I had and used a library card extensively when I was a child. As an adult though I have rarely been to a library. I've been fortunate enough to be able to just buy the books that I want to read. My wife who is more frugal than myself still uses the library apps to check out audio books and such, but I can't be bothered. Between having to wait for the book to be available, and then having to complete it in a set amount of time, I'd just rather pay and skip all that. I'd love to better fund libraries, perhaps we could swap that political donation question on tax forms and swap it out for making a donation to a public library fund.

One of my families vehicles has this feature and it seems to work pretty well. The automatic system doesn't switch off the high beams as fast as I would like, much of the time, but it does the job far more reliably than I do myself. I've never seen it fail to turn off the high beams or take more than a couple seconds to realize it needs to take that action.

Ditto the Ditto, been using FireFox for nearly two decades now. NoScript and uBlock Origin are essentials in my opinion.

The premise that the Palestinian civilians should even just be happy to be given Gaza after their lands were taken in a war demonstrates how skewed your views on the conflict are. Israel has created this situation over decades in what very much appears to be a drawn out genocidal process.

Israel has essentially from the very beginning fomented conflict and incited violence to justify taking more land. And Israeli settlements have not just been about Israeli's making use of unused land. They have deliberately been positioned so as to disrupt the ability of Palestinians to go about their daily life.

The Palestinians in the Gaza Strip chose Hamas because despite them being a terrorist organization, they also proved to be effective at running a government. If Israel would have actually treated the Palestinian civilians equally and given them an effective government this conflict might have ended decades ago.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a politician in the last few decades that hasn't essentially been a celebrity. As much as they claim authorship for various bits of legislation, it's fairly obvious that they have large offices full of people that do all the work for them. Which work, seems to largely consist of copy pasting what corporate spons.... err lobbyists hand them.

That's a disingenuous argument. The USA wasn't created until 1776, by which time most of the indigenous peoples had been wiped out by disease. In fact the first successful Colony that would become part of the USA eventually wasn't even founded until well after most of that death had happened. That death was primarily from European diseases, to which the local populations had no resistance or immunity, and frankly the Europeans didn't know how to stop that from happening and there has never been any evidence found that those disease were spread deliberately.

That isn't to say that the USA, once founded, didn't do its best to exterminate the remaining indigenous people. Including deliberately spreading disease and continuously breaking treaties. But it is arguable that the Russians did it dirtier as they were in the industrial era at the time.

Even when it was happening it was obvious that Putin wasn't leaving power. He had completed his allowed number of terms in office before he had to leave it. So he installed a hand picked successor as his puppet and then took back the position when he decided it was time. The plan was clear enough from the start that we were reading about it in the news the day that the puppet was installed.

Is that question a joke? I don't know if the Germans/Nazi's used firebombing as a specific tactic, and I'm too lazy to look it up. But I can tell you that they razed most of Europe, which displaced and killed millions of people. Then even worse, they systematically rounded up Millions of other people that they didn't like for one reason or another and deliberately worked them to death, experimented on them, and or executed them wholesale. Ultimately murdering more than 11 Million, if memory serves. There is good reason that Nazi's are upheld in popular culture as a sort of ultimate evil.

That said the tactics and technologies of the time are basically what necessitated large scale attacks like firebombing and the nukes. As horrifying and atrocious as those actions were they arguably spared more lives than they cost by ending the war more quickly. We'll never be able to know for sure though because we can't save scum in real life.

The USA is certainly no paragon of virtue, even now we have a sizable portion of our population that wants to empower a lunatic to take power and go straight to a dictatorship. I would frankly be surprised if the number of people in the world who have a very dim view of the USA are not in the bullions.

Came here to say Defense in Depth as well. Rushing patches without adequate internal testing is always a gamble. These systems should be designed such that they aren't a house of cards.

The problem is that the Cultural Problem isn't nearly as limited as people like to think. That glorifying power and its abuse has been pretty much the modus operandi of the Trump family for ages now. And we have probably half the country at this point wanting to make him a literal King. That's not necessarily an entirely new thing either, it's been going on since the founding of the USA. Although it's not like the USA started it either, it is essentially the human condition. Even our religions teach the same principle that being a criminal to get ahead is acceptable so long as you can put it in the right light. Just look at Moses, murdering a man just because he was mean to the workers, then leading an uprising against the lawful pharaohs, taking his followers and sending them into another land to plunder, rape, and murder with the explicit intent of genocide. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples from other religions, that's just the one I'm familiar with from my own experience.

Do you recognize the common theme here yet? Nobody likes feeling like they are oppressed and getting the raw end of the deal. So they will glorify people and stories about those that have managed to make it even if they did it by breaking the rules.

Hahaha, I've never been particularly worried about this as well because anyone who manages to peep on me gets a self inflicted punishment clearly not worth the thrill.

The Press is protected by the constitution's protections for the press, but that is not actually the same thing. The constitution is talking about anyone having the freedom to us their devices and systems exemplified by the printing presses of that day and age. The constitution was not calling for the protection of news organizations that we today call The Press. This is a common mistake that people make, and it does often amount to the same thing. However people also tend to then forget that these protections for the press actually apply to everyone, not just those who belong to formal news organizations.

Where have you been the last few years? He was already convicted on 34 felony counts, found liable in a civil trial for sexual assault, and found guilty of other fraud charges as well. Those aren't accusations, those have passed on to decided fact at this point. Sure there is a lot more stuff he's only accused of at this point but the GOP has been bending over backwards to try and delay everything as long as possible on the hope of getting him back in office. It's a gamble for sure, and it might pay off, but in the event that it doesn't they could be in for an existential reckoning.

I don't want to comment on whether it is right or left leaning folks screwing things up here, but I think the US politicians and Agencies are a part of helping this experiment fail. States can decriminalize stuff all they want. So long as the Federal Government says it's still illegal banks will avoid having anything to do with businesses trying to distribute such products. That means that the only suppliers are going to be small businesses trying to cope with handling large quantities of cash and all the danger that brings, and traditional drug dealers. That all works to keep prices high and means that the supply is always of questionable quality. Using drugs which aren't properly marked for dosage is a recipe for over dosing if there ever was one. And drug prices being higher increases the likelihood of people turning to crime in order to afford their habit.

Again, you can look to the example of slave labor. Just because a business was viable doesn't mean that it is eternally viable or that it deserves to be. As society's mores change so to do our rules. If we decide to make 32 hours the definition of a full work week then that's just one more time the goal posts will have shifted, and business can just deal with it, or fade away. The point of government is to provide services to the people that give it authority, not businesses. Sure, some people own businesses, but we aren't obligated to maintain the viability of those businesses in perpetuity, just because it was viable for a time.