Soldiers who take their oaths seriously, and remember their (mandatory, annual) training on disobeying illegal orders.

Pulling repeated hardware platform switches underneath without bothering customers too much is a thing that only a very competent company could do, and Apple is a very competent company.

Apple nowadays is bound to avoid any huge missteps, because it has become a very conservative company.

Granted they blew some on the Vision Pro, but not much, for them. They folded on the electric car project, which now seems like a shame as Tesla is vulnerable.

What revolutionary product has Apple launched since Steve Jobs died? It has been 14 years, and I'm still waiting.

Given the boom and bust cycle of fads like this, you also might not want to best they will, since they would then be stuck with some very expensive printing capacity they have no use for, but have to pay for anyway.

It's a delicate business, and their obligation is shareholder value.

Bitcoin does have some small intrinsic value. But it would be around the value of a ticket to the 1933 world's fair. Or an old newspaper with the headline "Dewey Wins".

Communism is not a workable system for more than Dunbar's number of people, and no country on earth uses it.
I really don't think it would work as an economic system, either, for the same reasons.

For groups smaller than Dunbar's number, that also have a charismatic leader, it can work quite well. But when that leader fails or retires, they tend to adopt a different system...or just fall apart.

That's not quite true. Occasionally some people in government do want to reduce the power of the government. For some reason they never end up making the decisions. This is because "power" is an instrumental goal that even an anarchist would desire if they wished to further their belief.

Every one dimensional metric oversimplifies things. But "fascism" is not well defined enough to use as a metric. And "statism" is the wrong term, if you're going to contrast against "individual freedom" the opposite pole should be "authoritarianism". E.g. many small communities traditionally didn't have any central government (i.e. no state), but they insisted on strict conformance to their rules via social pressure. (In that case the "authority" wouldn't be a person, but a set of social rules.)

I'm not interested in your advice, your gaslighting, or your worries. Injustice makes me emotional. This is a good and healthy thing. Unfortunately, I can't block people on here, but please don't ever respond to me again. End of conversation.

I agree that Rockefeller should fry in Hades and that his name should be erased.

This being said:
(1) The penalty for possession of small amounts of weed was liberalized to a $100 fine in the late 1970s, likely when you were a toddler.

(2) Under Bloomberg, the NYPD was in the habit of arresting people for possession of small amounts citing "public display", which was a misdemeanor, so didn't affect voting rights.

Pig: turn out your pockets
Joint falls on ground.
Pig: Oink! Oink! It's on public display now.

Most of those cases were dropped in court in any case, judges knew the game.

I'm fine with less assimilation ... hearing different languages, seeing different cultures makes my city (NYC) worth living in. You mean the WHINING of everyday citizens, right? Oh, ohhhhhh, there's food other than meat, potatoes, and burgers. Boooohoooboooohoooboooohoooo!

I'm OK with reasonable enforcement of immigration laws, not with stopping people not engaging in overt criminal conduct on the street and asking for papers like it was the USSR in 1985. (And sometimes, still harassing them AFTER they've shown proof of legal residency or even citizenship.)

Yeah, I have a temper. You've only seen a tiny sliver of it. Be glad.

As to VisiCalk being the real OG that started from nothing, there's an interesting comment on a VisiCalc youtube:

In 1969, we had to develop the world's true first electronic spreadsheet (LANPAR) within the limitation of 32k of memory - and we included forward referencing which didn't appear in Visicalc, TKSolver, Supercalc or even Multiplan I. Only in Lotus 13 years later. We even included the ability for sophisticated logic calculations, access to external data base data, and input of data in real time. Timesharing in those days was very similar to "cloud" computing now, except that you knew exactly which remote computer was doing the processing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Also at that scale who knows how much they are paying for each seat, I'm sure it's a bespoke deal. No doubt MS is making money, but I wouldn't just take the retail price and multiply it by 2 million.

It's quaint that you think the United States is still a republic. It's a monarchy, and Trump's handlers are likely moving currently to make sure that when Vance succeeds him, that the Executive branch and a Congress that will be, through the use of naked force if necessary, remain filled with Republican paper tigers to complement the paper tigers in the Supreme Court, settles into the oligarchy the Framers always really intended it to be. The military will largely be used to recreate the American hemispheric hegemony. The National Guard and ICE will be used as foot soldiers within the US to "secure" elections.

The morons that elected that diseased wicked and demented man have destroyed whatever the hell America was. As a Canadian, I can only hope we can withstand this hemispheric dominance and the raiding of our natural resources to feed the perverse desires of the child molesters, rapists, racists and psychopaths that have already taken control of the US.

Doubtless, I will be downvoted by the remaining MAGA crowd here. You know, the guys that pretended they refused to vote Democrat because Bernie wasn't made leader, but are to a man a pack of Brown Shirts eagerly awaiting the time when they imagine they can take part in the defenestration of American society.

If there's no letter to deliver, they don't need to do a full route, unless picking up mail in the box is also a service.