EldritchFemininity

Honestly, the issue is deeper than that. Your government has been fighting a war on science and reason almost as long as ours has. Politicians and CEOs in your country have been hungrily watching what politicians allow them to get away with in our country for over half a century. It’s why they keep pushing for privatized healthcare for you and countries like the UK. The one that I’ll never forget was around 2010 when a conservative administration came into power and immediately shut down a multi-year study on UBI halfway through and then sealed the reports because it showed that all the things that they lie about are false. The only 2 groups to drop out of the workforce were pregnant women and students, graduation rates increased, as did college admission applications, and the economy in the area where the study took place saw a general boom as people were willing to spend more money. And all of that was on maybe a $1,500 a month UBI if I remember right.

I always love the duality of comments on this topic. America’s military is a Schrodinger’s Military at this point, both terrifying and completely non-existent basically depending on what time of day the conversation happens at.

Canadians can’t help because the military is so powerful (completely obvious and understandable) but also, like somebody up above said, “Americans are feckless sheep” for not shooting up the White House yet.

Everybody’s a hero until it’s their life on the line.

No no no, you’ve got it backwards. It’s .ml users who’d get mad at you for comparing China and the US. “It’s a false equivalency!”

Like I had happen to me just the other day when I compared the US regime’s invasion to the invasion of Ukraine and the lack of any real response from world leaders.

Agreed, and I vaguely remembered something along these lines from my time cooking them, but I also know how many that I was cooking in a day as just a small scale operation at a local fish market cooking and shucking for lobster meat and cooking for the occasional customer to take home with them (I think the most we did in a day was close to one metric ton), and how unfeasible it is to do on a large scale.

I was doing 50 lbs at a time per pot, with 2 large stovetop pots at a time. That’s 25+ lobsters per pot, averaging probably about 60 lobsters per hour that I was cooking by myself. Imagining trying to do that at an industrial scale sounds like the kind of thing that would effectively kill lobster meat as anything other than an expensive specialty item.

And although maybe it should kill mass market lobster meat (why in the hell does McDonald’s sell lobster rolls in the first place???), I also have a visceral gut reaction to the idea of effectively making a food the exclusive domain of the rich. Especially when my boss at that job would make a big stink about people buying fish with Social Security money like poor people don’t deserve to eat anything other than rice and beans.

I feel like chilling them is even worse. They usually live in cold waters, and chilling them in cold air (like a fridge) will just mostly make them suffocate for a while before you boil them alive. They can live a long time out of the water in a cold environment/on ice (think 24 to 48 hours long, not 2 or 3) because it just slows down their biological processes since they’re cold blooded. They’re just going to warm up again as they’re boiling, and it will probably take longer to start boiling as they have to come back up from a lower temperature.

Even the shock method seems kinda useless. It would need to knock them out for about 20 minutes to ensure that they’re unconscious until they’re dead.

The most humane thing to do would be to kill them somehow in one moment, like with a concussive force or stabbing through the brain stem, but that then runs into the issue of how quickly dead lobsters go bad (also the issue of presentation - people don’t want a crushed lobster staring at them from their plate). It’s actually illegal in plenty of places to sell dead lobsters (or even cook them!) due to this, so they would have to be killed on site just before being cooked, which is a tall order when 1lb of lobster meat requires about 5lbs of lobster to make (roughly about a 20% yield on lobsters) and it takes about 5 years for a lobster to reach 1lb in size (and then about 2 years for every pound after that).

All of this said, it’s all still probably more humane than that one company I used to work with back when I was in this kind of industry that was experimenting with getting raw lobster meat out of lobsters by tossing them into a pressure vessel.

I somehow managed to delete my long-winded reply while I was typing it, so I’m gonna try to condense it down into something semi coherent.

In short, it’s not the anonymity that I’m arguing for (though I think there’s a very important debate to be had about the erosion of privacy through removing anonymity on the net), but the strengths of social platforms on the internet that are being abused by bots and AI slop. I think that a blanket ban is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We need to regulate the bad actors somehow and moderate the amount of social media that kids use, but to effectively ban kids from being able to interact with people outside of their local communities is a bad precedent.

