Remember, the unit of selection is not the individual or phenotype. The unit of selection is the gene.

From their point of view, that means if you have two kids, they are "worth" as much as yourself. Throw in their kids, and other peoples' interests might be more valuable to your genes than you are! Your genes to you: "Time to stop taking their food, and die instead."

Nobody is surprised when a drone gives their life for the queen. So don't be surprised if you see the same computation happening elsewhere.

Texas is just mad because they're innumerate.

Suppose you say "I'll punch you in the face for $5" and I say "ok!" So you punch me in the face. Ouch! That hurts. And then I hand you $5.

Was that theft?

Or am I just an idiot?

Before I was a Microsoft-hater (I didn't start hating them until 1989 while getting fed up trying to use LIM EMS as a means of dealing with MS-DOS' limitations while jealously eyeing all the 68k machines' (Amiga/ST/Mac) flat memory), if asked who is the worst of the worst, I would have had to say Nintendo. Their efforts to prevent independent development on Nintendo hardware (both through technical and legal means) made them The Enemy of the day.

When I bitch about iOS being a video-game-console-inspired personal computer, such that mainstream users are limited to single source bottleneck for software, the saga behind TFA is exactly the kind of shit I'm talking about. It's disgusting and intolerable for hardware makers to limit what the user is allowed to do with the hardware they bought. And especially from a 1980s perspective, if you're a user, then there's also a reasonable chance you're a programmer, so you might want to program your computer.

Most egregious of all was the lockout chip. I see the beginning of so much evil, such as the concepts behind DMCA's 1201, as emerging from the industry's reaction to the video game crash of 1983. Nintendo's decision to do such a thing, has turned out to be one of the more important moments in computer history. They never should have been allowed to get away with this shit, and had we nipped it in the bud in the mid 1980s, we would be better off today.

My position used to be that it should be legal for manufacturers to do these dirty things, however wrong it is. Until the late 1990s, I thought DRM should be legal. I think the attacker generally has the advantage, so whatever technical means are used to prevent third-party development, it will be defeated and all the effort put into it, wasted. I thought the practice would go away because everyone's attitude would be that security-through-obscurity doesn't work, so they're just adding unnecessary expense and unreliability.

But with DMCA's passing (and now over a quarter century without repeal, WTF!?!) I no longer think that, since that moved the law from neutrality to favoring the monopolist. And so: the lockout chip, and all its modern descendants, should be forcefully outlawed, and any company caught using such things should have all their copyrights PDed and all their remaining assets seized and liquified and the proceeds given to EFF to be used to sue the next offender to death. Repeat avenging cycle until this particular evil is extinct. ;-)

Thanks for "radicalizing" me, Nintendo. You were my very first "oh, fuck those guys" and your 1980s actions helped form my 2025 opinions. And maybe I shouldn't, but I blame you for all of today's locked-down hardware, more accountable to manufacturers than to owners. Nintendo, you taught me early in life, before the iPhone even existed, that I will never buy an iPhone.

Finally, some media I can play in my 1999 car.

And Trump is winning that contest, showing that he is the best at taxing. While Americans are heroically paying 145% tax to their government, Chinese are only weakly being taxed at a ridiculously low 125%, probably due to their renowned/stereotypical government efficiency causing them to have less need. This shows that Trump's penis is larger, because he was able to write a larger number than these ignorant communist peasants can envision.

The animals in question now are just called "patients", "the public" or "customers".
Another blow against oppressive regulation! /s

I'm holding out for the Tron lesson, because it'll be the coolest.

That said, what made Harris extreme?

She's a black woman.

If this is conservatism, it's the furthest-left conservatism we've ever seen. FDR wasn't this far to the left.

No no no, the story leading up to this, when Trump raised taxes on all Americans, is what hits the consumer hard, as you describe.

This story (retaliatory tariffs) is about harm to American workers, due to chaotic, arbitrary government interference in the markets making their industries lose customers. (Either because the industry used to export before the retaliatory tariffs were invited by Trump, or because its customers used to export, etc.)

So the consumers you're worried about, also just lost their jobs.

Trump clearly thought of everything. When things get expensive and you can't buy them anymore, it makes a lot more sense to feel that helplessness when you're unemployed. For people who still have jobs to not be able to afford things, would be a weird and painful situation, so Trump's ingenious 4D chess policies are engineered to avoid that.

The draft language reveals Waymo may also share this data to personalize ads

I haven't ever been in a Waymo yet, but it's one those things that sounds neat. I would try it at least once, if it came to my city.

It's NEVER going to happen, though, if I think Waymo cabs are torture chambers full of ads. And that rumor has now been officially started. If you work for, or partially own Waymo, your top mission has just become: kill that rumor and make sure that everyone is convinced that Waymos will always be ad-free zones.

Don't fuck this up.

There's also the "Detox" exercise of leaving your phone at home. and only taking it with you when it's absolutely necessary for example to work if you have to use a third factor authentication application to get into your computer)

Just switch on "airplane mode". No incoming calls, message notifications, or app push crud. (If you've got any apps, other than alarm/calendar notices for your schedule reminders which YOU set up, that poke brain-derailng messages at you, disable (or delete) them.)

Then get into the habit of not going to it for anything non-essential while in this mode.

Now you can use it for a key, or wallet, or whatever, if you must, without it constantly killing your attention span with interruptions. Yet you can always turn it back on to make a call, or in the timeslot you reserved for handling this trivia.

No incoming calls, though. (What a relief: No phone spammers!)

Question from an American - What is a "pension"?

This has been going strong 65 years, why change a winning strategy?
"A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, unless it is acted upon by a force." I'll let you draw what inference you may from the highlighted clause. The majority of Americans are too dense to do so.