It seems to me that they can be stretched just shy of infinitely, because sources aren’t reliable and people aren’t paying attention. That is, when a source reports on what’s happening with as little bias and editorializing as humanly possible, it is labeled as “left bias” while the conservative news sources don’t bother talking about the problems with ICE at all. As long as that’s the case, they can basically get away with anything because their human rights abuses won’t get enough coverage or will be dismissed by enough of the population that it won’t actually have an impact.

I don’t recall any rights about not having my memory wiped. Wait a sec…

I think I misunderstood what you were originally saying and we’re more or less on the same side. My point was that it’s not about saying “okay we’ll stop caring about this” but about saying “this isn’t the thing we need to be focusing attention on right now.” I worded it very poorly.

I get what you’re saying, but every rights movement has worked the opposite way. It’s not about giving up ground, it’s about picking one battle at a time. Gay people fought to be not killed, then fought to be accepted, then fought to be able to marry. It wasn’t a single “equality” battle, it was a series of battles in a longer war. They didn’t slide back immediately when they couldn’t get married, they fought the next fight.

Some people really suck, but for a lot I think it’s more misunderstanding or reluctance to let things change. There’s many reasons. Labeling everyone who doesn’t get on board with every facet of what you want means you’re reducing your allies. And those people who are comfortable with one thing but uncomfortable with another may become more comfortable when they see that the first thing doesn’t lead to the collapse of society.

Sorry, I did not mean to imply that the US doesn’t have bidets. My point was that I would like to leave the US, but having easy access to a bidet is a necessity for me when choosing the destination country.

I’ll do a swap for free for, if I’m being honest with myself, any country that you can buy a bidet in.

Technically, you can already give power of attorney to others, or live with as many people as you want. You can grant access to your bank account to as many people as the bank will let you. I think the main thing you can’t reproduce is a tax benefit, basically.

I am not trying to brake check people and get in an accident but I would very much like a signal for “Please remove your car from my butthole, it’s getting uncomfortable.”

Nah, 20s me was the best time to get into the show. 30s me is stressed, has no time, has developed anxiety, spends a lot of time exercising not because it feels good but because apparently my cholesterol is high now, and the show is mostly focused on the kids which is usually a sign that the plot quality has gone down.

Maybe as a punishment. It wouldn’t solve the problem in the correct way unless the taxes were MORE than the cost of paying a livable wage. Because the taxes would, at best and very optimistically, go towards programs that then give out money but only for very specific things like Medicaid or SNAP. It would be better for everyone if those employees just got the money as cash to use as they see fit rather than as a benefit that has to be used on certain kinds of food.

In case you’re curious why they might hate the post office so much, I suspect it’s because as a government entity it has two important attributes:

• A requirement for universal access
• At least some constitutional protections for privacy.

When you ship UPS or FedEx, you’re giving a package to a private entity. They are only bound by the contract they make with you. If they decide to start opening every package, that’s their right. The USPS has specific laws around when it can and cannot search packages, and generally requires a warrant.

It’s the state of advertising tbh. If ads were still of the “Look, here’s a cool product” variety, or even the “Look, here’s people happily using a cool product” kind then the world would probably be a better place. Even targeting isn’t so bad, when it’s broad like “We want businesses to know about our B2B product.”

The evil in modern advertising is the overly specific targeting, the lying, the psychological tricks, and the way they seem to invade every possible space.

Okay but even if we forgive that, it looks like they’re taking a picture of the ticket while driving.

Putting it this way kind of makes it sound like modern therapy has reinvented Buddhism.

Okay but you’re missing the point: I want to believe that this is all a highly planned and funded Russian op because the alternative is that half the country elected someone so incredibly dumb WITHOUT a conspiracy.

Are we sure they haven’t just hired someone to pretend to be a tweeting AI?

That’s not good though, right? “We have the technology to save lives, it works on all of our cars, and we have the ability to push it to every car in the fleet. But these people haven’t paid extra for it, so…”

I’m a bit concerned about that TBH. I’m not a doctor or medical researcher though so if they make one I’ll probably be an early adopter anyway. But since cancer cells are body cells with a problem, it feels like a screw up on a cancer vaccine would just lead to some exciting new autoimmune disease.

Lifetime pass for Plex too. A few months ago, it bubbled up an ad-filled version of a show I was watching in front of the show on my server. That is, it showed up in Continue Watching. I was briefly baffled when I started watching an ad on a show that I thought was streaming locally.

Anyway, I switched to Jellyfin. There’s some imperfections, but so far it hasn’t tried to trick me into watching ads.

It sounds like Hollywood tech lingo. Like when you’re watching a movie or a TV show and the designated techy character starts just saying computer words that make no actual sense in the real world, but I guess in CSI: Idiottown the hard drives have severe overheating issues.