Yeah but the point is that if they hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.

It’s easier to ramp up an authoritarian regime if you start off bullying a group that’s small and easy to marginalized. Then you work your way up from there.

What you’re saying is like “All lives matter” compared to “Black lives matter”. The point of BLM wasn’t that Black lives are more important, per se, but that they need more attention right now.

Like if you’ve got two kids, and one scrapes his knee, and the other cracks his head open…obviously (hopefully) you love both of your kids, but one of them is clearly in more need of immediate attention. They matter more right now, in the current context.

I had an early PDA (think it was an IPAQ, not to be confused with ipad) that had a 56k modem that connected via CF slot.

It could be…but it’s supposed to be the most newsworthy/discussed person. Doesn’t necessarily have to be for negative reasons. Greta Thunberg was Times POTY in 2019. Last year was Taylor Swift and before that was Zelensky.

I dunno man if he’s in Kansas that means he’s past the Rockies and it’s all downhill from there.

/s

Why do you think Microsoft left the Russian market?

Good comrades run Astra.

This is what happens when you loosen up regulations. Bunch of really shoddy sub-par balconies. They practically throw you off them.

You just know that once Trump takes office, a bunch of balconies are just gonna become death traps. Particularly balconies owned by Mexicans, Democrats, members of the “fake news”, and transgender people.

This cisgender male Republican-owned balconies will still be safe. Miraculously.

This is my superpower‽

I just thought everybody else was too scared to try something new.

No…but I am being hyperbolic. I definitely interface with more transmasc and nonbinary coders than I do with cisgender female coders. This may also be because, again, cultural reasons.

There certainly are more cisgender female coders, but they are still a minority group by a big amount, and they tend to not draw much attention to themselves.

This isn’t even about gaming, necessarily.

Girls who code are rare. There are probably more AFAB coders at my work than those who identify as female. And a hell of a lot more men.

And I’m in a progressive city in a progressive state.

I work in IT, and I think there is one woman out of 50 employees on my corner of the org chart, and that’s the CIO’s admin assistant.

I’m certain it’s culture, and it doesn’t just go for programming, it goes for almost all of STEM. There was a recent “Stuff You Should Know” episode about toy chemistry sets, and they made it a point to talk about the marketing, and how it always was with boys, for boys. My son, 8 year old kid, says “that’s just wrong! Girls can do all that stuff!”. He’s got it figured out.

Eruption. Apparently Michael Crichton had a pet-project he was working on and his widow found an author to finish it…James Patterson.

I never read any James Patterson, but it does have a feel like a lot of Michael Crichton books I loved like Jurassic Park or Andromeda Strain…building up “how the hell could we let this happen” with entirely plausible scenarios and science with only enough fantasy to make it work.

Totally unrelated but as I’m reading this thread I’m listening to an audiobook and one of the characters said “End of all life on this planet” at practically the same time I read your comment.

Big pharma will love it. All the drugs they made with expired patents are now illegal. Good thing they’ve got a very, very, very similar drug that meets all the necessary criteria, all lined up and ready to replace it (with a brand new patent, of course).

There has been some controversy about AstraZeneca’s behaviour in creating, patenting, and marketing the drug. Esomeprazole’s successful predecessor, omeprazole, is a mixture of two mirror-imaged molecules (esomeprazole which is the S-enantiomer, and R-omeprazole); critics said the company was trying to “evergreen” its omeprazole patent by patenting the pure esomeprazole and aggressively marketing to doctors that it is more effective than the mixture.[50]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esomeprazole

While the impact of CFCs from inhalers on the ozone layer had been minuscule (dwarfed by industrial processes using CFCs), the FDA in its interpretation of the Montreal Protocol mandated the switch in propellants.[17] Patients expressed concern about the high price of the HFA inhalers as there were initially no generic versions, whereas generic CFC inhalers had been available.[18]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inhaler

Yeah it’s very depressing to realize that the country will continue to head towards the shitter, or at least won’t move away from it, until I’m dead or close to it. Probably longer. No matter what else happens, we still have a stacked SCOTUS and a highly gameable (and also stacked) district court system. Mitch didn’t just hold up a SCOTUS seat nomination…he held up a ton of lower court seats, too.

Sorry kids. Buttery males.

and no matter who was in charge, the US will continue it’s legacy of genocide worldwide.

Soo…what was not voting for the less-genocidey candidate supposed to accomplish?

NPVIC ain’t going to happen. Not for at least another 40 years or so.

It was a great idea, but this (so-called) Supreme Court would absolutely shut it down in no time flat. The balance of this court isn’t likely to shift for a very, very long time.

The only solution to get rid of EC before then will be a massive movement that results in a constitutional amendment.

Tl/Dr: start pre-lubing your assholes now, they ain’t gonna help you there.

ETA: the funny thing about having to codify “norms” into law was that the expectation would be that government would be transparent enough, and press would be free enough, that lawmakers wouldn’t even think about shit like insider trading, because the risk of getting found out and the hit your reputation and career would take wouldnt be worth it.

Instead, ass hats celebrated it.

Have you ever heard of an analogy before? Because that’s like…the Stretch-Armstrong of analogies.

Stop. Just stop.

It’s a post-truth world. Just…give up. We’re all yelling into the void. These people are being force-fed “facts” consisting of cherry picked data and sound bites from every angle imaginable. It’s their news. It’s their friends. It’s their family, and their neighbors. Their community leaders, and their social leaders, and their religious leaders. It’s in their face, constantly, everywhere they go.

You can’t compete with that. That’s brainwashing on a societal level.

You can’t both be right, and be victorious, in that environment. Simply because for the same amount of effort you put out expelling one falsehood, they can be exposed to a thousand more.

I give up. I have no more faith in humanity. People are proudly digging their heads into the sand to avoid hard truths and then act shocked when “I told you so”. Fuck them, and fuck me for having to go down with them. Fucking children. Fucking ostrich children fucks. Pitiful. Repugnant. Deplorable.

You should take it. Especially nowadays. You’ll never know when you might need a solid alibi.

How could I have been getting an abortion? I was across town getting a donut. Jen L was the cashier. She saw me.

I would expect a massive nerf/devaluation of rewards if there’s no poor people getting exploited.

I say this as someone who pays for all his family vacations almost entirely with points. About every year and a half. This time was Texas for the eclipse. Before that it was Disney world for my kids 5th birthday. Before that was COVID times and I used my points to buy hardwood floors that I installed throughout my house. Before that it was SC for the eclipse.

That really has mostly to do with the high cost of living. And it’s going to be high in an area inhabited by businesses on the cutting edge of technology. Those jobs have high wages because they need highly educated people, and highly educated people come from the best universities in the country, many of which are in Boston, and Cambridge. Not to mention the great schools in commuter range in Providence and Worcester.

Red states don’t have higher education, and they don’t have innovative industry, so they don’t have the population density issues that blue states have.

Maybe if red states had these things, they’d have a high cost of living, too.

Most of the people fleeing MA for those states are working remotely for their companies still in MA. Mostly DINKS and young (primarily male) single professionals that don’t really have public education or healthcare as any sort of immediate concern. That’s gonna lead to problems when the average age of red state populations inverts itself. Better make sure that they can’t not have babies.