendulum swinging is necessary, we are a pack of goldfish swinging from left to right looking for something good with short short memories. This system can be metastable, you don’t make a ton of progress on anything but you just sorta bounce between the two sides and the status quo sticks around and you don’t slide into madness.

When 9/11 happened and Ws war on terror emerged, I worried that it would break the system. But in 2008, Obama emerged with a progressive message of hope and change. The pendulum I was told about was about to swing left. I had lived through the right swing of Ws time in office, and now I got to see what the left had to offer (which as a leftist was very exciting).

I watched two phenomenons happen concurrently that broke the system.

1. Obama captured the leftward energy that should have swung us back to the left and held it solidly in the center / center-right. He ran as a progressive firebrand and then governed from the center / center right. The big hop and change we got was nationwide Romneycare, a program devised by the Heritage Foundation which has done nothing but entrench the powers of the insurance industry into law.
2. Racism broke a large part of the voting public away from reality.

Obama wasn’t the first to do this, Clinton’s triangulation strategy was also a democrat governing from the center.

So we have a captured Democratic Party, beholden to the donor class and they capture the periodic leftswing energy and hold it center / center-right. Things fail to get better and the population goes “well fuck the left doesn’t have any answers, let’s swing the pendulum back the other way”

Over time the result is that the Overton window shifts and shifts and shifts until an oligarch is doing nazi salutes and the corporate media is going “oh he probably isnt really doing a nazi thing, he’s just advancing policies that nazis would love and saying things nazis would say and is excited and you know how hard it is to not do a nazi salute when you are excited.”

Our only hope now is that trump doesn’t slowly boil us into fascism and overplays and the people revolt. But Americans have proven to be willing to just take it in the ass rougher and longer than I’d ever imagine.

But that carbon tax would have made a few mega wealthy people ever so slightly less mega wealthy.

I would imagine it’s more ChatGPT getting about as good as stackoverflow.

Couple that with the ability to ask a question without someone closing it as off topic, or a duplicate, or telling you you don’t actually need to do the thing you need to do, or bringing up the XY problem, or… well the list goes on.

ChatGPT might hallucinate sometimes but it’s nice about it and it fundamentally changes the barrier to entry to ask a question in the same way that stackoverflow once did.

Stackoverflow was a step change because it excelled at being a a great place to ask questions because they gamified people actually answering them.

ChatGPT is another step change because it makes it so you can get a similar quality answer instantly and without any of the social baggage. It also allows you to have follow-ups and get into a groove of question and answer. It’s not always right but I was pleasantly surprised using it to navigate unfamiliar libraries and apis and being able to drill down on something. Even when it got something wrong it got it right enough that I could course correct without having to argue back and forth with someone.

Boston Market. It might try to convince you it’s upscale homemade, but it’s just kfc in another wrapper

What a weird way to spell “will” I mean they missed every letter, “could” some editor must be real embarrassed.

Republicans love a good scam

Next up is the dismantling of the ACA. They will roll out these amazingly cheap alternatives. Health insurance for $10 a month!

So the poor and the stupid will sign up. They’ll go to the bar and saunter up to a “libtard” and tell them that trump fixed everything.

Then when they get sick and try to use MAGA super plan plus premium they won’t be able to find a doctor. The $10/month plan only covers an annual trip to a CVS minute clinic. They’ll go on Facebook and write up how the goddamn liberals tricked him. Other faithful republicans will pray for them and tell them that it must be a glitch because trump made things better.

The con will win because it’ll only hurt those without power.