The big strength of the internet (and why it’s so important in empowering oppressed groups like the queer community) is in the ability to connect people and rapidly spread information regardless of distance. They want to take over TikTok because it’s been credited as a major platform in dispelling the Israeli funded myths about the genocide of the Palestinians. Protests of college students broke out on campuses all over the US over colleges getting funding from Israel and the production and sale of weaponry. That didn’t just appear out of nowhere, that information was spread through social media in real time. You can’t get that from a book at the local library (you should still support your local library though, they do so much for a community beyond being a source of knowledge). But this rapid spread of information is exactly what makes the AI slop and all the other garbage (ads, misinformation, the list goes on and on) such a problem, because the bad stuff makes money for the big corporations who run the social media platforms we use. But that doesn’t mean we should ban a tool because people use it maliciously or excessively to the point of harm. Nobody is calling for a ban on TV for kids under 16 despite it having a negative effect on our attention span and being filled with channels like Fox News.

Plus, I am always wary of these “protect the children” campaigns because they are often a false flag to actually restrict minorities’ rights - often queer people. You see this most prominently with porn bans, but stuff like this that allows a government/group to better censor information and control the narrative come up time and time again. There was an attempt not long ago to get rid of Massachusetts’ multi-grade standardized test program called the MCAS. Standardized testing has its issues, but the groups pushing for the removal had no plans to replace it with any form of statewide teaching standards or anything, they just wanted to be able to teach kids that evolution is fake and gay kids go to Hell.

Also, I work with teenagers. They can’t read. Every year standardized tests get easier. The average ACT score in Florida is now 18. That’s almost the same as answering at random, and these kids pay for the exam in an effort to go to college.

I hate to tell you this, but I think this is a Florida issue. Florida is one of the worst states in a country that has been fighting against intelligence for decades now. Boomers but proudly illiterate is exactly what those in power - especially people like DeSantis - want. But the same internet that allows this to happen can also be used to give these kids a better chance. I go on YouTube and see videos of people making a fully working jet engine out of a can of Coke or a hobbyist launching a 3d printed rocket that breaks the sound barrier. I see kids learning about orbital mechanics and reentry heating through Kerbal Space Program and simple circuitry through Red Stone Minecraft tutorials. I see trans elders supporting trans kids who may otherwise never make it to adulthood - sometimes even to the point of telling them their legal rights and helping them get out of abusive households. I see up to the minute medical research news coming from furries who worked on the COVID vaccines on Bluesky. I see so much art, music, and support for passion projects that introduce people to interests that they never knew they had. And I would never want to take all that from kids.

I would argue that the internet has died partly as a result of removing anonymity from the internet, not because of it. The massive centralization of the internet into corporate walled gardens where they can control the narrative is what made your criticisms possible. The early internet was a wild west where you could find anything and everything, for better and worse.

The big issue I have with this is that it isolates queer kids from any sense of community. Trans kids can’t avoid permanent damage from the wrong puberty if they don’t have access to the knowledge that they could be taking puberty blockers. Without access to that community, I didn’t even learn that trans people existed and I could put a word to that existential distress until I was in college.

So send their location then, since sounds have to be played from the player’s location in order to project from the right spot.

People think this is a crazy complaint because the controller has an estimated battery life of something like 30 hours and a wireless charger included. So as long as you remember to put it on the dock when you put the controller down once every couple of days, you shouldn’t have to worry about your battery’s charge.

I agree that being able to hot swap the battery would be nice, but this is closer to having to remember to charge your phone and being able to change the battery in a phone at all is a crazy concept in this day and age.

But if they’re not rendered, what about their sound effects like walking, or something like their bullets?

This is actually an issue in War Thunder, where if the server thinks you shouldn’t be able to see a tank, it won’t render it, but this also causes it fairly frequently to not play noises from the tank like the engine or shots, and to not render projectiles from them either. So a teammate can die right next to you and you won’t know how because the shot wasn’t rendered on your screen even though you were looking in the direction of the enemy when they fired it. Or a tank with an engine louder than a semi truck will sneak up and kill you because the game simply decided that you shouldn’t be able to hear them.

Important to note that the controller is designed to be serviceable and Valve is partnering with a company to provide replacement parts.

