To be fair he might have been a lurker. I lurked here for years and years because it didn't occur to me to sign up and comment. Honestly before everything in my life just kept going pear-shaped thanks to America's fucked up healthcare system and semi-annual economic collapses brought on by Wall Street deregulation I don't think I would have bothered constantly bitching on forums.

I don't think I signed up to vent. I can't remember what made me actually sign up. But it wasn't long until that was 99.9% of what I was doing.

And there was very little covid money floating around. If you are well off you got about $1,500 that's not even enough for a down payment. If you were poor you got about $2,500 but you use that for food and rent. As usual most of the handouts went to the top 1%.

Car prices like everything else are shooting up because the upper crust is gradually realizing they can do what Apple computer does and make tons of money selling luxury goods to a small group of consumers instead of bothering with the masses.

There was an interview with a guy in Las Vegas saying that it wasn't worth the trouble of going after the small gamblers versus the big whales that would come in and drop a few million. It's like that

Away from oil so that they can make sure that they've maintained their stranglehold on energy.

If you're a billionaire or a local monarch or whatnot your job is not to run companies it's to make sure that you stay on top. Other people run your companies you're just there to make sure that you remain in charge.

If that means we're going to keep using dirty energy that's causing droughts and trillions of dollars in direct economic damage then that's that.

Now get back to freaking out over whatever stupid culture war issue they're telling you to freak out about this week. I hear we're bringing back violent video games from the 90s. So retro.

The problem is that they artificially increased the weight of the phones by using metals and glass because their focus groups indicate that a heavier phone is viewed as being more premium.

So the OnePlus 13r I have is a giant brick compared to my old Motorola which was mostly made of plastic.

I could drop my Motorola on concrete and it's fine but it feels like what I've got now it's going to shatter into a million pieces if I drop it on cheap carpeting because that's physics for you. It's also annoying because it's uncomfortable to hold my phone for all that long.

That's what she said.

Eight of which are against children. Trump has literally said he is going to hell. A man who says that has done things even he can't forgive

It wasn't an attack he threatened to kill himself. There was danger because an idiot with a gun is dangerous but we let idiots with guns in all sorts of places now

I mean not at Republican town halls or Donald Trump speeches. You absolutely cannot take a gun there even though we all know guns make everything safer. Curious.

Thanks

Not that it's a good thing since corners will be cut. Got to make those quarterly profit projections.

But what worries me is when they start cutting back on necessary maintenance. That's what happened in Fukushima and it'll happen with these slap dash nuclear reactors being thrown up to feed AI data centers.

10 years. That's how long the city of Fukushima had to be evacuated. If you lived in that area around the disaster you just lost everything except what you could carry when you fled.

America is not kind to its homeless.

He's just upset the president isn't allowed on Wikipedia anymore.

Ring footage is frequently abused by Karens in Nextdoor.com. People post videos and images of their neighbors for minor transgressions. One racist POS posted their footage of (minority) kids playing basketball during the COVID lockdown. Some post footage with face showing of people who let their dog wander literally a foot off the sidewalk into their grass (didn't poop or damage the lawn...just technically trespassed because the dog walked a foot off the sidewalk on its leash). Many post videos of dogs shitting and the owner allegedly not cleaning up.

OK, keep that level of human shittiness in your head...

My biggest worry is this surveillance technology used for abuse from romantic partners. Now with facial recognition getting good, they can cheaply track your whereabouts at all times...without your consent...because your senile neighbor had their grandson install a ring camera. Now imagine that data leaked and someone making a nice utility to search it?

I don't cheat on my wife...but I also don't want to know about every neighbor that is. I also fear the data getting out and being inaccurate...what if there's a false match where a neighbor's webcam things your babysitter is someone else's girlfriend?...and that guy comes up to confront you asking why you're banging his girlfriend?

I've heard several third-hand, fourth-hand urban-legend-esque stories about funny ways partners get caught cheating....I don't like Amazon contributing to that. I choose to be faithful, but I am confident many in my life don't. I don't want that drama for their kids...it's between the husband and wife...until we have a data leak of this and now the in-laws are searching and getting involved.

Or a more traditional paranoia?...your boss getting this data.

Oh, you called in sick on Tues, but I see you walked your dog twice...must not have been too sick...or I can see you were at the store...or took a trip to another state, etc....or were seen walking into a rival's office for a job interview.

We really need laws for this...NOW. Even if Flock and Amazon decide to not abuse the data, it's only a matter of time before another player does...how long before a service offers a bounty if you provide evidence someone participated in adultery?...or insurance fraud?...or just gives any paying member access to everyone's location data found by some upstart's surveillance camera network? Pay $50 a month and you can stalk your ex, your employees, etc...get notified each time they're Id-ed on some camera?

General welfare clause. It's part of the law. It's not in the preamble.

So facial recognition is much less accurate with dark skin. It's just a limitation of how the technology and light work.

So what ends up happening is with dark skinned people who are typically minorities in America the police get tons and tons of false positives and they go around harassing Black and Hispanic people.

Or you know how about we stop humoring disingenuous fascists...

There are no both sides to this. The public did not demand this or wanted this. Outside of a handful of religious extremists to already had software they could use to control what their kids saw as well as anything else could besides a fascist government crackdown.

This stuff is happening because democracy is collapsing and it's part of a broader effort to control the public and the information the public can access. As always going after indecency is how they do it.

None of this is coming from the public. Voters could care less about this crap. The ones who do care would be uncomfortable with mandatory age verification.

So there's nobody to satisfy except a Gestapo that wants to decide what websites you can go to and what you can say and do and think online. There is no middle ground here and there is no compromise. Because there's nobody to compromise with except a bunch of fascists and you can't compromise with fascists. Christ we learned that almost 100 years ago.

And video games after that. Every now and then they will let the cat out of the bag too. All these age verification laws originate with a group out of Australia of all things which was one of the groups that got GTA banned over there for the longest time.

The bottom line is they don't want us to have any other media choices besides what they want to put in front of us. In particular they want us back in church tithing.

And not your nice small Church where everybody's nice but those weird creepy mega churches where the pastors get caught diddling kids every couple of months.