It's extremely difficult to manipulate and voter suppress when the voters can just throw something on the ballot and pass a law. They will try to manipulate that process by either making it very very difficult to get something on the ballot or by changing the wording on the ballot measures to confuse people. I remember a bunch of states did those cigarette bands and they were all sorts of weird wordings and rulings and tricks and shenanigans to try and prevent them.

One of my favorite TV commercials of all time is a bunch of old people sitting around talking about something scary. They never once say what the scary thing is just that they're very very scared. At the very end it ends with a impassioned plea to vote no on propositions such and such, which was really just net metering AKA paying people for the solar energy they produce in excess. If I remember correctly the proposition passed.

To be fair though that only worked because the concept of net metering is a little esoteric. But something is blunt and obvious as how crappy data centers are now everyone knows we don't want them and it's just a question of whether or not we are still enough of a functioning democracy to stop them.

Billionaire corruption and voter suppression is how it became GOP controlled. There are no red states. There are some States where people are allowed to vote in some States where people aren't.

In the last election they were over 3 million illegal challenges to signatures and registrations. Every single one of them requires someone to drive down to the courthouse on a weekday during business hours and prove that they are who they say they are even though there is virtually no fraud except from Republicans occasionally casting their dead wife's ballot.

Meanwhile blue leaning swing states have multi-hour wait times to vote some as much as 7 hours.

Finally 90% of the media is owned by billionaires. Google the phrase sane washing.

Donald Trump said it himself, this is the last time you need to vote. Very soon they won't care what you think or say or do. And when you try to turn the violence they will just use drones to kill you

The military hates it because it lets them spy on their people.
The Congress loves it because it lets them spy on their people.

The military can't spend $1B until Congress writes the check. They've been writing a blank one, each year, since before your dad was born. They've been accepting "Well, whatever" as the answer to "Where's the money going?" for that same amount of time. They've been telling you, as a citizen, that you can't question the money they're sending. They are also the ones who collect that money. Congress, not the military.

The term "datacenter" is also losing much of it's meaning and that is having consequences elsewhere.

For the past 4-5 years a local company has been building a new office/datacenter building as they are growing. Now this isn't some AI company building a multi-hundred-megawatt facility, this is a local company who does colocation, web hosting, servers, you know, all that stuff the term datacenter used to stand for. Doubly so that this company decided to make at least an interesting looking building instead of another flat, windowless white box.

Now on local social media this building has been swept up in opposition with folks repeating boundless conspiracy theories and wanting the whole thing shut down. You try explaining the difference but it's deaf ears. You even try and tell them "hey, their existing datacenter has been like 1 mile away for a decade and there is another, larger datacenter down the block that's been there better part of 3 decades and nobody has complained.

  Now on the one hand I also can empathize with them a bit, the layman isn't going to know the difference between those and these new AI centers but people are ready to spike an actual local company, a small business that has grown quite a bit, the exact thing we should be celebrating.

Once again I don't so much blame AI itself but it's proponents and the companies behind them. So far their tech and business is making so many things worse faster than it can do any of it's so called improvements.

Going around the legislature is only the beginning of democracy. The next step is actually changing the legislature. That's expected to happen at the next opportunity, barring armed intervention at the polls.

Come for the voting, stay for the gerrymandering!

But yes, quite a few Ohio folks (and other Americans) are getting the day they voted for.

You can't even engage with the question, what a joke.

Everyone is 12.

In general, "damping pleasure" is not most people's experience with GLP-1 agonists. What it does is more like separate pleasurable experiences from having an urgent need to continue doing them.

I'd believe the Iceland numbers. I had a doctor once who wanted to get me on antidepressants, and got mad when I didn't want to, and completely ignored my pleadings of "But I'm not depressed", "I enjoy life", "I'm probably the least depressed person you'll meet", etc. He just really liked his patients to be on it. The Icelandic medical system is very into anything that "medicates symptoms" rather than treating diseases. For example, during COVID, it was essentially impossible to get drugs like paxlovid, but they made parkodín (tylenol with codeine) over-the-counter.

In most modern societies medication is usually a last resort.

I'm going to take a wager that if I were to open your medicine cabinet right now, there would be painkillers in it, which you take as will when you get headaches, body aches, etc.

Yes, different people have different baseline hunger levels. This is well accepted in the scientific community.

So a common way to make your resume stand out as a programmer is to contribute to open source projects. It's one of the ways open source projects get contributors in the first place. The problem here is you've got people doing AI slop trying to get their names on lists so they can apply for jobs.

So for years and years there was a shortage of technology workers and we didn't need a union to bargain for higher wages. We got Big heads because of that. What's more because people are so incredibly stupid around computers we tend to get really really big heads. That makes us want to avoid collective bargaining because we want to see ourselves as amazing rugged individuals who don't need no help.

So you have a combination of a period of time that has long past when we genuinely didn't need unions and the arrogance that comes from having a skill that for some reason the public at large has a tough time with.

To be fair video game programmers and artists are much higher up on the totem pole than code monkeys and project managers but they also suffer from the problem of being artists and artists really just want to do their art. They're pretty unhealthily obsessed with it.

Decades and decades of outsourcing

Please read: Cooked bean variety.

The "beans in your pantry" data you're looking at are probably per serving. Here, let me grab the beans in *my* pantry. Roland BLACK BEANS Habichuelas Negras Supreme Calidad. Net weight 15.5 OZ / 439g. Serving size: 130g. Calories per serving: 180.

There's 453,6 grams per pound, so that's 0,968 pounds. 439/130 = 3,15 servings, times 180 calories = 567. In 0,968 pounds, that's 586 calories.

Or look online. "172 grams of black beans (cooked, boiled, unsalted) contains 227 Calories." Do the math.

I'm not sure exactly how you expect something that is 70% carbs (of which are 36% fibre) and 26% protein to be low-cal. Do you think it has the moisture content of celery or something?

They are running at the absolute bare Bones possible to be a functional industry at this point. They're just isn't anyone else they can fire without not being companies anymore. This means that if you're looking to unionize they can't really credibly threaten to fire people because they are isn't anyone left to fire.