It sounds like it’ll be as hard to replace the battery as old smart phones were, which makes it very customer friendly.

I used my launch day PS4 controller up until last year without ever having to unlatch a cover or unscrew a screw. After more than a decade of use, I finally had to open the case and replace the USB port with a new board I bought for $2 by unscrewing and unplugging the old one and swapping it out with the new one.

Why are you acting like having to replace the battery is this super inconvenient thing that you’ll have to do frequently when the odds of having to do so more than once every 5-10 years is unlikely with proper care? I’d consider having to replace AA batteries more of a hassle than that. Especially if they go bad and leak all over the contacts or something. Crystalized battery acid is a pain in the ass to clean out.

The first thing I add after an ad blocker on a fresh Firefox install will always be Shinigami Eyes: a crowd-sourced system for marking transphobes and allies across the web.

https://hyperallergic.com/1038623/us-agencies-say-they-have-no-records-of-tourist-flagged-for-jd-vance-meme/

The public records request filed by Mikkelsen and his lawyer also alleged that Mikkelsen was detained for 18 hours, during which his repeated requests to contact the Norwegian consulate were denied in violation of diplomatic conventions. Mikkelsen also claimed he was threatened with imprisonment and fines if he did not turn over passwords to his device or sign certain documents.

Mikkelsen had planned a months-long trip to the US to visit friends and tour national parks with his mother, he told Hyperallergic in an interview after he returned to Norway in June. However, while passing through passport control at Newark, he was summoned into a room where he said ICE agents asked him if he planned to commit terrorism, belonged to any extremist groups, or was smuggling narcotics.

CBP officers then inspected Mikkelsen’s phone, according to his account of the events, where they found the viral meme of a bald JD Vance and photos of a pipe he said he made in trade school. Publicly, the DHS has stated that Mikkelsen was denied entry because he admitted to using marijuana, which he acknowledges having done twice in places where the substance is legal.

However, DHS’s public narrative does not match what Mikkelsen claims officers told him in the interrogation room, nor does it match documents from CBP reviewed by Hyperallergic.

Officers handed Mikkelsen a document known as an I-877, which is an official sworn report provided by DHS in instances where an individual is denied entry into the US. Mikkelsen’s I-877 states that he was denied entry because he appeared to be seeking illegal employment, which he denies.

Mikkelsen told Hyperallergic that during his interview, however, he remembers that he was told the JD Vance meme was “illegal” and “dangerous.”

Mikkelsen requested a copy of his I-877 in his FOIA request, which the agency claimed it had no record of.

“I’m disappointed in CBP and ICE for not being able to give me the documents that I have a copy of,” Mikkelsen told Hyperallergic. “If anything, it just looks like they are trying to hide something.”

Because it takes time to get a vehicle in the air to go after them, time in which the drones might be gone and all you have to go by is their last heading when they could’ve changed direction, split up, and traveled a hundred kilometers in different directions before heading for where they actually came from. All while you can’t follow them into somebody else’s air space because drones are too small to be picked up on standard radar but a helicopter or plane certainly aren’t, which means that it could look like you’re invading their air space. This also means that the drones could potentially have traveled through multiple countries undetected before arriving at their destination, so you can’t even assume that they came from those countries even if you do manage to track them to their air space.

Kirk certainly knows what it’s like when the blood’s pumping.

This is basically just the sanitized internet conflict again, only it’s the parents wanting to force adult-only spaces to disappear instead of advertisers. What’s next, banning gay and lesbian bars for not catering to straight people?

There’s another comment further up about a statistic showing that people who pirate content are more likely to spend more money on content as well compared to people who don’t pirate content. It seems that there’s a correlation between people who pirate things and people who care about the ethical treatment of creators. Stuff like people who pirate music from Spotify and then spend money to buy the music from the band on Bandcamp.

In that context, I have an even harder time caring about people pirating from the megacorps when they’re supporting creators at the same time. That’s closing in on Robin Hood style activities at that point.

Revelations 13: 16-17

And he causes all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free men and the slaves, to be given a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, and he provides that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name.

Don’t forget the flipping tables, beating bankers and money-lenders, and saying that rich people don’t go to Heaven.