You should if you want to be a science writer or academic, which lets be honest is a better comparison here. If your job involves latin for names and descriptions then you probably should take at least a year or two of latin if you don't want to make mistakes here and there out of ignorance.
To be fair, any American at least 35 years old can run for president. Criminal status or history isn't a block to that, to prevent pulling a Putin and jailing political rivals to clear the field. The media is also a cesspool of ragebait and train wrecks due to the 24 hour news cycle and "ratings".
Even American cats have spyware.
And they have since the 1960's: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_Kitty
I've been wanting that since 1994. Jawsome!
That may or may not be entirely true, but you have to admit that was a damn good burn. Someone had to say it, it was too perfect a setup not to.
The invisible hand of the market is not all powerful, which is why regulation and safeguards are needed for a "free" market to function. Anti-monopoly laws, labor laws, etc. I lean libertarian, but do not embrace 100% laissez-faire economics. Immigration falls under this same framework.
The West has eliminated their manufacturing and blue collar base by outsourcing it overseas, which hurt large swaths of the working class. Outsourcing labor by importing labor from overseas to do the job cheaper here has similar results. See the agricultural sector in the US for this example. Everyone always says that the reason immigrants are needed is because Americans don't want to do those jobs, but leave out "for the wages paid".
Some regulation is needed, and we have had wholesale failure of meaningful regulation and complete regulatory capture by the oligarchy which started under Reagan and snowballed out of control since. Proper support networks and social safety nets have also failed, for the same reasons. Unrestricted immigration does not solve these issues, and with these holes in place does indeed hurt.
Things that aren't a problem when everything is healthy and working as intended can definitely hurt when things aren't healthy. Obviously the "health issues" need to be addressed to actually fix the problem, but ignoring symptoms while doing so doesn't help.
It takes days or weeks for the polonium to kick in. He might look to be in the clear for now, but don't count all your chickens before they get defenestrated.
It was super shocking to find the Republicans actually knocking the third leg out of their wedge issues stool. All they really have is gun rights now, as the regular culture war stuff isn't nearly as powerful as abortion was. It's going to be very interesting to see what happens in the next 2 election cycles, but so help me if the Democrats manage to get back control of all 3 and STILL don't codify abortion rights, gay marriage rights, interracial marriage, etc so they can capitalize on these suddenly stronger wedge issues. Again. So God damned pissed off at the Obama admin still because of that. Also the lack of federal legalization/decriminalization. And this is from a pro 2A former classical libertarian who wants the government shrunk by replacing all of the bloated agencies and welfare programs with a simple and solid universal healthcare system and true UBI, funded with a aimple tax code with no loopholes that incorporates something of a Georgist land tax.
Yeah, leave the burning of furries to the 40k universe.
I didn't even get a question, just straight up installed Windows 11 on my Surface with a bunch of cumulative roll ups after using it again for the first time in about 8 months. Couldn't even stop it once the "windows update" started, only option is to allow the reboot and then go through the hassle of rolling back to 10. It's a tertiary device for me and goes long periods without being used and I was probably ok with testing 11 performance on it, but don't appreciate being strong armed. I had to kill modern standby again to prevent battery drain while shut down, which is plaguing my laptop after I tried 11 on it.
Windows 11 is straight up unusable in multi-monitor configurations though due to the locked down UI customization, so my main rig won't be touching it with a 20ft pole. If Linux had more consistent VR gaming performance and support, I'd probably be jumping ship. As it stands, once 10 hits EOL I'll probably end up there anyway. Microsoft will be killing one of my headsets at the same time anyway by dropping WMR, and I hear there is some great Linux options for the Surface Pro line now too.
I am completely with you on the f-word being thrown around willy nilly these days, but there are a disturbing number of self proclaimed Christian nationalists in government and among the evangelical populace. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not the only politician to state this on a televised interview, but is the first one to jump out at me.
Damn, only three drinks to slurred? Dad's a cheap date.
America is a power bottom, and proud of it.
Have you seen children? Empathy is one of the last things to develop. There is a specific purity of cruelty attributed to children for a reason.
Civilization is conditioned into humans as a general rule, not the other way around, and needs consistent reinforcement. Humans are eusocial, but like chimpanzees and ants where war with other "tribes" is closer to a baseline than cooperation.
You are correct, and it is exacerbated by the cap on representatives. You will never really get it 100% perfect due to the land mass of the US, but uncapping it and making it proportional would go a long way.
