Idk the Republicans seem to really want fascism.

I don’t think that argument makes a lot of sense. If sexual deviance was seen as a primary definition for strength then gay people would be seen as a strong group to be emulated. It seems far more likely that it’s simple in groups vs out groups and the traditional rules for thee but not for me playing out. And certain kinds of sexual deviance is an easy way to define an out group.

Along perhaps with projection based on priests continually being proven to be the exact sort of homosexual groomer pedophiles they claim to be most afraid of. Something like “if our ‘influencers’ are this bad, the other sides influencers must be worse”.

Do we have a original textualist group in Wisconsin? Otherwise I have trouble thinking a governor would expect this to actually fly. Is this a contrived case to get this potential loophole to court to close it? Or am I too optimistic about governer thought processes?

I think it’s more the cloud being the issue here. Such an obvious and large and valuable target. Of course Microsoft also isn’t that secure historically.

If youtu.be premium is actually ad free (and I can still run sponsor block) I can see paying for it. I get a lot of value out of it and can’t really justify doing a lot of work to avoid paying.

Usenet is hurt a lot by takedown notices unfortunately. So lots of older popular stuff doesn’t work. That said, things like Anime or something that isn’t given a takedown seem to be on there about forever. The server speed is a benefit for sure.

Just wait for an Islamic group to sue then. Or wait for Scientology to decide they don’t want to be a second tier religion and start suing.

Or an atheist group maybe. Idk there’s enough competition in religious zealots to make picking a favorite hard to do unless they just throw out the 1st ammendment prohibitions.

It’s fascinating how normies will figure out a VPN to use shitty social media but not figure out more open systems or alternative sites.

Windows post 7 was and remains annoying and getting worse all the time. So I wanted an OS without telemetry and one that I could control the updates on. I also work with Linux a lot at work. I use Alma 9 for a LTS release. Don’t have to mess with it much.

I have found that you usually have to go to a specialist forum or the like and spend a few months reading it and asking questions etc. Rarely has a community steered me wrong. However they also usually point to expensive or specialty products. Mass market is usually mediocre at best.

Sometimes though there are deals like Harbor Freight hand tools or their higher end power tools.

It’s also the anti commodity stuff IP has been allowing. If Hershey makes crap chocolate, there is little stopping you from buying Lidnt say. But if Microsoft makes a bad OS, there’s a lot stopping you from using Linux or whatever.

What’s worse is stuff like DRM and computers getting into equipment that otherwise you could use any of a bevy of products for. Think ink cartridges.

Then there’s the secret formulas like for transmission fluid now where say Honda says in the manual you have to get Honda fluid for it to keep working. Idk if it’s actually true, but I l’m loathe to do the 8k USD experiment with my transmission.

You’d think the government could mandate standards but we don’t have stuff like that.

I am in NY upstate but travel around the east coast semi frequently, and was kinda thinking about online options too.

This seems like something the optimize charging tool could manage though. Starting the day at 90 percent or 80 percent or whatever is crazy to me - why am I going backwards to needing to babysit my phone when it’s charging, and why would anyone want to charge their phone when they want to be using it vs when they’re asleep?

That seems a strange definition to me - so if a boxer gets back up after losing the match, well his opponent didn’t beat him in that fight?

I hear this a lot, but what would beating the Taliban involve? While the US was there, the Taliban was at best in hiding, it was not holding territory. If you mean removing the very idea of the Taliban from the world? That is both hard to do and arguably also a genocide, at least a cultural one. The US has been good at that, but it’s also frowned on in the current world - see Gaza headlines.

This is also why I’d suggest it’s kind of impossible to both not be the worst of the colonialist systems and stop terrorism (and it’s kind of unclear that even the colonial cultural suppression / conversion / excesses / crimes actually would stop terrorism).

The way they’re doing it probably not. But the other extreme of rotating door arrest - release - arrest - release for basically all crimes like my local city has taken doesn’t seem to be working well either.

Gaming - too much hassle for me, and I just wasn’t even using my PS4 much. I don’t know if I’d call it outgrowing it exactly though… this one is borderline to me.

What I have outgrown is cable news like CNN etc. Or they went way to clickbait for me. Maybe both happened. Similar with the NYT, they keep getting things wrong that they just shouldn’t and then the more history I read the less I really trust their reporting. The more boring the news source, like AP, the more likely it is to be accurate from what I can tell.

Similar things happened with certain influencers / podcasters. As I learned more I just found they were continually making the same mistakes on things that they should have known better / learned better by now. Sam Harris was a big one, and I narrowly avoided the beginnings of Brett Weinsteins Dark Horse and now it’s completely off the rails.

