It's not that bad yet, but I think it is a lot closer than the average American believes it is. All the mechanisms are in place, they just haven't been fully employed yet because they're being pushed a little at a time so there's no big incitement to revolution.

It's too late for that, 'law enforcement' has unfettered access to Americans within the US. It doesn't matter what OS you use when they can just march in and disappear you.

Tech bros are difficult to classify. I think they might be the new version of the 80s finance bros; people who have control of an industry where money seems easy to make, influence and power come with the job, but who don't really have the expertise that should be required for the job... except mix that a bit with a toxic engineer personality instead of a toxic jock personality.

You need a national program pushing Linux right now. Windows is a backdoor into every company that uses it - Microsoft can install whatever it wants, monitor whatever it wants, exfiltrate whatever it wants.

365 is exponentially worse, because you can't even shut the computer off if you discover it's happening. Microsoft will tell you the data is, as per your local laws, in a data center in an approved region... but it's all accessible from the USA.

It's one call from the Trump admin away from being an active compromise. It's not like the Trump admin hasn't already been dumb enough, multiple times, to pull the trigger on things that only work once and then make everything worse for themselves going forward.

It honestly should... but 'good porn'. It can be the worst sex ed ever, but there's no reason it can't introduce kids to what sex is like - or should be like according to whoever is curating the 'good porn' collection.

It could be teaching kids a general level of comfort with sex to avoid some of the first time awkwardness. It could be showing some proper foreplay. Maybe filter out the 'twist the woman into whatever shape gives the camera a good angle and the guy best access to hammer her anus and then go ATM' stuff. Amateur couples porn that isn't targeting OnlyFans would probably be a decent starting place.

Now show me the parents who would sign off on that and I'll show you a bunch of whack jobs who could never be a large enough group to make it happen.

Whatever you focus on, you will get better at. You can play piano obsessively and never be Beethoven, but you will (eventually) acquire competence unless you have a significant mental impairment.

So why would we expect anything else from obsessive focusing during childhood and adolescence? Use your screens to watch interesting, thoughtful, or informative things and you're conditioning your brain with those things. Use them to indulge your worst social instincts on social media and you're going to get 'better' at that, which unfortunately means turning yourself into a miserable person.

Doing this as a kid, when you don't have a couple of decades of other experiences under your belt to soften the impact makes it worse.

1) The US doesn't have a left, it has a 'less right'

2) Never, outside a few weirdos so small in number as to be irrelevant.

3) Regardless of the first two items, what's your point? "Trump isn't bad because the Democrats would have done this too"? Because everyone is getting tired of that false equivalence.

Russia's been a brutal kleptocracy longer than I've been alive. It's slapped a fresh veneer on a couple of times, but that's about it. Despite this, after the burst of progress after WWII and the decline afterwards, here we are decades upon decades later and Russia is still able to launch rockets into space. We laugh at them because they're generally not consider as safe as other nations' space programs, but they do it. For a while longer, anyway.

Maintaining capability is a lot different from creating new capabilities. The US is diving so rapidly and enthusiastically into the kleptocratic model, combined with a revival of rabid anti-intellectualism, that I don't think it will be able to establish a lunar base before it finds it has lost the ability to engineer one.

I expect they are indicating there's no depth / distance data, but I'd still call it a 3D map because it is the inner surface of a sphere. You can't really compare even the relative 2D positions of things on this map correctly without considering an additional spatial dimension.

You should be sorry for commenting in ignorance. ...Asimov wrote extensively on that exact premise.

That's actually a pretty good time range - Sun-like stars in the Galactic Habitable Zone have been around for about 9 billion years, and if we assume Earth's 4.5 billion year history is typical, 5 billion years ago is about as far back as you'd expect to find little green men.

We are on the verge of being able to scan the atmosphere of exoplanets in bulk. It won't be that long (relatively speaking) before we'll know if there are any planets in our sky with chemistry that suggests a living biosphere. I hope to live long enough to see the results.

Expecting respect from the current US government.

I'm all for keeping a nice environment, but whenever someone trots out the word 'sacred' I want them to fuck all the way off.

You know what should be sacred? Science and discovery. Even before it had a name and was formalized, science was advancing humanity's state. It's the reason we're not still wandering the savannahs and forests of the world in small groups, subject to every random whim of Nature.

It's a bad time to invest in anything knowledge-based in the US anyway.

I had some business reasons to have an account and participate in a few niche subs. The subs were niche enough to mostly be enthusiastic friendly people, but it didn't take long to notice the patterns of the same ideas making the rounds.

Then one of my posts was removed for reasons I don't understand (and didn't try). Whatever the mod was thinking, I just gave up, deleted my historical posts and removed my account. Not worth the effort.

Up to that point, old.reddit.com was working (with or without signing in, mobile or desktop) despite the threat to shut that down. I wouldn't use the new interface unless you paid me a decent wage to do so.

I've quit Reddit before - it's very toxic overall - but now it's not even worth it for business. I doubt they'll ever lure me back again.

Even if you live somewhere with good cops, they're still human beings and will often put themselves above duty.

Only the fear of consequences drilled into them during training followed by robust monitoring and security audits will keep it under control (note I didn't say 'prevent entirely').