Same here, and I am hoping that as battery density increases I may be able to extend the range on mine when the car gets old enough for a rebuild.
Finally got around to backing up my over 200 audiobooks in a DRM-free format after this post reminded me it was on my to-do list. Libation is pretty damn good.
She committed the cardinal sin: stealing from the establishment. Steal from the working class with predatory financial practices and fees for being poor and they are fine with it; the powers that be have been trying to steal the working and middle class out of existence for years. But she stole from other companies, stupid lady. After a few handfuls of stores they won't stand for it.
Just designate the area as an "open air campus" and then you're good to go.
That is because the "well regulated militia" part is neither the subject of the sentence, nor a qualifier for the rest of the sentence. It's pretty straight forward English sentence structure. It explains a primary reason why the individual right to keep and bear arms "shall not be infringed" is important, and like a comment line in computer code it doesn't "do" anything to the rest of the program.
The federalist papers and the militia acts back up that "originalist" interpretation.
Librewolf didn't take as much adjustment as I would have expected, and it even supports toning down specific security postures for QoL niceties like Firefox account sync. Made the switch just to try it out and haven't gone back. Excited to see what people come up with for more forks/hard forks in the future.
Sounds like someone has DNACenter with fully deployed ISE and SDN fabric. I'm honestly a little jealous.
In my case I live in a place where cities are spread out and where it gets cold in the winter. My parents live 40 mile away and don't have an EV charger or a 220v outlet in their garage. Take 10% max range off in the winter, and I would have to use the only charging station (Tesla supercharger) or spend at least 6 hours charging at their house to be comfortable getting home in case of extra traffic or detours. I semi regularly drive even further, 80-100 miles one way. I'd have to stop to charge on my way there and on my way back in the winter, adding at least 30 minutes to an already 2 hour drive. There is also poor charging density on the route, so it has to be planned.
I drive a plug in hybrid now, and can get to work and home on battery only, but only in the summer and no extra stops or alternate routes are possible. People start getting antsy under a 1/4-1/8th tank of gas, it's worse with battery. Add to that I am able to charge at home, if you have to go visit a charging station because you live in a ln apartment or townhouse without garage space, you need at least 5 days of charge range between fill ups, because most everyone isn't going to want to add a 30 minute stop to charge daily.
Little problems here and there for me personally, but the deal breaker for me is that over/under monitor configuration is impossible because Microsoft insists that the taskbar must be locked in the same place on all monitors and it cannot be placed at the top of the display. If they want to force lockdown to iOS levels of "customization" because I apparently cannot be trusted to organize my own desktop, they can fuck right off.
Yeah, and give it another 100 years or so, a veritable eye blink in the timeline discussed, and meat will be lab grown or replaced with something else. Essentially complaining that civilization is taking more than a generation or two to advance in specific places is mildly mind boggling, because civilization almost never moves that fast. Not everything moves at the speed of the development of powered flight, and meat has an unfathomable level of inertia being on the base of the hierarchy of needs.
I sure would, and that is what I'd argue for. I'd love it if both sides would agree to revert to the '67 borders, or even draw up and negotiate new borders if that is required at this point. Both sides have equal "claim" to the area, and this is a needless pseudo-civil war. Without the US and Israel's surrounding Arab neighbors pouring money and ideology into it, the original '48 plan may have settled into a workable 2 state solution, but who really knows.
I also know that I have no skin in the game on either side, and honestly my opinion doesn't matter beyond the fact that the US is allies with Israel as a democracy in the middle east that they can leverage towards favorable geopolitical stability, and which I have little power to effect. I just wanted to ask about what appeared to be dishonest propaganda that tries to conflate Israel with foreign colonizers like England, Portugal, Spain, etc, and erase pretty solidly agreed upon paleo and anthropology. We shouldn't whitewash in either direction.
Both the Federalist papers, the militia acts, and current government code confirm that everyone not part of the standing military or national guard as the militia. The militia doesn't get free guns, they were expected to bring their own privately owned guns and ammunition when called upon. I would not mind free guns though.
Training should be part of the public education system, but gun/hunters safety and shooting sports have been removed because it's not kosher to expose kids/teens to guns. Due to the prevalence of guns in the US it just makes sense, because treating guns like abstinence only sex ed will have the same shitty results.
