Well, this WAS the Apple of: "1984 won't be like 1984" and earlier refusals to bend over and backdoor the iPhone so that the FBI could snoop at will.

So, for the fact that they've dona a 180 to whore themselves out to MAGA and become big brother and do the bidding of dear leader and his henchmen... yes, they absolutely should be scorned and condemned.

No. Actually he wasn't political from day one on the Late Show. At first he shed his Colbert Report persona and tried to do the typical "make nice with everyone" late night host a la Carson, Leno, and Letterman. Thing is, times were changing, audiences were expecting and demanding sharper wit, speaking truth to power, and takedowns of the high and mighty. And ratings started to slide. So Colbert adapted, brought elements of the Report back, but more overt and open than the playing th coy in-character persona from the old days. And ratings recovered. That worked swimmingly until COVID and malevolent mega media manipulation blew ups the entire television landscape and installed their minion to purge CBS of anyone who's not a true believer.

In his personal life, he's catholic and raising his kids as such, conservatively but not to be bigots. He's also a HUGE nerd and MASSIVE Tolkien and LOTR fan. He'll do fine as a writer on a LOTR movie. He havs the chops for it, and he "gets" the material. I knew the MAGAts were delusional from the outset for thinking they could silence him and that he'd bounce back. Though I must admit it's kind of a bummer he'll be holed up in a writers' room instead of back on air immediately on another platform.

Well then, I guess it's a good thing that the sort of big brother wannabe thugs who would demand your passwords under the guise of law would absolutely respect actual correctness and are not in any way the sort who would just toss you in the gulag for your stunt or just beat you with a pipe until you talk in the first place.

One of the lessons we've had as the Federal, multi-branch nature of the US governmennt has frustrated Trump is that the government may be fucking us over, but it's not doing it in *unison*. It's doing it piecemiel, on the initiative of many interests working against each other, just as the framers intended. The motto on the Great Seal notwithstanding, there are myriad roadblocks to consolidating power in the hands of a single individual. It takes time and repeated failures. This is why the second Trump Adminsitration is worse than the first; they've figured out ways around things like Congressional power of the purse, put more of their henchmen in the judiciary, and normalized Congress lying down and letting the president walk all over them. It's a serious situation, although fortunately Trump isn't long for this world.

While that's true, a responsible generation aims to boost the next generation to a *higher* level than the education they received. The world has become more complex and faster-paced, and even if that weren't true, the consequenes of aiming high and falling short are better than the consequences of aiming for the status quo and falling short.

So while I'm 100% onboard with skepticism that technology will magically make education better, I think the argument that "the education I got worked for me should be good for them" isn't a strong argument. What we need is a better ecducation that would have been a better education fifty years ago: stronger math, science, and language skills, general knowledge, and, I think critical thinking and media literacy. Possibly emotional intelligence -- it's kind of pointless to teach people critcial thinking skills if they are carried away by emotions.

There are no economic or security reasons to blockade Cuba, so that leaves *political*.

It used to be believed that bullies were low status individuals who are lashing out out of frustration. But research has shown that bullying is an effective strategy for achieving and maintaining social status. In other words it's a political winner. So the focus of research has shifted from the bully to the people around him who enable the bullying. The inner circle are the henchmen -- people without the charisma and daring to initiate the bullying, but join in when the bully gets things started. Around them are the audience, the people who wouldn't risk participating but enjoy the bullying vicariously. And around them are the much larger group of bystanders, who don't approve but are waiting for someone else to stop the bullying. Then off to the side are the defenders, who stand up to the bully.

Perhaps the least appreciated supporting factor in the phenomenon of the high-status bully is the silence of the bystanders, which is dependent upon the perception of widespread approval. Since you can't visibly see the the line between the approving audience and the apalled bystanders, the silence of the bytstanders is absolutely essential in sustaining the bullying.

Lot's of Americans are apalled at the idea of using military force to inflict suffering on the Cuban people. But that's only politically advantageous *because* of *them*. Tney are indistinguishable from the relatively small number of people who are thrilled when Trump announced he can do anything he wants wtih Cuba. The gap between actual approval and *perceived* approval is absolutely critical in establishign and maintaining any kind of authoritarianism. This is why would be authoritarian leaders are so focused on punishing and marginalizing any kind of expression of disapproval.

