It would seem you have some sort of emotional issue that's causing you to draw some irrational conclusion about what was intended by a story in 2500 year old text that tells the founding mythology of an ancient middle-eastern society. No one in their right mind would read the passage from 1 Kings and interpret it as describing pi.

Can you show me on the doll where the priest touched you?

I know it's a common mistake but you're confusing The Simpsons with The Bible . Surprisingly while they are held in similar regard in western culture, they are, in fact, very different works, and should not be confused.

So ECB can indirectly identify users from their payment data, or some non-ECB entity can directly identify users?

I have a hard time imagining they wouldn't have a way to accomplish this as they wouldn't want the system to become a tool for human trafficking, Russian oligarchs, drug cartels, terrorists, etc.

Am I just being paranoid?

THEY didnt really create the problem. The Spanish drained the lake to build a larger and much worse city there. Their clear cutting of trees in the area exacerbated existing flooding issues that had been mitigated by an indigenous dyke. Spain should probably be responsible for footing the maintenance and repair bills.

The problem is that you need to have the other components to plug into the motherboards.

First the shitty crypto bros horded all the consumer GPUs for a ponzi scheme, driving the prices to explode by several hundred percent. Then, as consumer GPU prices start falling the fucking AI bros buying up all the commercial GPUs create a shortage of ram chips (because theyre going on the GPUs) causes the consumer RAM prices to spike by several hundred percent.

Now "Ram is cheap" is not true.

Its about time for me to build a new main desktop workstation. Ive been holding off for a couple years already. Its starting to feel like they want to prevent people from having desktop towers so they can get everyone on privacy raping all-in-one mobile style devices to force everyone back into the old time-sharing client-server model. Perhaps so they can have all the data on all the people all the time.

Welcome to the future where you will own nothing and be happy.

imgur doesn't work. I can't figure out which of the dozens of domains to allow to get an image to show up. Use postimg or something more sane.

Sadly, there aren't very many deserted islands on which someone could choose to live. If the island is unpopulated it's probably borderline uninhabitable, or has been set aside as a conservation area by the government over which it's sovereignty is claimed. I'm not sure if there are any uninhabited islands that are also not claimed by a member of the United Nations, so that's another issue with your suggestion.

There really aren't options for someone to go live alone as a hermit in a remote area without either being extremely wealthy breaking the law.

Thank you for illustrating the fact that California is fake progressive . Pretending to be progressive is fashionable there, but the real progressiveness is non-existent. It's shallow, lacking in substance and personal conviction. California in a nutshell.

More importantly, the US produces sweet crude but only has refineries for sour crude, which we import from Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela. The refineries were planned and built before the Obama-era shale-gas fracking revolution that led to the US being the worlds largest oil producer by volume, to refine the crude that was available from nearby countries.

So, we export the more valuable sweet crude to countries that have sweet crude refining capacity(mostly in Europe IIRC) and import the cheaper, dirtier sour crude to refine in the US. This is another reason why we can't consume the oil we produce.

Median income is the point at which half of the incomes are higher and half of the incomes are lower. It is not the income that most Americans have. Based on 2024 data (the most recent data available) only 12% of households fall in the range of 75k-99k.

source

Was there a measurable effect on traffic fatalities? What about the rate of injuries?

In the rural area where I live the highway is a single carriageway. If you cross the center line you risk a head-on collision. If both vehicles are going 10mph over the limit the resulting collision is 20mph faster. Even traveling at the maximum speed limit(50mph) any head-on collision is the same as hitting a wall at 100mph.

Speed absolutely DOES affect traffic safety . To say otherwise is to deny basic physics.

Some states, such as Colorado, have strict regulations on rainwater catchment. https://extension.colostate.edu/resource/rainwater-collection-in-colorado/ The state considers the rainwater and watershed to be their property. I guess if you collect more than 110 gallons, you would be stealing that water from the Gov't/California/Arizona. It looks like the law just changed this year(2026). I remember it being more restrictive in the past.

According to Scott Manley's calculations it's actually possible.

I just watched this video where he does the math last night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlQYU3m1e80/

"If they're available, you can request free earbuds." You'd better hope your device still has a headphone jack...

Since most smartphones don't have 1/8" headphone jacks anymore most wired earbuds for smartphones have either Thunderbolt(iPhone) or USB C (iPad, Android) jacks instead. I would be surprised if the author of the article/summary was unaware of this, but the allure of a snarky and misleading quip bemoaning the loss of 1/8" headphone jacks on smartphones was too great to pass up, or was so great it interfered with the data retrieval function of their brain.

You sound like a eugenicist. I love the irony that your post starts with a lower case "u" as you claim that non-Americans are less intelligent than Americans.