The USA used to be a reliable protector for it's allies. Trump has changed that...in my mind, for the worse...but history will tell. Like I said...shit was horrible when the USA was looming?...OK, well, you'll soon see what life is like when the USA loses interest in your region. The CIA has done shitty things in the Middle East, but let's see how shitty they get once the USA doesn't really give a shit because we have enough oil and Trump doesn't respect alliances....especially since hypersonic missiles now cost the same as a luxury car.

These people have no shame.

I have 2 kids. We've had many conversations about sex. I've told them they're not allowed to watch porn or consume inappropriate content. However, I also educate them as to why they should wait until they're 18 and frankly, when they want to talk about sex, I make it a boring academic discussion about science and reproduction...so instead of "ooh nice titties"...the conversation goes to lactation and hormones produced and how babies rely on mother's milk during their early years. Sex isn't naughty or scary. When they ask me inappropriate questions, like "how often do you and mommy have sex?"...while it's tempting to remind them there's a lock on the door for a reason....I just politely tell them that's personal information and I don't want to share it. My strategy is to make sex clinical and educational, not naughty.

Both of my pre-teen kids have watched porn without our permission before and had questions. I told them they cannot do that again, but I went through and explained every detail. That naughty cumshot? I explained about the different organs in the male anatomy and the different fluids produced and their purpose and framed things from the perspective of people starting families...which is easier for them to understand. However, I didn't shame them. I'm honestly glad they saw it because then I don't have to explain to them what ejaculation is. Both of them feel very comfortable asking me questions and ask me a lot of them (my wife is less comfortable, but really appreciates how I answer it and how much sex ed trivia I remember).

So rather than let the internet and their friends be their sole source of information, I've set up an environment where they know they can trust me and ask me whatever and I'll never shame them. I prepare my children for the world we live in, not demand the world change so I don't have to teach them what sex is.

But to the point, sex is like traffic. We teach our kids to look both ways before they cross the street. We teach drivers to be mindful of pedestrians, especially children. We don't go around banning cars to nerf the world for our children.

Porn is irrelevant to feminism. People who oppose legal porn for non-religious reasons have issues with sex....no other reason. It's like drinking. I don't like to drink, some do. However, I don't go around claiming people who enjoy drinking legally are harming women because I am uncomfortable around drunk assholes. I just accept they're into something I find disgusting and not good for me, personally. Porn is a profession with a market. It's no more degrading than driving an uber or cleaning someone's toilet....but often more lucrative. However, as you've stated, there is no problem. It's a fucking job, or more likely, a side hustle. Some jobs suck, some are awesome. To me, sex performers are like any other performers...being a struggling musician seems like a worse life than showing your tits on OnlyFans, IMHO. However, it's a valid line of work providing a service than harms no one. Women who claim porn is sexist are trying to control others.

Porn is often pretty gross to many people. That's OK. It's not for you. Most of the hit songs on the radio are gross to me. Every major religion is gross to me. I don't go around telling everyone we need to ban annoying pop music or religion. I don't even shame people who are into it. I'm happy they find their joy so long as they don't harm me or try to make me partake in their gross behavior.

The massive problem with the Feminist movement is that it isn't official. Anyone can claim to be a feminist and we have a bad habit as a society of taking them seriously. In contrast, Catholicism has well defined doctrines. Someone can't go around applying their personal prejudices based on being a Catholic...they can't say "Fat chicks are gross and heretical to the Catholic Church"...you could ask any priest and they'll quickly tell you that person is full of shit and doesn't speak for them.

Unfortunately, because feminism is an idea, not a specific movement, there is no authority to say what is feminist and what isn't. So you're some awful misandrist who blames men for all your failings in life?...and I know a LOT of women like that. You can go around and call yourself a feminist. You can say you speak on behalf of feminists...and everything that irks your personal prejudices...like women more attractive than you monetizing their bodies and receiving adoration you will never receive is sexist and anti-women.

