Oh... come on. Somebody at least mod me +1 funny, over -1 overrated for doing the exact sort of binary bucketing behaviour that I'm ascribing to this dude. I thought my hypocrisy was nuanced enough to not be neutral! :)

If everybody owes everybody then it all cancels out, right?

The problem is that debt diverts a large share of actual economic output (goods and services) into passive income (interest paid). Disconnecting productivity from consumption is bad. Communism goes all in on it but runaway capitalism does it too.

"...on the dump of UNIX' bad ideas."

This twat is highly representative of the sort of jackass I've known all 30+ years of my career. The self-described alpha who thinks in binary terms, doesn't get context, and can't be bothered to understand their own method of categorizing things into "good" and "bad" buckets.

Sudo has done the job since the early 80s. Give Cliff and Bob a little credit.

a) Your first point is dependent on semantics. I mean superpower in a narrow sense of a country that's powerful and can get its way beyond its geographical sphere of influence, as distinct from a regional power, which has similar power locally. If we add to the concept a delimitation of needing to hold that broad influence via soft power, then yes, the URSS wasn't a superpower. But those are two different definitions of the word.

b) This is another instance where we're using the same word with differing meanings. What I meant was access to technological developments. Russia advanced from a mostly agrarian society to a technological power in those 30 years. It took the US to get to the same level about 200 years. But yes, all you said also happened too.

c) Socialism isn't Communism. In Marxist jargon, Socialist policies are temporary measures that are to be dropped once Communism proper starts. The URSS never attempted to start Communism, it just kept circling around variations of Socialist policies. Failing for almost 4 generations to bring about Communism, despite layers upon layers of totalitarian policies designed, in theory at least, to bring it, is a pretty clear indication it cannot be done, which is the core critique one can develop against the worst of Marxist delusions.

He monetized the baby face. Well done.

Of course they were. There was no concept of this moment being "intimate", to the point guests watching a couple have their first sexual intercourse was part of the wedding. And see also this reply of mine to another commenter.

This Reddit question has three answers with links and references. I'll copy and paste a 19th-century quote provided by the second answer. Reading and clicking the different links is very informative:

"Modesty must be an unknown virtue, decency an unimaginable thing, where, in one small chamber, with the beds lying as thickly as they can be packed, father, mother, young men, lads, grown and growing up girls --- two and sometimes three generations --- are herded promiscuously; where every operation of the toilette and of nature --- dressings, undressings, births, deaths --- is performed by each within the sight and hearing of all; where children of both sexes, to as high an age as 12 or 14, or even more, occupy the same bed; where the whole atmosphere is sensual, and human nature is degraded into something below the level of the swine. It is a hideous picture: and the picture is drawn from life." (Rev. James Fraser, in a 1867 report "on the living conditions of agricultural women and children")

Well, Islamic societies were in many aspects ahead of European ones. It's remarkable to me that you mention the 14th century as the starting point for such records, which suggests to me they refer to the period after the Mongol conquests, which were quite thorough in destroying most of what existed before with few exceptions ("rivers running black with the ink of all the libraries destroyed" etc.), so my educated first guess, supposing your country was among the Mongol victims, is the reconstruction and moralizing that came about after that "end of the world" event saw some pretty extreme cultural changes compared to how things were done before.

What I described is common all around the world except there where it was made to change. So my default hypothesis is things weren't much different in your country before the "end times", and only came around after it, likely in answer to it ("God punished us for our sins, so we must become pure" and the like).

Nah, they were just normal. This is how humans function normally when they haven't been religiously indoctrinated into the belief sex is evil and corrupting. And even when they are finally convinced by incessant preaching that sex is evil and corrupting, cultures still change slowly, especially if people are left to their own devices. The way to accelerate that, which is what's been used most everywhere this change happened was via violence (morality policing), which does make people quickly change their behavior.

"So, how do I avoid answering the actual argument while feinting moral superiority? Hmm... ahh, I know!", and starts typing: "In case you hadn't noticed it's no longer..."

Variation year to year is hardly news. An energy provider gets the fun of allocating resources to generation and storage options.

I personally am looking at adding batteries to my home because my electricity provider charges by time of day and the batteries would let me shift my usage to the cheap hours. I did the sums and concluded it could pay for itself pretty quick. $200/month saving - I am a heavy user - I have computers, minisplits and two EVs. It could pay for itself in a couple of years.

Add in solar and the savings would be more, but solar ain't cheap and the payoff would take longer. With solar and batteries and a capable inverter, I could have some off-grid capability, but I don't really care - the electricity is pretty reliable around here.
 

I've self-hosted email all these years, but more often each year I cannot use emails at my domains to sign up for things, and outgoing email from my ip is rejected. I suppose it's because of spam issues mainly. But it's indicative of a root cause - people like walled gardens with Responsible Parties to moderate content and resolve issues with.

Ha! This is true. I'm a year-round motorcyclist in a desert area. Below about 102, the air is somewhat cooling when you get moving (dry climate). About about 105, it feels like being in a huge hairdryer.

Soaking your shirt before you start helps a bit for a while.

Also 9% of households in India have A/C.

What is that figure in Phoenix?

The ransomware insurers will probably force them to do some things like 2FA.

It's a horrible outcome all around - the crooks got paid so they'll come back stronger; the company lost $1B (largely in destroyed value that is not recirculating in the economy) and finally the patients, millions of whose records were exposed, or even delayed care.

Until around the mid-18th century, when people in English-speaking countries became wealthy enough to afford living in houses with more than a single room and, by consequence, the very novel (at the time) concept of personal privacy came about, parents, grandparents, children and other family members all lived and slept within that one room.

In that one room the parents had sex. Right besides their old folk and the children. Sometimes the old folk had energy to have sex too. And yes, the children were frequently awake and watching. That includes all of you great-great-great-...-great-grandparents, and all their ancestors.

Besides that, almost all children worked in animal husbandry, helping quite directly several species of domesticated animals to mate, from goats and sheep to cattle and horses. What they saw when doing that was no different from what they saw their parents and grandparents doing at night.

That's how humanity lived for most of the last 12,000 years. And, somehow, those 600+ generations of children neither had any trouble "being ready" for any of that, nor came out of it mentally broken in any way whatsoever.

So, from where, exactly, came this weird myth so many conservatives hold that present-day children are in some way different from the children of old, and cannot deal with direct knowledge of sexual acts? What is the origin of this nonsense?