Sam aged, Frodo did not. I recall several mentions throughout the books that Frodo was considered unusually young-looking for a 50-year old hobbit, just as Bilbo himself was very young-looking for 111. Owning the ring seems to basically just pause your aging, even if you’re not using it.

Sam was also twelve years younger than Frodo, but since Frodo stopped aging for 17 years, he wound up effectively older, physically speaking.

Yes, I have always from the first time I saw the movies thought that’s what they needed. A five second clip of that and nothing else about the movie has to change!

If your only source is the movies, one of the annoying gripes about them is they have this deceptive editing that makes it seem like Frodo left the Shire within a relatively short timespan after the birthday party.

Frodo got the ring on the 22nd of September of 3001. He leaves Bag End on the 23rd of September…of 3018.

Don’t feel like a dick for that! That again is management’s fault!

Remember that bagging your groceries used to be part of the service and part of the price, they eliminated that job to increase their profit margins!

At least around here Walmart still bags them for me, except they now have the cashier doing it instead of a dedicated employee for bagging.

Self serve gas was actually lower priced than full service back when the transition was happening, so there was actually a reason to do the work yourself.

If it had been the same price, only I have to do the work of pumping it, damn straight I would have felt the same.

In retrospect it was a bad deal because once full service went away entirely, so did the price difference, so I’m smarter now and wouldn’t use self checkout even if they gave a discount.

Not when, in a universe known to contain non-organic beings able to perform tasks like smuggling plans, a gunnery officer decided to save lasers (as though they were apparently a precious resource) and not fire on an escape pod with no life signs? I feel like that would be the most appropriate moment to stop taking Star Wars seriously.

The funny thing is he might be the one in the right, if we examine with logic.

A mayor probably has no particular skills or abilities to help personally in that sort of situation, and if he was doing his job correctly in the past, then everything in his power to do would already have been done. The appropriate experts are ready. Emergency plans are in place. There’s backup plans, and backup plans for the backups, all carefully considered and planned by the best people the mayor could get to do them in the past.

But humans are weird and have stupid ideas, so we want to see the mayor in his office, giving interviews, or even better, at the site of the disaster, helping. Except the most the average mayor is likely to do in an emergency situation is get in the way and be a distraction.

That’s the sad thing - your city’s mayor may or may not have done a good job, I have no idea, but the average mayor will definitely be attacked if this happens and he doesn’t make a show of ‘helping’.

Counterpoint: toaster 1 looks like Hitler. Use toaster 1.

Moron is no longer enough. Republican voters at this point are malicious, not stupid, not poor gullible fools, they are malicious people who actively seek to harm others, no matter how ‘nice’ they may seem.

I am not interested in hearing about how someone knows a Republican who is such a nice pleasant person, willing to help just about anyone, kind, caring, etc. It is a mask, like that of…I forget the precise medical term, either psychopath or sociopath. But the irony is they are worse because they do have the capacity for empathy, but they choose not to.

And this is, and always has been, who they are. This is not new. This is exactly who they have always been, people who, if they lived in a different time, would happily own slaves, or watch someone tortured for the evening’s entertainment at the coliseum, or any number of such things.

That’s the people we’re dealing with, and they are a significant portion of the population as they always have been.

Consider this question: how is it that anyone under the age of 40 today has ever smoked?

By the time they were born, the bad effects of smoking were well understood. By the time they were teenagers, not smoking should have been as obvious as not jumping in front of a train. People already addicted find it difficult to quit, but it in no way explains anyone starting.

The question is different and yet very similar, because the things you mention wind up in a similar way. Somehow people start in that route even though it should be obvious not to. And these things you mention are much easier to fall into than smoking because parents, family, etc are all pushing it on people. Smokers generally aren’t pushing their kids, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, etc to smoke, and somehow smoking still proliferates to some degree, just consider how much more difficult to avoid it is for those whose families are actively encouraging them to fall into these methods of belief and hate.

No, but they should be public to everyone, and not hidden unless you jump through hoops.

Lex Luthor is actually a super genius. And he can actually improve the world tremendously, such as in Red Son.

That said, Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg was still a more positive and likeable character than Elon Musk.

“AI”, especially art. I’ve spent years trying to learn to draw on and off and have never gotten good at it, but now I can use words to create illustrations I want in a level of quality and detail I could never dream of.

Now I just want the interface to be easier and more able to understand natural language and be capable of making directed changes better.

Because so-called second amendment advocates are really just gun nuts, and so over the years they have worked hard to maintain the right to keep and bear guns, rather than arms.

Thus knives, swords, halberds, maces, and all other ‘arms’ have had restrictions go unchallenged, or at least, not challenged by an extensive and well funded network of advocacy.

This is why PS3 is the last PlayStation that I owned, and I didn’t even buy it retail.

After they discontinued the backwards compatible model I sought out and bought one secondhand, and swore never again to buy a PlayStation product unless they release one on which I can play all my PlayStation games all the way back to 1.

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Not ‘to grant them greater control’ or even ownership. To secure exclusive right for a limited time. And this only because it was meant to promote science and art.

Using copyright to prevent a work from spreading is a direct perversion of the intent, it is using it in a manner diametrically opposed to what it is supposed to do.

These changes could be applied retroactively; this isn’t like creating an ex post facto law and then jailing people for breaking a law that didn’t exist at the time of the event.

How about reword it slightly: it must be available for purchase if you want to use IP law to prevent others from distributing it.

Too fucking bad? The purpose of IP was to give the public access to novel ideas and art, not to increase the control creators had over it.

And yet, instead of answering a simple question, you’ve launched into a ‘if only we could change the past’ screed.

If there was a good answer to the question, people like you would just answer.