And my tribe, the liberals, have a VERY BAD habit of not questioning people that speak for them. So many are too afraid to be called sexist, so it's easier to just let Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, Gail Dines, Susan Brownmiller, etc rant and say absurd bullshit like "Porn is rape"..."All performers were coerced into performing (which is technically rape)"...and Brownmiller's famous "porn is practice for violence against women." None of these horrible people bothered to talk to the performers. Dworkin was ABSOLUTELY nuts and thought marriage was rape...all men are rapists...all bi/heterosexual women are anti-feminist traitors, etc.

Liberals let female incels define a major wing of feminism because they didn't have the common sense to question their obvious bullshit. Few would let Andrew Tate speak for the male gender....yet Andrea Dworkin's obviously stupid bullshit is taught in universities...not as being actually correct, just as being an alternate idea.

And their worst nightmare has come true. Porn is legal. Porn is VERY prevalent. EVERYONE enjoys porn. Guess what....violence against women is down...rape is down. Misogyny is down since everything they wrote. Why?...PORN HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PROBLEMS WOMEN FACE!!!!! The crimes against women had a lot more in common with crime, in general, which has stronger roots in socio-economic issues. Turns out the way to reduce rape is to same way to reduce robbery and murder...don't ban the porn, but increase economic opportunity....provide substance abuse treatment...lock up the mentally ill with criminal intent that can't function in society.

I suppose to be fair the UK isn't so much better. The police can make these requests themselves. They have an oversight group, but they rubber stamp everything it seems. Hundreds of thousands of requests per year.

So companies opened literally thousands of data centers that use huge amounts of electricity and water both of which are increasingly in short supply.

Now they have basically unlimited money because they are dangling the possibility of freeing the Epstein class from their long-standing dependency on us filthy filthy peasants.

But the problem is they don't quite have unlimited power and people have noticed how terrible the data centers are for their communities so they can't just keep building them.

So because of that they are starting to have to prioritize what their data centers are going to support and to do. At least in the short term. They are still building data centers here and there and they are gradually getting state laws changed by buying off State legislatures.

The Epstein class is always been really big on buying up the state legislatures. They are big and powerful enough that they can use them to ram through anything they want no matter what voters actually want but they aren't so small and numerous that they're too expensive or troublesome to buy up. And it can be hard to buy a national government completely.

First off about 60% of people never move from where they were born. Of that most of them move for work.

Second of all it is perfectly fucking reasonable that you should be able to move to any major city or town and not have to worry about whether or not you have water. Having water is one of the most basic elements of functioning civilization.

I am so sick of the absurd length and excuses people come up with to blame individuals for systemic problems just so they can preserve some kind of weird libertarian worldview where we don't actually have to take care of each other.

Meanwhile the reason is reservoirs are low is largely because we fucked up the water cycle with climate change. We didn't need to but it helped corporate profits and it got a few men closer to being trillionaires

Most Chinese phones use Android. Google could be huge there, but choose not to be.

They gave the Chinese government access to Chinese user's data years ago. They don't seem to have an issue with governments gaining warrantless access to their systems.

If you care about privacy, go Android. Google does require warrants, and doesn't operate in China due to the warrantless access requirement.

It will, you can side load them.

And Apple's total lack of third-party GPU support on Apple Silicon (beyond a few kludges that use them for AI workloads, but no display), losing the current Mac Pro is no great loss. :-)

And yeah, the BlackMagic stuff I've bought lately is Thunderbolt. Also, most of the software for things like real-time switching runs on Windows anyway, so I'd imagine the market for that on Mac is not huge. And so much stuff gets brought in over networks these days (NDI, SRT, etc.) that HDMI ingest probably isn't that interesting anyway. You're more likely to use a dedicated encoder box that provides streams over Ethernet. My production work has been doing it that way since the pandemic.

Exactly this. Apple neutered the Mac Pro by making all of its additional functionality useless.

Years ago, they announced that they were killing support for kernel-space drivers. Then they announced a user-space replacement, DriverKit, that is basically half-assed when it comes to PCI, providing no support for any of the sorts of PCIe drivers that anyone would actually want to write. The operating system already comes with built-in support for USB xHCI silicon and most major networking chipsets, nobody builds PCIe audio anymore, FireWire support is dropped in the current OS release, and video drivers can't be written because Apple didn't bother writing the hooks.

