Obligatory Simpsons quote:
[Grandpa Simpson]: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a cheat, a communist, but he is NOT a porn star!

Technically true, but Polio is on the ropes, and Measles has been all but eliminated in many industrialized nations (thanks to the anti-vaxx crowd it's been doing an encore performance in several countries, including the United States). So I don't think it's unreasonable to work towards eradication, but yes, it is tough and requires a concerted effort.

Thank you. I was going to post the same thing. My lip was twitching reading the original post lol. You have done us all a great service by satisfying all of our OCD-ness as well /salute

If they're overweight, then they're at a higher risk of complications from COVID. It's faster and easier to get a vaccine than to lose 50 lbs. So...I'd say that makes sense logically.

That's...still a path to citizenship. I agree with you, don't get me wrong, but you're just saying there should be another stop along the way. That's fine. After getting permanent residence they can apply for citizenship in the same way as other green card holders. Seems like a good plan to me. At the end of the day, they still become citizens.

I've seen die hard Trump supporters who were pissed off at the rioting in the Capitol Building. Maybe it's somewhat rare, but it does happen. There are still principled Republicans out there, just darn few who are politicians. Uncivil Law over on Youtube has a whole series on going over the indictments of Capitol rioters. He's up to 55 videos now devoted to it, and he is *staunchly* conservative, but just happens to believe in law and order. Check it out when you have a chance, some of them are hilarious concerning how some of those dip-nobs got caught. Others are kinda standard, but I've very much enjoyed the whole series. The 55th video in particular is a bit long, but he goes into the filings that idiot made (sovereign citizen garbage) and it's pretty funny to listen to. Direct link to the video.

And yes, that's one guy, so your point about overlap still stands, but he's at least got a few tens of thousands of subscribers, so maybe there's some hope.

I was with you up until the last point. Leased cars are still owned by the financial institution handling the lease and by definition they form a contract between the institution and the individual. I don't see any reason why you should restrict the ability of the parties to contract for where/how repairs and maintenances are to be done on property owned by the company. I think it's a little silly if they include this term, but there's nothing forcing you to lease a vehicle from them (or at all). Now it would be a whole different matter if they tried to lock you in to their servicing options when you BUY the vehicle, but a lease is a whole different animal.

Having flashbacks to Sid 6.7 over here.

Where I live is technically below sea level, but there's 4000 ft. high mountains between me and the ocean. If rising sea levels cause a flood in my area, we're already in an apocalypse protocol.

Desalination has its own limitations and problems. It's expensive for starters ($2000-$2500 per acre foot, vs. anywhere from $25 to $750 per acre foot of untreated river water - which varies wildly depending on where you live). Then, anywhere you build a desalination plant, the outflow will 100% destroy the area you dump into. There's not a lot of places where you can build one without risking serious environmental impact which can have massive hidden costs down the road. And you can't just store or stash that slurry, it's too bulky and too much to ship anywhere without tripling the costs of production, so back out to sea it goes. Saudi Arabia has invested heavily in desalination because they really have no other choice. America has other options that will be far more cost effective and less damaging.

Drought conditions usually mean higher heat which means more air conditioning use. Then also, less rainfall means less hydro power generation too. It's not that the drought is directly straining energy production, but it has multiple knock-on effects that create a big overall problem.

VMWare 7.0 (and if I remember right, 6.7 as well) supports virtual TPM2 chips. It requires configuration of a KMIP server (which there is a free software version of one on GitHub), but I doubt that desktop virtualization software has that kind of support. It's more of an enterprise feature.

We're hardwired to mistrust "the other" but what exactly defines "the other" is 100% learned behavior. Humans are, by nature, tribal. Our definition of tribe expands the more calm and smoothly everything works. At this exact moment in history, we are just barely capable of identifying our country generally as "our tribe". But in times of conflict or strife that circle shrinks. In the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster, your tribe is pretty much limited to physically nearby blood relatives (and spouses) and everyone else is a threat.

In earlier days in the United States there was rampant discrimination and racism against the Chinese, the Italians, the Irish, and others. We still have some issues with racism towards Asian Americans (that can *partly* be traced back to World War II) but you'd be hard pressed to find rampant discrimination against the Irish and Italians anymore.

TLDR: the definition of "other" is learned, not innate.

"If is follows aught
It'll do what they thought
In the end we all do what we must..."

Such a great little game. I'm going to go play another round. See how many drifters I can kill this time around.

Worse than that, diffraction adds more to the effective limit, so it's more around 1.6 microns, so even a square of four of these probably won't add much to the resolving power.