These people actively went after and banned women's rights a la Handmaid's Tale - and you're still surprised their "solutions" for "protecting the children" are harmful?
Harm and suffering of others while accruing political power is the whole point!

Texans just have to have their hijabs bigger than everyone else's. It's some psychological thing.

I hate basically everything about gmail. Other than the reliability, the UI and filters are honestly terrible. I'm forced to use it at work (in the web interface), and good luck getting it to filter multiple exact strings, and it definitely can't filter anything based on X-header information. It's a wonder to me that it can be so bad and still be so ubiquitous, but it's big and free and has momentum and it does have extremely good uptime.

I had their free hosting for many years, and I'm glad I pay someone else to do it now. People are so used to how bad gmail is they don't realize that life can be better. (That said, I don't know what the other free options are like; I presume that they have similar limitations.)

It's a bit more than a couple days. It's not, like, the whole year, but let's not hyperbolize in the other direction and minimize a very real issue. In Canada last year, there were weeks at a time where it was bad for you to go outside. Some jurisdictions were worse than others. I would say that we had anywhere between 4-6 weeks last year during the summer that exercising outside was probably bad for your health (in the Okanagan Valley).

But something that I find interesting living here is that much of the year, our air quality is a 1 (the best), and on moderately bad days where you can smell smoke but not necessarily see any haze, it'll rank as a 3. When I lived in Montreal, it was a 3 all the time. I mean, maybe that's not actually surprising--Montreal is a city of 4 million people (in the Metro area) and I now live in a city of 40k (the whole valley is 400k).

But yeah, the air is gross in cities, it's probably not good for us, and forest fires are making it worse. That's life now. I don't know what's actually to be done about it short of rewinding the clock 100 years. Hopefully battery tech gets lighter so when we finally do switch to EVs, we not only have reduced vehicle emissions, we also aren't pulverizing the tyres as quickly. Then maybe we'll see some city air quality changes.

The people complain bitterly when you try to tax them on anything, too. We have a carbon tax that's more-or-less revenue neutral, and gives back money as a carbon credit, so quite a few people make more than they spend. They don't like that either.

Basically they want the right to do nothing at all, pollute the air, make life miserable for other people, and if you tell them that that should cost more or be illegal, they throw a fit.

Capitalist systems are not inherently unregulated.

One of the costs of doing business is following the law. If your product kills people, it is not allowed to exist. If you can make it so your product no longer kills people, you can keep selling it, even if making it non-lethal is a cost on you. But everyone else is (supposedly) held to that same standard.

Capitalism didn't (and will never) find a solution until it was necessary to find a solution. Something that made it necessary for companies to find a solution was the government deciding that it was necessary to eliminate a dangerous substance. Then the companies that used to mine asbestos or make asbestos into products went and did something else because the cost of business involving asbestos was too high.

Unregulated markets aren't a necessary nor sufficient condition for capitalism.

Oh, sorry, I meant that as a consumer, you can't escape them, not that they're necessary. I 100% believe that we could make do without them if they would just stop using them. But if I want to buy frozen corn, right now, I have no options.

I believe Apple believes in privacy enough for them to want to make it an effective marketing tool, so they care about it more than other companies, yes. I don't think they have as deep rooted a concern for privacy at an ethical or moral level as they say (though I DO also believe that Tim Cook believes in privacy more than most, because of the realities of being a gay man from the South). But it doesn't matter, they don't have to want to do it for philosophical reasons as long as they do it, and they do.

Based on other stories, there's likely nothing wrong with Apple's models, but they're meant to run on-device.

Why couldn't Apple just scale them up and run them on cloud servers? Because then they wouldn't have arms-length deniability when it comes to privacy.

I like Apple products, I appreciate the privacy focus. But having Google as their default search engine because they're the highest bidder is an obvious privacy hole. My theory is they want a similar out. You'll be able to use Siri on-device for things that make sense, but for larger, more complicated tasks, you'll need to ask Google because they have no qualms about giving your privacy away or taking someone else's to give a service to you.

Sure, there's plenty of zealotry to go around.

