Oh boy do they ever. The local school district is cutting everything they can and still in danger of going under for lack of funds. Part of that is because no one wants to raise property taxes but largely it's because every year or three for as long as I can remember they've basically been digging ditches just to fill them back in again. Repave a parking lot then almost immediately tear it up to build a new extension, destroy and remake 3 or 4 perfectly good tennis courts in less than a decade (despite not even having a tennis team), refurbishing the auditorium then tearing it down again. The fools couldn't waste more money if they were trying and then they wonder why no one wants to vote for a tax hike to pay for everything!

Of course, the ones to suffer are the kids. This district used to have all sorts of vocational training, an amazing arts department and one of the best music programs in the state. That's all getting cut, the combined district is merging with another and if the combined district manages to stay afloat for more than a few years it'll be a miracle...

Actually secure boot doesn't make it any harder to create a linux distro, it just makes it slightly harder to install one (because you have to disable it before you can do so unless your distro and hardware of choice have the right keys).

Of course those drug gangs and the general instability they bring to Mexico are our fault you know. The 'war on drugs' creates a huge black market which leads to huge stacks of cash and thousands of guns getting shipped across the border as payment.

Somebody forget to take their anti-psychotics this morning...

The Apple is evil comments are because Apple fired the first salvo in this war. Yes, most of the suits on either side are nonsense, but its only understandable to enjoy seeing a bully get hoisted by their own petard...

Here's the problem with unified Console/PC multilayer: the mouse and keyboard. It's a much better interface for certain types games and if you let console and pc gamers into the same sandbox the console users are gonna get their heads kicked in and not have a very good time of it.

You don't need more than one GPU to use multiple monitors. Pretty much any halfway decent modern graphics card is gonna have more than one output and nowadays if you have the right setup you can even daisy-chain multiple monitors off a single port.

What I've found is that most of the people who whine about high taxes and say that they prefer the American solution fit into one of three categories:

Greedy 'I got mine' Rich Person: They make enough money that the lack of public infrastructure and government support doesn't impact them in a meaningful way and want to hoard as much money as possible, presumably so they can pretend they're Scrooge McDuck and swim in a pile of gold. They don't give a shit about the hoi polloi and despise having to give anything back to the society that enabled their success.

Wannabe Rich Person: They've bought into the lie that all it takes to become super-rich is a bit of hard work and want to be one of the above jack-asses when they get there so they support low taxes and deny the need for government help even though it would benefit them greatly as they are now because they think it'll make things better once they 'make it big'. They don't realize that realistically, you need to be either incredibly lucky or be born into it to get rich enough that lower taxes actually benefit you more than the complete lack of adequate social services that enables such low rates hurts you.

Free Market Drone: Maybe they read a bit too much Ayn Rand. Maybe someone forced them to watch Cold-War era propaganda films for days on end, Clockwork Orange style, perhaps a Marxist molested them as a child. Whatever the reason, this is a true believer. Unlike the other two, this isn't sociopathic self-interest (or the delusion of future such self-interest) but rather a genuine belief that the government is always evil, the market is always right, lower taxes are always better and that completely unfettered markets would lead to anything other than a cyberpunk dystopia.

This is because, for a lot of people, the 'free market' is basically a religion. It lets them be as greedy as they want to be and classify that behavior as good and moral so they refuse to acknowledge that there's any situation where 'running things like a business' isn't the correct solution.

Simple answers are always easier to sell people on than complex ones, even if they're not right, especially if it lets people do what they want to do anyway and feel good about doing it. It doesn't help that we spent most of the 20th Century blasting every with propaganda extolling the virtues of the free market and the evils of socialism.

Honestly I think what the problem comes down to is how we elect people in this country. Our electoral process is heavily biased towards a two party system. Since both parties are corrupt and stupid there's no real way replace the trouble makers. There's plenty of things that the government should be doing, but as long as the system is weighted towards two parties and 'may the richest man win' they're going to keep doing the things they shouldn't instead.

It's not quite that bad, an electric charge-point takes up a lot less space than a gas pump so that should free up some lot space and since their margins on gas are so low anyway they could probably still make a decent profit off fewer customers who stay there longer as long as they can find things to entice those people into spending money on while they're there.

Further, since there wouldn't be an oil cartel breathing down their neck to meet certain price points they could actually charge as much as the market will bear for electricity and make a bit of profit there as well.

For me at least, the problem isn't that so much is becoming public but that so many little things that shouldn't matter can get you in trouble when they're made public. Smoking some weed, getting drunk, whatever goofy shit you get up to, it shouldn't matter if it's made public, because it shouldn't be anyone's concern but your own what you do with your own body in your own time.

Obviously, if you're getting twisted at work or whatever that's an issue, but victimless fun shouldn't have legal or professional consequences...

What was that?

Don't let them know that. If we play it right we'll finally be able to fly without getting felt up by a rent-a-cop again...

1) Why is OK to throw money down the hole on something that might save lives in a highly unlikely set of circumstances when there are much more pressing issues where that money could definitely be used to save lives, especially given that you seem to have a problem with government spending in general given your sig. Unless you only have a problem with the government spending money when it's on things you don't like?

2) Assuming we actually need to be spending money on this, why do we need lasers in this roll at all given that Nike-Zeus was making contact intercepts on the sort of missiles you're worried about in the 1960s?

3) Assuming we need this sort of system and must use pew-pew lasers to do it why should we be using giant, finicky and expensive chemical lasers when we could be spending that money on solid-state systems instead?