Then I got it exactly right. I stated that the authors of the report were essentially anti-human activities, and demand that people fly less.

Guess you missed this part:

the report by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive thinktank

This isn't the oil companies. These are people that, at their core, basically want a lot of humans to go away, and the ones that are left, their lives will be severely restricted in the name of "the Earth".

NNTP binaries will never come back in any scale because of the platform's reputation as a refuge for kiddie porn.

It's becoming pretty obvious that for these "advocates", the answer is "common people can't fly anymore".

Important people on their private jets will be excluded from this new zealotry, of course.

I heard that Britain and other Western powers are sending weapons to kill Russian soldiers in Ukraine.

Oh wait. They Are.

Did Western leaders not think there would be payback for that? And with British generals telling the public that they should prepare to go to war with Russia, I'd say that aiding hackers is pretty much a low-level response from the Russians, all things considered.

Unlike, say, Javelin missiles killing your tank crews.

Ahhh... all those Louisiana gals suddenly finding those naughty Mardi Gras pics showing up in iCloud again.

This thing was doomed from the start, especially in New York City, where "Internet" + "Public" + "Visual" virtually guarantees that you're gonna have a bunch of people gooning on camera. The creators surely envisioned this being used for noble, high culture. But this is the city that gave us Lenny Bruce and Andrew Dice Clay. Come on.

Dublin: "Hello America! What a wonderful way to connect cultures this is!"
New York: "*Flashes Tits* Check out my OnlyFans"

That's the thing of it though. Western foundations like Gates and the Ford Foundation concentrate on lowering Western birthrates. The Third World is an afterthought to them as far as population goes. But Western birthrates are sinking, not growing, as it happens in affluent societies. If anything, the West needs a boost in its natural born birthrates; in Europe especially, the family trees are inverted now. So it's kind of maddening to see people like Melinda Gates so concerned if some woman in Poland or Wisconsin has more than two kids, while her crowd seemingly ignores the average Nigerian woman who's having 8 kids.

String Theory is even more convoluted and un-provable: it posits that we live in a 10-dimensional multiverse, but, hang on.... we can never actually prove those dimensions exist, so you'll just have to take the word of Very Smart People for that.

Until someone can actually prove something in regard to these airy theories that rely exclusively on exotic equations (that require very strained circumstances to work, even on paper), theoretical physicists may as well be debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

... they still have to stop making dreck with secondary characters no one cares about.

The fact is that Twitter was bloated crap run by hypersensitive children of helicopter parents before Musk bought it. Their so-called curators were nothing but an Opinion Police brigade, and if they didn't like your opinion, you didn't get to use Twitter. You were One With The Body, or you were cast out. It was basically run by a bunch of Mean Girls with a Cancel button. Musk's management hasn't been perfect, but it's been a large improvement over the previous state of things. When he fired said curators, it was a situation of, as we say on Slashdot, And nothing of value was lost.

As for "bye bye", Musk would be the first to point out that you have plenty of Twitter alternatives to go and enjoy.

Microsoft is often accused of always being behind the curve, but Microsoft went all-in on mobile at a very, very early stage. Bill Gates personally made it a priority. And they were big into phones early on. They just couldn't figure out the interface. They were working on Metro when the first iPhone blew the doors open on the smartphone market, but by the time they were ready to ship, Google had already copied the iPhone interface with Android, and it was too late. The market just doesn't want to seem to take more than two competing systems. By the time Metro went public, Microsoft was an also-ran. It had to be incredibly frustrating for them as they'd seen the vision and had been working on mobile for so very long. And Metro WAS a very good interface for mobile. From what I understand, MS even offered to foot the costs for developing popular corporate apps like airline, food, travel, etc, but they were told that there was no interest in supporting a third ecosystem by the likes of Delta, American Express, etc. So they eventually just gave up on mobile. A shame, really.

If you've ever seen Giger's original drawings of the aliens, the head is shaped the way it is because Giger drew it as an actual penis. Not implied, but right there for all to see. The tip of the skill was the penis head, and the bottom was the alien's face and retracting jaw. The whole thing looked like some nightmarish, creeping Dildo. Giger was a seriously messed up individual.

Yeah, the myth of "affordable California" is really that... a myth. California has been expensive to the common man since Hollywood put the state on the cultural map. I was born there and spent my formative years in SoCal...which truly had a bit of magic in the air at the time... but even then the economic storm clouds were gathering. We were a typical American home, father working, mom running the house, kids doing kid things, until 1977, when costs had shot up so much that my mom had to go to work just to make ends meet. A year later, we left California. The income just wasn't keeping up with the costs. Taxes and real estate, especially. Within 5 years, most of my extended family that lived in California had left. In another 10 years, all of them had left. People bitch about Prop 13 now, but at the time, you had retirees being forced from their homes because of property tax increases that started to look like something out of a South American inflationary spiral.

Centers of culture are expensive, because they tend to be in desirable locations anyway. That accelerates the cost of things. The harsh truth is, not everyone can live in such places, at least not very long. Look at the ridiculous lengths kids go to have the '"New York Experience"... at times living in converted closets for thousands of dollars per month. My simple old 3 bedroom home in Pasadena, considered to be the older, un-trendy area of town off of Colorado Blvd when I was a kid, is now valued at almost a million dollars. For a freaking Craftsman Home. That's how ridiculous things are in California now.