But there's basically NO WAY to get away from plastics. Try buying any frozen food without buying a tonne of plastic. A lot of FRESH food comes wrapped in plastic. I shop at a small grocer, and I can get away from some of it, but any baked goods that are brought in from off-site are in plastic. It's everywhere. I can't make the decision not to use it, without deciding to not eat half the groceries that are available. Even bags of rice are in woven plastic bags most of the time (though sometimes burlap, but always with a plastic interior liner).

I try and buy stuff that's in aluminum or glass, but my city doesn't even have a curbside glass recycling program--they want you to DRIVE your glass somewhere (it's not accessible by walking or transit very easily) which feels very much against the spirit of trying to recycle.

Reduce and reuse were always the first two things for you to try and do out of the Three Rs, but there's a limit to how much you can reduce your plastic consumption when they wrap every damned thing in 2 layers of it before putting it on the shelf.

I still get this kind of packaging for a lot of stuff, especially cheap, small things. Cables, etc. The worst of the packaging is almost always the name-brand stuff, where they still make packages meant to go on shelves and frustrate thieves and attract shopper attention.

If you can find a cheap Chinese knockoff (sometimes exactly the same product) you're often better off not just from a price perspective, but also a packaging perspective.

Clearly you have failed to wear your company mandated Shokkollar: Presented by HP(tm). This infraction will be reported and then you will be shocked. Shocked, we say.

... instead?

That works.

Evidence of no evidence is evidence of being full of shit.

But while you're busy making shit up, here's a list of studies proving you're full of shit.

Covering topics such as:
- Guns are not used millions of times each year in self-defense
- Most purported self-defense gun uses are gun uses in escalating arguments, and are both socially undesirable and illegal
- Firearms are used far more often to intimidate than in self-defense
- Guns in the home are used more often to intimidate intimates than to thwart crime
- Adolescents are far more likely to be threatened with a gun than to use one in self-defense
- Criminals who are shot are typically the victims of crime
- Few criminals are shot by decent law-abiding citizens
- Self-defense gun use is rare and not more effective at preventing injury than other protective actions

Also, if your argument that something is "between 2 and 10 times as often" as something else related - that's not statistics, that's pulling numbers out of your ass.

Not to mention that using murder instruments 10 times (or two times) "for defense" means that in at least half of the cases "defenders" are actually the ones committing the crime by trying to kill an unarmed person.
While gun nuts are up to 10 times more likely to use guns to attack people and threaten and attempt murder than "criminals".

You are literally arguing that people with guns are pulling guns on people 10 TIMES MORE THAN CRIMINALS DO.
I.e. That they are paranoid lunatics whose crimes go unreported. Probably cause they tend to use guns to threaten their wives and kids.

Which IS all supported by the points... well... basically all on the list above.

The problem isn't cramming people into cities, it's cramming people into cities WITH TRAFFIC.
Also, to a lesser extent, with traffic AND NO TREES.

Plant more trees. Plant trees between major roadways and homes. Have fewer cars on the road and more trains.

1 train with 4 cars can move 1000 people. That takes about 15 buses, but over 600 cars (on average, based on typical occupancy; in the best case, you might be able to reduce that to 200-ish). And those cars will require an enormous amount of parking--asphalt that just sits there and heats up in the sun, doing nothing productive.

If you want to move a lot of people around, cars are the worst way to do it, but that's the way that currently dominates. Our cities can be cleaner and less bad for our health if we treat them as places where people live as opposed to places where people DRIVE. City planning for the health of your population actually requires attention to that detail, it's hard to just stumble into it by accident. Plant trees, establish parks, get rid of parking lots, increase public transit into the densest areas. It's all doable, if we want to.

Droughts due to climate crisis we're in makes nuclear, being just another steam engine, unreliable, inefficient and too expensive.
And that's when it is already heavily subsidized by the government - as it needs to be in order to be profitable.
Which the companies running the existing reactors know very well - cause they're the same ones running coal and gas plants... and the renewables.

Only one of their energy sources allows them to get something for free and sell it to their customer at a cost - and it's not nuclear.
Nuclear is a dead end for commercial energy production.