Shooting kids is the Number 1 reason kids die in the USA.... do those laws work ?

Oh please...this stat just is bogus.

They took the ages up past 19yrs old, I believe to 20yrs....

Legally you're adult at 18...so immediately that should be cut out of the mix, but also with ages 17-19...you're going to start counting heavily on the gang bangers who are criminals into drugs and drug wars...

Those are NOT children...they are criminal who more and more are being charged as adults.

If you took what most people consider to be actual children...1-10yrs or maybe even up to 12 yrs old....those "gun deaths" numbers plummet.

When those numbers are looked at...more kids die by car accidents.....

So please...get of the fucking high horse on children gun deaths...the REAL NUMBERS show a much different story...

And if you are not from here or don't live here....bully for you, you don't have to live with our "freedoms".....

But frankly I LOVE it here and love my country.

It seems strange to hear your rants while we still have people illegally risking death to get here.....

Look you don't have to like it. You don't have to live here in it.

And if that's your choice...fine. But otherwise it isn't your fucking business how we live here, now is it?

Why do you keep complaining about it if none of this is your problem much less none of your fucking business?

I had forgotten that Apple Card was even a thing because it's so fucking stupid.

Why do you think it is stupid?

I like it...I get cash back on purchases, it gives me on central place to readily check what I've charged each month (THIS is big for me, easy to track and manage budget)....and I get 3% off and 12 mos interest free on Apple purchases....

I pretty much only use one other card...my Costco Visa that gives me cash back on gas (5% at Costco pumps, 4% others )...and cash back on Costco purchases, which along with my Exec membership adds up quickly over the year....

What do you feel is stupid about it?

Or...easy solution, tried and true, age old.....don't use Facebook or any of those other social median apps.

We got along just fine before them....and I can tell you from experience....never being on them, hasn't harmed me a bit, in fact I think it overall has had a positive effect on my life....

I'm sure someone will find a way to hack a work around.

Fuck it....

I'm gonna just go back to smoking real cigarettes....

It was MUCH more fun anyway...you got to carry a lighter all the time, play with fire....and flicking ashes at the bar while talking to a girl just felt....right.

Hell, maybe go back a bit further and buy loose tobacco and roll my own.

Pure analog pleasure.....geez I miss it.....

There is a nicotine source that isn't at all age locked. I guess the teens will move on to these "cigarettes" you hear about from time to time.

They even come in cool Menthol.

The laws are a joke by people who apparently flunked "Hello World".

They demand a mechanism, but don't even offer guidance on what mechanism it should be. You can technically comply while having no 2 Linux installs following the same API, making it effectively useless.

A better approach would be a purely optional userspace package (perhaps call it "Californication") that returns 1 dword with the age information encoded in it. Each person installing it gets to decide what that encoding will be.

Yes, it returned 0x0BADF00D, that's the code for 18+.

Someone else might decide 0x0B00B1E5 means 18+.

"We used to have super high taxes for the wealthy and corporations."

Did we?

Because what I see is a high marginal tax rate really only in the postwar years. ... And anyone who begins their economic model in the late 40s is a moron or a liar.

Remember anything important that happened, say, midcentury?
Something that may have left the US fabulously wealthy, particularly relative to all the other industrialized countries who were shattered & left in ruins by the same event?

Anyone who points to that time and stupidly says "durr, we should do it THAT way" conveniently disregards the (hopefully unique) economic environment resulting from multiple, cataclysmic, economy shattering wars and the luxuries available to those left standing thereafter.

Some early adopters of "Here's a complaint one, pretty please use it" included small operations like PGP. Others were small companies then, later to become large.

Not too long after, there was the whole flap around DeCSS for DVDs. The medium itself is nearly dead now, but it was individual efforts that rendered region coding largely a joke. The Chinese vendors whose DVD players didn't give a damn about region codes came second.

I can buy alcohol because I don't live in Saudi Arabia. I can have an OS that doesn't know or care how old I am because I don't live in California. That law literally doesn't apply to me. If I make a distro where I am, why should I bother with age verification at all? It's none of my business if a friend of a friend or a complete stranger decides to download it and install it on a machine in California. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

You can get fired at the drop of a hat for no reason at all. Bosses blow their top over being 1 minute late. Fill out these forms you just filled out last week and again online before you can see the doctor. IRS knows exactly what you made and what you paid in witholding, and what you owe but YOU need to compute it, better not be wrong! Don't be late! Rent and mortgage take up an ever increasing portion of your monthly income (if any). 23 calls a day, mostly scams. You have health insurance even though it was damned expensive, but somehow you still owe a heap of money you don't have after a single visit to the ER.

Meanwhile, you're getting badgered about your "credit score". If you let it get bad everything gets more expensive and it gets harder to get a job (for some reason).

Yeah, you're less likely to actually die today than years ago, but your place in life is far more precarious than it was even 20 years ago. More things demand your attention.

s'okay. Biology is the only scientific discipline where division and multiplication are the same thing.

uh, no. You didn't win.

Places like Bell Labs were more like university research centers than corporate dressing on mandatory-overtime grind. They were not expected to directly turn a profit as business units of the company, because what they did was to lay the groundwork for technology that the other business units could then adapt into products. The return on the investment paid into running them took years or even decades to realize. Without the pressures of needing to turn quarterly or even annual profits they weren't working their researchers to the bone and they were fostering a culture of internship for college students into joining their ranks as researchers to perpetuate the institutional knowledge.

The floppy disk ("diskette") was originally developed as a microcode load device for the 370/145.

We are obligated to ignore stupid laws. To mock them, to flaunt them and ultimately get them removed.

We are not sheep.