It looks like the transfer rate of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway is back on the menu, boys!

Your accurate yet unavoidably incomplete list made me reflect on how much the term "pro-life" is inaccurate while also being propaganda spin bullshit. It is literally the term for a policy of the death cult wing of american politics. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but god damn.

I am a nature lover and animal lover. I come from a conservative redneck-ish family and one very strong correlation throughout my life has been that the more conservative somebody is, the more likely they are to openly brag about how much they would NOT spend money to help their own pets. Or even about how they would shoot them (usually a dog) if they ever did X.

But that is part of a much larger package deal where those people define themselves by the things they hate and activities they avoid.

At this point in time I care way more about Valve's investment in Linux gaming than I do about Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo working on their next closed proprietary PC with custom controllers.

You MUST let me tell everybody when he's the size of a bald eagle!

RedTailedHawkSCREEEEEEEeeeee

I read that with a positive connotation, at least towards her.

That is, the virtue candidate is the most virtuous one. The best person. The one the world needs. The one you choose when you don't want to game theory your way into your vote.

But they are not the person the world WANTS, presumably.

The negativity is cast more on the person choosing AOC, the way I initially read it. By choosing the virtue candidate, they are virtue signaling their purity of leftness or whatever. They refuse to compromise and join a coalition behind somebody electable. (again, I'm just discussing the term reflecting more positively on her in my interpretation -- I am NOT arguing that she is in fact a virtue cabdidate or unelectable. )

Holy shit, this is my son in a couple of decades!

We are an animal-loving family. We have a tortoise. We go it when he was 3.

It's a species that gets big too. Sulcata, aka African Spurred Tortoise. In 6 years he's gone from the size of a chicken nugget to the size of a thanksgiving turkey. Or a Halloween pumpkin, perhaps.

When he's 30 I hope to be able to offer him "appy bites" and think of the fediverse as he low-key scampers over. I could take a bite myself then let him chomp on the whole damn apple!

He really likes his greens though. Like a little armored cow. Except for bright yellow dandelion blossoms. Holy shit those are his jam!

In a country that has been building its infrastructure around personal automobiles for decades, we cannot make that necessary function of daily life be an automatic consent to targeted analysis.

I get that cameras pointed at intersections and highways are here to stay. That means there will be records of what happens in public places that can be analyzed for a certain person's movements once there's a warrant.

That's the whole fucking point of warrants and 4th amendment protections. Just because the technical ability exists to analyze somebody's Personally Indentifiable Information doesn't mean you just get to do it. Just like you don't get to listen to any phone call you want, or plant bugs and trackers on everybody you are curious. (A group of three-letter agencies enters the chat, lol)

I think it’s just the economics of it, as it almost always is.

Solar panels have been dropping logarithmically in price for 50 years. Battery improvements don’t hurt either.

I am a fan of nuclear energy, but its cost has not done anything like that. It would be a good thing for us to develop cheaper fission and build more reactors. I know there are companies trying to bring it back, at least.

I was a teenager in the 90s, so my brain would surely love it, but I am still in the "make it like this yourself now, because that's what I am doing" camp.

I like having a huge OLED TV and a Jellyfin server running on a PC with several processor cores, TBs of storage, GBs of RAM, and MBs of processor cache. I like that I can GPS navigate, take a video, text my family, or look up any information on earth on a whim thanks to the phone in my pocket.

But I also actively avoid a lot of my technology for much of the day. When I am home, I often don't have my phone on me and I spend a lot of time working on things outside. It's not unlike playing in the creek or in the woods in the 90s.

We all know that the key is often moderation with these things. Simple sayings like that often have profound truth behind them, after all. The problem is that some of the richest people and richest corporations on the planet have poured an unfathomable amount of resources into turning our technological advancements into addictive products designed to engage and retain attention.

You can have the same kind of existence, but now you have to intentionally pursue it and put effort into it. You can't just passively exist in that world like we remember doing.

The bible lays out rules for both slavery and abortion. Truly a manual for life.

Yeah, you can philosophically argue that we don't "really" know anything you choose, since there is no way to prove with 100% certainty that the reader isn't a brain in a jar or in the matrix or an actual simulation.

But for practical conversations about the real world, fuckin c'mon. The actual president of the actual country I live in is one of the most "accomplished" famous rapists on the planet. And if he isn't, then he is the subject matter of the greatest psyop in human history.

American here, and while somebody could righteously and pointlessly make a "not all americans" argument, you are spot on about the culture as a whole.

The rape history is valid but even that is a subset of the larger cultural issue where helping others is seen as weak and for suckers, while shameless greed and punching down are what the smart and the strong do. Look at none other than the president. He's a rapist and a scammer, sure, but he also brags about how he doesn't pay taxes because he's smart and his supporters eat it up.