That last one is the showstopper for PCI slots on a Mac. The main reason people bought Mac Pro or bought Thunderbolt enclosures was to support high-end video cards. With Apple not supporting any non-Apple GPUs on Apple Silicon, the slots are basically useless. I'm not saying that PCIe is useless by any means, just that the neutered, broken, driverless PCIe-lite hack that Apple actually makes available on macOS is basically useless.

I suppose you could theoretically provide DriverKit support for RAID cards, but really at this point everybody just uses external RAID hardware attached over a network anyway, so the number of people who would buy a Mac Pro for something like that is negligible.

And I guess in theory, you could port Linux video card drivers over if the only thing you're doing is using GPUs for non-video purposes (e.g. for AI model training or offline 3D rendering), but tying it into the operating system as a video output device is likely impossible without additional support from Apple, and nobody is going to bother to do that for the tiny number of people who would want that when you can just run Linux on x86 and not have to do all that porting work. After all, for those sorts of tasks, you probably aren't benefitting much from the OS or the CPU or memory performance anyway.

So basically the Mac Pro was dead on arrival because of Apple dropping support for very nearly every single thing that the Mac Pro could do that couldn't be done just as easily with a Studio (without even attaching a Thunderbolt PCIe enclosure). And once the Studio came out and had a comparable CPU in a much smaller form factor, the writing was on the wall.

More than that, the Apple Silicon Mac Pro is a sad toy that was never truly worthy of the Mac Pro name by any stretch of the imagination. It doesn't even have ECC memory or upgradable RAM. IMO, Apple really should have just been honest with its pro users and said "We no longer care about you," and then they should have dropped the Mac Pro as part of the Apple Silicon transition, rather than shipping something so massively downgraded that is so many miles from being a true pro desktop machine.

Anyone who is even slightly surprised by it being discontinued was obviously not paying attention.

What phrase would you use to describe that, other than "spoke incoherently"? I mean, I can think of some medical terms that might apply, but that's how I would describe his debate performance. He wandered off the subject, had trouble forming a complete thought... basically like a Trump speech, only he paused a lot when he lost his train of thought instead of rambling about illegal aliens eating pets or whatever.

"Genocide is the deliberate, systematic destruction—in whole or in part—of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group". Israel is not targeting civilians, but terrorist organizations. The point of genocide is to target the people, not the combatants. Are they committing atrocities?...maybe, but that's not genocide. Words mean things. Also, that's not the correct use of the world "literal"

Is Israel the good guy?...in my mind, yes, but I am not confident of that and I am open that maybe I'm wrong.

However, what I am very confident about is that Iran is far worse. They do target civilians. They fund groups that target civilians. The only reason Iran isn't committing LITERAL genocide against the Israelis and probably most of the Sunnis is because they lack the ability, not because they're more ethical.

You're comparing nations against your ideals, not reality and their peers. Israel spend a fortune trying to precisely attack specific targets. Iran has no qualms about killing non-combatants. That's a major difference between a democracy and an authoritarian theocratic regime. Again, I'd rather be a civilian living in a nation attacked by Israel than Russia or Iran. No one WANTS to be attacked, obviously, but at least civilized nations make the effort to do the right thing. They fail often...and that's the horrors of war...but the uncivilized ones? Nope...Russia will happily bomb daycares, schools, and civilian powerplants to simply weaken the resolve of their opponents. If Iran has the ability to, they'd do the same. I have no doubt about that.

If you want to discuss things like adults, with actual facts, we can...if you want to be vague and inarticulate...well...go back to your bubble. I'd rather be living Guam or Puerto Rico than Ukraine or any country in the Soviet Union...what about you? Again, be an adult and read the original point instead of mindlessly regurgitating your propaganda. Has the US done bad things? Absolutely! Were they worse than the Soviet Union? NO! Russia? NO! Do we have to go back to before the 20th century?

Read about world history and you'll see the USA sucks...but far less than it's peers.