If they want to make Pluto the state's planet, and the Sun the state's official black hole, I don't really care.

What I do care about however is that my tax dollars pay for those bozos to work on idiocies like this instead of on real issues.

I did mention Patrick Stewart didn't I?

Although you never know, I might actually like the theater. Because Patrick Stewart is a superb thespian.

He's not a very good actor. He's not a particularly interesting person. His only claim to fame is having been Captain Kirk - something Patrick Stewart was orders of magnitude better at - and as Shatner himself says, it was only 3 years of his life.

But at least he's not obnoxious.

You should try Lemmy.

He's never made any money in his entire life. He means well, but he's a bit of a hippy, he doesn't like to work much and he has two left hands.

One day he bought an old minivan and told us - my sisters and I - that he'd start a small business delivering groceries to old people in remote villages, and would we like to invest in his company.

Can you guess how much we gave him?

We love our brother, but we'll never see our money back. Been there, done that. So we passed up this investment opportunity.

Well guess what: we ain't big shot Wall Street investors, but Reddit seems just about as adept as my brother at making money - and just about as likely to turn a profit for anybody investing in it.

Nah... Only regular people and billionaires who scam other billionaires go to jail. All the other super-rich criminals just put on a 3-piece suit to go apologize and promise it won't happen again in front of a senate hearing committees.

but I watched Dune I and I found it really awful: Timothy Chalamet is to Paul Atreides what tofu is to meat, Jessica Ferguson has about as much acting range as a lettuce and Oscar Isaac - the only Star Wars character ever to manage the feat of making Jar Jar not so annoying after all - is as convincing a Duke Leto as Cheech Marin would have been.

It's truly a mystery to me how Villeneuve managed to make such a meh Dune after his absolute Blade Runner 2049 masterpiece. I expected so much of him after Blade Runner - because really, THAT was the challenge of the century and he pulled it off brilliantly - and all I got out of his Dune was an urgent need to rewatch the godawful Lynch movie from 1984. That's how bad it was for me.

So I'm very happy to give Dune II a pass.

Politicians don't do anything that won't re-elect them. They don't need to understand the consequences of the laws they pass, they only need to know if it makes them more popular.

Meaning you have to remember that if politicians pass ridiculous and dangerous laws in the bible belt states, you can squarely put the blame on the voters in those states, because if they didn't want that shit, the politicians wouldn't do it.

We already are in the dark ages of the internet.

The golden age was the mid-nineties to mid-2000s. Today it's all privacy violation, surveillance and dystopia. The age verification thing is just more of the same.

You could also go to town and find yourself real boobies in glorious 3D and touch-o-vision.

Making porn hard to access makes it all the more attractive to kids.

When I was a kid, sometimes we found a raunchy magazine with naked girls in it. As soon as we'd leave school, we'd hide in the woods to gaze at the ladies - and delight in the forbidden nature of what we had in our hands as much as the content itself. Because it was rare. Now porn is everywhere and it's just "meh..."

It's the same reason why neo-nazis in the US are a fringe phenomenon that most people look at thinking "What a bunch of idiots", whereas neo-nazism is gaining ground in Germany where it's actively repressed: make it illegal and it becomes attractive. In the US, it's totally legal and people can see just how much they don't want any part of it.

Requiring age verification to keep minors off porn will achieve the exact opposite.

He doesn't know about energy infrastructure. He knows about investment.

He's invested in those Texas companies he visited. What you're reading on his blog is PR.

He's totally not astroturfing for Infinium because he has a vested interest in its success, and totally not rooting for Mars Materials because he's invested in the company.

Remember people: don't be fooled by Bill Gates. He's still the psychopathic ruthless entrepreneur he was when he was running Microsoft. He hasn't turned into a harmless old man concerned with doing good around him. His Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, just like all the other billionaires' foundations, has nothing to do with philanthropy and everything to do with hiding their wealth and not paying taxes. If you're not convinced, just browse its portfolio and see for yourself tne number of disgusting corporations it's invested in.

And here, old Billy is selling you his latest investments. He doesn't give two shits about clean energy.

But here it's a banal photo of a nice looking woman with a hat. There's no nudity, it's not gross. They could have used a man instead but they happened to use a woman. And even though the photo came from Playboy, they took care of cropping out what could be considered offensive.

So I don't know... All I see personally is a picture of a nice-looking, attractive human being that happens to be of the female persuasion - because at least biologically, last I checked, most humans fall in one of two categories, one of which being female.

Is it so wrong? What if they have used a man? Would men have had their pants in a knot since 1996 as women have over this photo?

But okay. I'll admit, maybe I'm too old to understand the butthurt here. There's a lot of other kinds of butthurt I don't really understand either lately, and I've just decided to shut the hell up and go with the flow personally, because there's no talking rationally to people about certain things anymore.

Therefore, in the interest of not offending anybody, I suggest using photos of alpacas and fire hydrants. I know some sexy-ass alpacas and some pretty hot fire hydrants!

The social elevator has stopped decades ago. You can do your very best at school, then in college to get a good degree, yet it all but guarantees that your fancy diploma will land you a job other than flipping burgers at McD.

Add to that AI, which is poised to make a lot of jobs students are studying for today obsolete, and you have a generation or two who just don't give a shit anymore.

I know that because my neighbor's teens also skip school all the time, and when their parents confronted them, they literally said "Why bother..." And the sad thing is, all their parents could say was "You still have a better chance at a better life with an education", which isn't exactly a great motivator.