OTOH, who the hell responds to, or even reads or engages with in any way, random unsolicited emails from total strangers? If it were me, I'd never have even known anyone had their panties in a bunch in the first place, partly because my email is spam-filtered to hell and back, and I usually don't even bother checking the accounts that aren't my fiends&family, job-hunting, or banking & buying stuff ones in the first place.

Same for WhatsApp and any of its other contemporaries. I don't even answer real phone calls if the caller is not in my contacts.

When did spam filtering and call screen stop being... well... pretty much universal?

Yes. Absolutely. Let's look at that. So... copyright 2002? Then it should have become public domain, 17 years after publication, seven years ago. And no, the term length for patents should NOT have been extended either.

Any other questions?

In 1790, the US population was 94.9% rural. There is no country. in the world today that rural -- Burundi, which looks like blanks spot in the world at night satellite picturs, is 88% rural.

The largest city at the time was New York, with a population of 33,000. Northern Manhattan was near-wilderness, mid-town was farms and country houses.

In 1790 the US was. country you could "police" with sheriffs and volunteer posses, largely to keep the peace. If you got robbed, you hired a private thief catcher. This works in a 95% rural country with just 3.4 million inhabitants. It would be chaos in a country 87x larger.

> Kars for Kids

The weird thing is that they ARE somehow successful. Because for me, that godawful racket may have made me plenty aware of the brand; but every time I hear that noise it fills me with a burning hatred that, every time, reinforces my conviction that they will never, under any circumstances, get one red cent from me, regardless of...

... by the way it's not even a children's charity. It's actually some religious organization masquerading as a children's charity to scam people into giving money to their church. That makes them extra-double-super loathsome.

8GB is plenty of RAM for what most users use their laptops for, if the OS doesn't gobble it up with background tasks. Probably be a good idea to steer clear of Chrome as a browser on these things.

It's actually more like an iPhone 16 Pro runing MacOS in a laptop form factor. Apple basically rummaged through their parts box and pulled out a mobile CPU that'll deliver 50% more single core performance than what's in a high-end Chromebook with only 80% of the power draw. And Apple's got *massive* economies of scale on those parts, so they can afford to deliver a lot of bang for the buck.

The only place the Neo appears to falls short is in RAM, but this is *not* a power user machine, it's for basic office tasks and multimedia consumption. Realistically 8GB is plenty for many users.

In any case, the desktop isn't the center of most users's universe anymore; the switchboard of their life is their smartphone. This is a gateway drug to MacOS IOS integration, and eventually onto the upgrade treadmill. Users will switch seamlewssly between their iPhones and Neos all day long, with data on iCloud and iMusic etc., and when it comes time to upgrade their phone or their laptop, they won't be *stuck* exactly, but if they leave the reservation they lose a lot. But they certainly could upgrade to a *much nicer* Macbook....

It's no wonder the other laptop makers are sitting up and taking notice. Apple has set up a one way conversion ratchet for people tempted by a really nice and perfectly adequate entry level machine at an entry level price.Nobody else has the vertical integration -- chip foundries to device manufacturing, to software platform -- spanning desktop and phones that's needed to do this.

Well, in all fairness though, the airport securitygoons, of all persuasions and sub-categories, have been little more than a value-less pack of tin-plated wannabe dictators with delusions of godhood since well before trump. Mostly trump merely unfettered them to be the massively gaping dickholes they've always aspired to be. But make no mistake; they were scum and guttertrash before trump, just like they are scum and guttertrash now, just lke they will always be scum and guttertrash even after trump and all of the rest of his magatrash are consigned to the ash heap of history where they have always belonged.

'Not the point. They're citizens, full stop. No ICE thug has ANY business detaining, arresting, interrogating, quesitoning, laying hands on, speking to, or in any other way darkening the day of ANY citizen fir any reason for any length of time. They made themselves irredeemable the day of that very first "immigration" raid in Newark, not even a day after the inaugeration, when they... YES... attacked and held US citizens who were working in that plant 100% legally. And then there was when they started ordering US citizens... in at least two cases, immigration lawywer for a double-dose of scumbaggery... to "self deport." Oh, and what about all the people with green cards and education visas they have attacked and kidnapped? Or how about the people they've straight-up murdered whilst they've been rampaging around?

So yeh... Fuck all the ICE thugs and fuck you for simping for the scum.

Was Claude, or any other Anthropic product, developed and paid for under a "work for hire" contract? If not, then you have no point here.