The "buy it at Walmart and figure it out" is because you can't lock rights behind hoops to jump through, so adopting a Swiss model and making fun education/training part of compulsory education is definitely a good minimum.
I think some citation is necessary for the assertion that the Jewish people were not historically from the Levant region, and have no ancestoral "claims" in Jerusalem and the surrounding territory. I would love to see some anthropology studies or papers on the bronze age Israelites being proto-Asyrian or Persian and not one of the Canaanite tribes.
I'd also like to point out that basically every war ever has been and will probably be a land grab, wrapped up in some rationalized or causative skin. That stretch of land in particular has been conquered over and over again throughout human history, and the inhabitants forcibly immigrated and emigrated during many of these changes of power. Mesopotamia has been birthing empires since humans discovered it and it became a cradle of human civilization.
It's easier to dehumanize and homogenize the opposition than view them as people with real convictions. It happens on both sides, and it's getting worse and worse as the polarization increases. Driven by the media and the 24 hour news cycle, capitalized on by the DNC and RNC, and keeping everyone fighting amongst ourselves instead of looking too closely at the accelerating wealth gap and banding together by class to restore healthy and competitive capitalism.
Technically you are falling for the positive stereotype fallacy, like saying Asians are good at math or the endowment of black males doesn't count as prejudice because those are "good things". Same boat as the Model Minority myth for East Asians.
People from those cultures may lean into those positive stereotypes or be less bothered by them, but they are still a prejudice. They also make it a little easier for less positive stereotypes to be believed by less educated or less tolerant people.
That said, as an Italian American you can pry my cooking stereotypes from my cold dead hands.
Minor correction: the Senate is 2 per state, so Wyoming's 1 state has the same representation as California's 1 state. The Senate is (supposed to be) the voice of the States in the Federal Government. The Senate wasn't even supposed to be elected by popular vote, they were appointed/elected by their state governments until the 17th amendment. The change made senators into super-representatives, which changed power dynamics. Arguments can be made here for whether this was ultimately better or worse.
The House of Representatives IS the voice of the people, and should be proportional to population size (but was artificially capped because the Feds complained it was getting too big so now Wyoming has more representational power per person than California). This needs to change because it's only going to get worse going forward.
With this breakdown, the Federal Government's interests, State's interests, and the People's interests balance each other. These three bodies have vastly different focuses.
Nah, he doth protest too much. I don't expect women are appearing in his "fantasies". Definitely finding Christmas presents if you catch my drift.
Cable TV started out as "pay for your access and you won't get ads". It enshitified into its current state, and streaming is literally a rerun. Give it a few more years and you will have price bundles for streaming services where you have to pay for peacock to get Disney. They might even bundle it with ISP services.
The Virtual Boy was released in 1995. It wasn't wildly successful, but was roughly the start of home VR gaming. There were many VR arcade games and attractions after that in the intervening years until the Oculus DK1 and "modern" VR in 2010. That's ignoring the really early VR stuff in the 70s and 80s. Just because we have had major breakthroughs in the last 14 years with consumer cost doesn't mean time starts there.
Palmer Luckey didn't invent VR at 16 in his garage out of whole cloth without the decades of tangible growth and development done in the prior 2-3 decades. His breakthroughs in latency paved the way for the the current renaissance in consumer home VR, not minimizing his contributions, but VR didn't start with him, nor Valve, nor HTC.
You are correct, as quality of life increases overall fertility rates decrease. That does need to be solved, and immigration is part of that solution. Unlimited/unregulated immigration is not.
Difficulty with legal immigration is generally the case for almost every first world country, the US is not abnormal or exclusive there. I do not meet qualifications to immigrate to Canada, or anywhere in Europe right now even as a tech sector worker, except possibly by having family history through my ancestors. I am not arguing that US immigration policy needs a lot of work, but it's not fair how much the US gets singled out for it as if it's the outlier here.
It only needs to be solved if the country is going to survive, so if that doesn't matter then it doesn't. There will be knock on results from that, because countries usually fall a grade or two when they fail, and with decreased affluence the number of children will increase again.