Certain “nonfiction” authors followed the same path - as I got older I realized how made up the Ancient Aliens thing was, I think I bought in hard in my late teen years and then when I was 25 I had an epiphany that it just has to be crap or more people would believe it, and when I re looked at the “evidence” I was like - oh, well if you just go by the book, sure it sounds compelling - but if you search alternative explanations all of a sudden you’re like, oh yea, that is far more plausible.

Consumer Reports happened about a decade ago. The reason was I always was a little annoyed by their biases that they didn’t really make clear. What really killed it for me though was comparing laptops primarily on screen size. Looking back now, it’s a little less ridiculous than I initially thought, but to not have separate Mac and Windows categories let to the Mac winning over the windows competitor when the Mac was like 3x the price. This all seemed like a crazy result to anyone who knew anything about computers, especially like in 2014 when for something like 95% of the population, the Mac would not run 99% of the software they could possibly want to run, or know about. A great build quality, performance and size doesn’t matter if the computer doesn’t do the computation you need.

In the last 3 years non anime TV shows - mostly because of a mix of already been done better, no FOMO with streaming, and because of all the channels etc no water cooler talk about the 3 shows that were on last night / this week / whatever dragging me to be up to date. Now that there’s so many choices, I don’t have to take “mildly entertaining” as my bar for watching a show, it’s way way higher now. And as the individual shows get longer on streaming for many - it’s harder to set aside 55-90 minutes depending on show. Even 42 minutes is harder as more is going on now for me. I think the only reason I do more Anime is it’s ~20 minute chunks, and I have less experience with it (for half my life I didn’t know it existed, and for the next quarter it was kind of hard to come by) so I am just starting to get more picky about the shows and the “this was done better before”. Konosuba for instance is IMHO a worse version of Slayers series in a lot of ways.

Magazines - I just got tired of both trying to keep up, the rising costs, and then the increase in ads so there was so little there there, along with what to do when I was done with the weeks / months issue? I get a lot of that kind of content now from online anyway.

Physical books - similar. Unless I want to get a collectors edition for the object, the content is much better as an e-book IMO, cheaper, less paper waste, less piles of stuff taking up space etc. I’ve really come back around on the novel contents though - lots of bang for you buck in time vs dollar spent, way more variety in stories than ever get made into TV shows, can be stored locally easily on the device so you’re not burning data like with streaming… Easy to keep place with a decent app, easy to read for 3 minutes or 3 hours.

After the shit show that was polling with 2016, I seriously doubt any polls get much valid data now. Or that it holds long enough to change anything. The crazy way our system is set up, there’s like IDK, maybe 100,000 people who basically vote randomly each election that makes the difference. In 2024 I have to think if in March you’re still voting Trump, he could probably show up, rape your wife and daughter and you’d still think come November, better than Biden.

On the Democratic side, I can’t actually think what policy position would make you think Trump would get you closer to your desired goals. I know the media doesn’t like to talk about it, but it’s not like Trump is any more with it. At least Biden is getting confused between 2 ongoing crisis that exist while Trump is randomly talking about magnets and water. You can’t convince me one is sharper than the other or in better health, or more likely to live out a 4 year term.

It’s more about who’s actually showing up to vote, and in that case I think Biden has the uphill battle because for reasons that escape me, Trump gets people more excited.

Common industry trope - same with climate change EVs vs industrial processes. We keep asking 7.9 billion people to attack the 5% or less left of an issue that maybe they with full collective action could dent, while just pretending that nothing can be done by the IDK 100,000 people running the industrial processes responsible for like 70% of the problem.

I swear, it’s the latte / avocado toast financial advice. Yes, if I drop $100-$200 a month habit it’ll make up for the $4,000 a month unsustainable living expenses.

If I thought he’d do it, John Stewart would be amazing. I think he might be the only potential chance, but he also (for some reason) isn’t interested in actually running. I’d be really surprised if people hadn’t approached him before and after 2016. And heck, Regan was a movie personality!

And I’d think he’d turn the Trump playbook back on Trump. Could you imagine John Stewart debating Trump? That’s appointment TV right there, and Stewart would mop the floor with Trump in 2024. He destroyed Tucker back in 04 on Crossfire, and Tucker’s a way better orator and presents way smarter than Trump ever has.

Stewart is a lock for any liberal millennial, we grew up with him during Bush. He’d get the 30-40 year olds excited again like Obama did in 08.

Too bad he wouldn’t run - but also there’s just no way to insert him cause primaries have started.