They used local guides, who knew the routes, dangers and resources they might encounter.

no Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Belligerents list

Found your problem.

Except that in my experience, even a supporter of said party, when talking about how a member of ours “just toes the line” is communicating a negative, not a positive. That’s not a good, genuine guy we’re proud of, it’s someone to watch out for.

Colloquially too, the way I was raised, it’s a bad thing, you did not want to be a line-toer. And I’m not referring to discussions of politics, but how it was used in day to day conversation. I’ve been accused of toeing lines, for instance, with the implication being that continuing may get me in trouble some day and I should be a little more careful.

Perhaps it’s a regional thing.

The same dynamic I was discussing appears in that case as well. The politician may not agree with the policy, and may be willing to violate it, but still toes the party line.

If someone was doing something somewhat shady, but still keeping within the bounds of some rule, you might say they are similarly toeing that line.

The big question to me has become, can you toe a line in a positive way?

Yeah, I just made another edit to my original comment. lol

For the traditional toe the line imagery, it helps to imagine a very rebellious kid that you have firmly told to absolutely not cross some line under any circumstances.

Imagine the kid looking you dead in the eye and smirking, as they stretch out their big toe and put it all over the line while barely not crossing it.

This captures the aspect that you don’t have to follow the spirit of the rules or believe in them in any way, you simply have to follow the letter of the instruction to be “toeing the line”. There is an inherent malicious coloring to the term that is important, where people that only toe the line are bad people.

edit: It needs to imply that you’re searching for ways to break a rule and get away with it on a technicality.

edit2: This got me curious enough to google the origin of the term, and it actually has a wikipedia article, amusingly. Apparently it has a military origin, and the article makes no mention of the negative connotations I mentioned. This makes me think my personal interpretation is actually incorrect, and I now wonder why I picked up on it. In the US, toeing the line does have a subtle negative connotation to it, and people that do it are looked down on somewhat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line

I see nothing wrong with suggesting that, so long as it is made clear he is discussing one of many theoretical possibilities.

Is he a kook? He does kinda look like one, but so do a lot of legit scientists, so that’s not a good measure.

I have a feeling this has probably been studied, but I’m not a sociologist so I wouldn’t know where to look.

Nice.

One small thing, you’re actually not writing prose, you’re writing in verse. Prose is all normal, everyday writing. Most books, newspapers, journals, letters, emails, txt msgs etc etc are written in prose. Anything with a structure, though, like poetry or a song is written in verse, which is more structured and stylized than prose.

So, you’re asking us to read your verse/poetry/rap/whatever and not your prose.

Other than that, I liked it.

Yeah, that game is great. I hardly ever play it anymore, I can’t remember the last time I booted it up, yet for some reason it has been allowed to take up hard drive space for many, many years now.

The dynamic between the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea probably reflects on all of us at a certain level, and comedians have always been good at putting up a mirror.

Though I have been surprised before at how well-researched some Monty Python skits can be, when younger me only saw a bunch of dorks doing silly things.

Sugar addiction is a thing.

How often do you handle pushback from other people well? If you normally handle pushback from others positively, and the chatbot just gives you a break now and then when you’re not in the mood, that’s probably fine. If you normally react poorly any time you receive pushback from someone else, and normally prefer the chatbot because it won’t do that, then that is much more worrying.

I feel like if you avoided giving it long-term goals you could still retain most of your humanity. You could also mainly rely on the divination aspect, and avoid the perfect-execution aspect unless necessary.

Would still be the world’s greatest crutch, but the sheer power it offers is too tempting.

Gonna have to be more specific. What part of life?

Path to Victory, from Wildbow’s web serial Worm.

It’s a two-part power. The first looks into the future to determine the exact set of steps necessary to accomplish any given goal, if it is at all possible to accomplish in any way. The second makes you execute those exact steps with zero chance of deviation or error.

It only fails when interfered with by another power also capable of seeing the future.

edit for grammar

Ultimately, I think it’s a convenient excuse to cover for how truly difficult it is to teach people important things.

The adult mostly doesn’t actually remember the specific logical and/or experiential steps that contributed to whatever understanding they now have. The events are too disconnected in time, and too large in quantity to really parse that way. You need that background info to teach well, though, otherwise you can’t handle questions, you can’t explain, etc, which are all genuinely important parts of teaching.

So, it’s easier to just handwave the problem away and focus on going to work, whatever is for dinner tonight, what’s going on in the neighborhood, cleaning the house, etc etc etc, and leave the teaching to the ostensibly qualified people.

If you want to attempt to do things differently, when you learn something life-lessony, remember that to teach it to a teenager someday, it’s not good enough to have just learned the thing. You’re also going to have to be able to offer a decent-enough explanation and answer any questions.

We need a new version of eco-tourism. If some of these small countries are more willing to take bold steps, then they need to be rewarded with extra tourist dollars being pumped into their local economies.

Someone who knows how needs to compile a list of potential vacation destinations, organized and rated by the boldness of their country’s climate action, and put it on a website somewhere.

That looks like Iran employing its primary piece of leverage to try to get what it wants. It’s sort of like training a dog, it does something you don’t like, you punish it with strait closure. It does what you want, you reward it with strait opening.

Iran doesn’t really have a huge amount of wiggle room, there’s only so many ways they can inflict pain on their opponents. This is one of them, so they’re using it.

I will admit it does resemble the animated shenanigans of a certain wascally wabbit.

Maybe.

A salt molecule is 1 sodium and 1 chlorine. If you measure by mass, the chlorine is about 50% heavier than the sodium, so salt is not 50/50, it’s actually closer to something like 33.3/66.7.

Another possibility is the addition of something like potassium chloride, which is similar to table salt. It obviously won’t contribute any sodium though.