The reality is that if you do not have at least a replacement rate, retirement and social safety nets will fail as they become overwhelmed which leads to social unrest and upheaval. Immigration can help, but this comes with its own trade-offs. 8 billion people is also nowhere near an overstressor for the planet if fossil fuels and pollutants can be curbed, and even dropping the numbers of humans substantially will not help with unfettered greed continues to drive dirty industrialization
Game Theory is a hard mathematics concept and not an applied scientific theory, so you're in the ballpark but slightly adjacent. The fact that so many people can graduate high school without the basic understanding of the scientific method and the differences between a hypothesis, a theory, and a scientific law is concerning, I grant you that, but the number of graduates who can't read proficiently is even more concerning.
MatPat may not have been a Mr Wizard, Beakman, or Bill Nye, but he was not the worst Pop-science entertainment platform out there. Just like comic books didn't corrupt the youth and kill reading for the generations since the Golden Age, I doubt the Game Theorists did much harm to the public's knowledge of science. It is not the job of YouTube entertainers or ticktockers to teach science, and if a few people become interested in science because of channels or programs like these and go on to learn more or focus in STEM in school, then I think that's probably a net positive.
That's a damn good point. Also throw in 2A rights and I think you have the right mix. Someone who is genuinely "fiscally conservative" as in desiring a close the balanced budget, believes that 2A is just as important and deserving of defending as 1A and 4A (the main ones everyone knows), and who believes in plenty of legal immigration but thinks national borders are required to have a nation is basically in no man's land.
The Republican party pays lip service to those and other "Conservative" ideals, but by actions has abandoned them and are the furthest down the oligarch rabbit hole. The Democrats by action actually tend to do more of these traditionally Conservative things in modern times, but pay lip service to the opposite (gun control, open borders, etc) because many of the the actual far leftists remained more attached to the party instead of splintering off like the Sov Cits and various flavors of libertarians did from the conservative side.
Since we have a first past the post voting system and thus only 2 viable parties, those "conservative at heart" folks know they are getting grifted by the Republicans, but feel slightly more aligned with Republicans than with Democrats because they feel there is no actual place for them.
The "Liberal at heart" have a similar problem because the Old Guard corporatist Democrats are also in the Oligarch rabbit hole, just not as deep in many cases. That's why we get lip service about legalizing marijuana, decriminalization, debt relief, etc, but see very little actual or sustainable progress.
Very interested to see what happens whenever the government drops below an average age of 65. Maybe under millennial and Zoomer majorities we can get graduated voting methods and multiple viable parties.
Until 75% of the country agrees with you that they don't want or need the right to bear arms, everything listed after step 1 is unconstitutional. The reason being that you cannot add cost or hoops to jump through to exercise rights. Test all of these with any other right and see how fucked up it is. The following should be taken slightly tongue in cheek, but illustrating the difference in treatment people have with the second clear through absurdity.
Step 1: Offer major tax incentives to not vote or wave your right to searches and seizures. Skip the presidential election? $2000 tax write off. Allow the police to search your home and vehicle at any time they want? $5000 tax write off.
Step 2: You have to have a state issued ID for services. Could we charge a license fee to access the polls, or perform any sort of protest action? Want to vote? $200 for your voter ID stamp that lasts 4 years. Want to join a protest or picket? The police might need to keep the peace. $50 per protest.
Step 2b: Along with these fees, before you can vote you need to attend an extensive class on the people and issues on the ballot, run by either the DNC or RNC based on if your state is red or blue (or whomever paid the most for the position). If you want to post politically inclined statements in print or electronically, you need to attend journalism training on safe words and opinions. Understand that if you hurt or offended someone with statements you made, you are legally responsible for that distress.
Step 2c: After initial voter education training, journalism training, and jury process training, you must attend at least biannual refresher courses to ensure you are educated on the recommended politicians and proposed laws, changes in acceptable speech and societal norms, and how to be a good juror to retain the right to a free jury. These can be fun. A get together of all your fellow citizens as you are reeducated on how the government wants you to use your rights.
This might not prevent people from voting for the wrong candidates and laws, but the remaining model citizens will keep the discord in society down. China has a vastly higher number of citizens than the US, but doesn't have all of the political instability and fighting. I think the difference is the mandatory citizen training and reeducation camps.
The US is far more like the EU than it is like Britain or Canada, being a Republic of aligned States. We have a body representing the states themselves (the Senate, and each state is equal and gets 2 Senators), a body representing the People in those states (the House of Representatives, which has been capped for total size and is no longer equally proportional but serves the same purpose), and a body representing the entire Union (the Executive branch - the President, Vice President, Cabinet, etc.).