It’s less than half, but ya pretty much

Even like ‘real’ dildo manufactures tend to claim the toy is for novelty use only and don’t recommend actually using the thing as an insertable object. Adult toys aren’t really regulated, because that would mean legitimizing them which is icky to the government. So they’ll never really be regulated for health and safety

The government has ceded the entirety of modern currency exchange to private companies, which is still crazy to me, but I honestly don’t see people even question it that often. As if it’s just a given that online purchases (the increasing majority of all economic activity) is subject purely to a ToS and not the laws and protections granted to us by the government.

Because the lefties are essentially a loose coalition of every marginally sane political view that remains, containing the actual fiscal conservatives, the center, the progressives and the far left all in a single party.

I think it’d be pretty tricky to get a fire going at that size and get the photo taken before the thin plastic of the tent melted or burst into flames. The tent in the picture is fine, which I honestly think would be impossible with that setup, even if you tried to be quick

I’d be impressed if someone was so busy they literally couldn’t decide if they were pro-racist or not pro-racist. Politics is no longer a complicated question of policy but a simple division of core ethical values in America.

Agreed.

‘undecided’ = “unsure if I give a fuck enough to go vote for my side”

This seems to have been true for awhile now. The two parties are so different, it’s hard to imagine anyone bouncing between the two as if they were close enough to compare.

Which is honestly why I find a lot of the democratic campaigning and rhetoric weird. It seems to still be trying to cater to a group I don’t think exists, instead of trying to excite their existing voter base enough into actually voting.

It’ll only be weak for the presidents they don’t like

Oh, I absolutely agree with you on the probable outcomes if America did implement structural changes these days. That has like a 1% chance of actually being something positive. I think perhaps the most recent, best possible time for significant reforms was somewhere between 1930-1990. It depends mostly on the specific kind of reform (basically whether or not women or minorities were relevant to the change, farther in the past would be worse outcomes for them).

But some things like campaign finance reform, how many seats there are in the House, Supreme Court Reform, etc could’ve been accomplished with a relatively high likelihood of positive outcomes.

Basically before the complete collapse of proper journalism, when broadcast media was still king and most politicians still tended to compromise and were at least mostly interested in actually governing. It feels like post 90s, our governing body has passed some sort of tipping point where the majority of members are simply gaming the system, obstructing others from actually doing anything and shooting down any and all reasonable compromises. The actual productivity of Congress seems to be in total free fall. Bad actors pretty much always existed, but they only became a crippling number somewhat recently. (Or at least this seems true for the last 100 years, I have no idea if Congress was this dysfunctional in the early 1800s or something)

I’m not sure if anyone could conclusively declare a certain country’s democracy is totally better than ours, but several more recently created democracies have avoided many of the pitfalls that have been discovered with American implementation. Things like mandatory voting, ranked choice voting, better and stronger rules around money and political campaigns, more comprehensive list of citizen rights, etc. Most of those countries have their own missteps as well, but a lot of our issues have been solved, we just haven’t adopted the methods and improvements already shown to work. Typically because they’d require pretty extensive reform, which is incredibly hard to achieve with our government especially in the current political climate.

I’ve often thought that America suffers from being the first successful iteration of our style of government. It was great and a huge improvement over all the other examples at the time. So much so that much of the world eventually followed in its footsteps.

But where other countries looked at our first successful attempt and further improved and refined the idea, we’re still stuck on that very first version. What was once a radically new idea that worked so much better than everyone else, is now an old, outdated and barely functional relic. We’re the early prototype iPhone 3g, while several other countries have iPhone 6/10/etc

The problem with humans reviewing AI output is that humans are pretty shit at QA. Our brains are literally built to ignore small mistakes. Digging through the output of an AI that’s right 95% of the time is nightmare fuel for human brains. If your task needs more accuracy, it’s probably better to just have the human do it all, rather than try to review it.

You’re expected to go to prison where they can legally use you for slave labor

Am I crazy or does that not even sound like much? I’m not even sure if I’d notice 7 million immigrants coming into the country, at least if they were relatively spread out. The US is big and we already have lots of different types of people.

I realize gaming on Linux is already very doable (I have a steam deck), but for me specifically, I need the majority of the mod developers to have shifted over to Linux gaming before I can switch. I primarily play games that tend to be heavily modded and it’s really common to need to run some sort of 3rd party tool to mod. One that is often not Linux compatible. I realize there are utilities that can sometimes help with this, but between extremely spotty mod documentation and my own lack of familiarity with Linux, that kind a tricky ask for me to accomplish. I’ve pretty much given up on playing modded games on my steam deck for now. I hope someday most of the gaming world will switch, but until then I feel somewhat chained to Windows if I want to enjoy my hobby.

It’s kind of crazy to me that their AI product is already 50% of the revenue of their OS product. The thing that a stupidly high amount of computers require to even function for most people.

It’s kind of curious to me about search because honestly my Internet world has only grown smaller and smaller. Where I used to use Google to find new websites, I feel like most of my searches on Google are now to search a handful of sites I already know. Ironically if Reddit had a better search function, a lot of my Google usage would fall off as I’d just go directly there, as it’s still the best place I’ve found for troubleshooting support and real reviews of lots of products. A competitor to Google wouldn’t really need to index the entire web for most people, but rather a relatively small number of website super giants like Amazon, Reddit, Wikipedia, etc.

I’m not sure there could be any sort of legitimate threat to them, but I could definitely see a Netflix situation playing out. That is a popular upstart temporarily seems poised to take over, but then suffers from extreme levels of interference from bigger players who artificially hold the upstart down while they desperately catch up and then ultimately come at least equal while the Netflix equivalent is mostly a shell of what it could’ve been.

Never underestimate how much buckets and buckets of cash reserves can overcome even incredibly out of touch laziness when it comes to competing with any start ups. Apple in particular could probably afford to let competitors get a decade ahead and still be able to come back based on the ridiculous amount of cash they have to float their business along with.

Yes, which is why I specifically said I support libraries and want them to be available to those of use.

Which is why I said I support them and want them to be available to others?