And in charge of basically everything. What in the name of fuck did people expect? Cheap eggs?

People don't want the news. News consumption continues to drop. People always thought of news as a bit of a chore. Something you were supposed to keep up with but not anything you enjoyed. It got turned into 24/7 entertainment crap when Fox News took over but that's not news that's propaganda. And even that isn't very popular.

People in America are in the habit of blaming individuals for either systemic problems or what our Epstein class is doing. It's a bad habit and I wish we would stop but well, there's all that propaganda encouraging us to do it...

and let the citizens of each state decide what time zone the state will be in.

Yeah, there's two main problems:

1) People entering the wrong fields. For example, medicine really needs workers, at all levels, but not enough people are going into it.

2) Certain manual labour fields, like field work and home construction, because... well, I think we all know why there's a shortage of workers in those fields.

I wanted the high-end Qualcomm chip because it has a much better modem and I have lousy reception in my area. Switching to the high-end Qualcomm chip was night and day. People could actually hear me on calls and I stopped getting text messages 6 hours after they were sent. My bedroom is no longer a dead zone.

Samsung has an equivalent phone but they put a small battery in it either because they were being cheap or because they didn't like how much it made the thing weigh. Whatever the case the battery life is horrible on it. Maybe it's better if you're not sitting in a dead zone where the modem has to work harder but I am.

There is the red magic but at the time I bought my phone it was closer to $1,100. Not sure why but it's dropped down to 800. That's not great but with RAM prices it could be worse. But I did only have to pay $500 for the phone I have now because it was right before the AI apocalypse.

Right now if you want a high-end Qualcomm chipset you just don't have a lot of good options on Android besides that red magic.

I'm just seeing the world as is. If you actually stare the real world in its eyes with all the children being murdered by Elon Musk so that he could be a trillionaire and bombs dropped on children in Gaza so some stupid little nationalist asshole can live out some weird fantasy or watching kids in America starve because some people just get off on that or because it doesn't matter how hungry your kid as long as somebody else's kid is hungrier well if you actually face that reality you turn out like me.

I guess ignorance is bliss and all. So go ahead and enjoy yourself. But I think the reason you commented is you know how bad things are and you know how horrible and horrific they are and you're trying your best to act like things are normal. You're the dog surrounded by fire in the meme.

Maybe survivorship bias will work out for you like it always has. Good luck and try not to think too hard

Conventions are a lot of fun but not everybody can live in a major city with a major convention. It doesn't really do any good for you to fly out to LA for Comic-Con. You're going to meet a lot of cool people but then they're going to scatter to the four winds.

Facebook makes it possible to meet people in your area with your interests. So you can find a d&d group or a bunch of guys to go fishing with or something like that.

This is especially important in our modern dystopia. Increasingly game stores are shutting down because private equity owns all the property and game stores just aren't profitable enough for the amount of square footage they need. All those tables that you are playing at aren't merchandise you are buying. And a store wants to get you in and then back out again so they can get more customers in. You hanging around doesn't result in enough extra sales. Yeah you might pick up a mini or two or a expansion book but then you're going to hang around using up space for basically the whole day.

Also people have to move a lot. People have to upend themselves and move to other cities all the damn time now because Jobs go away and you have to live where the work is. So if you're new to an area Facebook lets you find the community you want to hang out with.

I'm really sad to see the complete lack of nuance in this supposedly science focused forum.

Facebook can be an evil company whose product has good uses.

Actual social media instead of Doom scrolling can exist.

Social media means connecting people with like-minded interests in a positive environment.

Most websites don't do social media. We don't really have a good term for what they do.

That is on purpose. It's the same reason right wing extremists brand themselves as conservative.

If you're going to do something horrifically evil you don't just set yourself up as Horrifically Evil LLC. You pay a marketing firm to confuse the public because the public does not like nuance.

I think a better answer would be for everyone to use the same time number, and adjust their hours of operation to fit local standards. For this I pick Zulu time for purely historic reasons, though it's really no better than any other arbitrary choice. And scrap leap seconds. Every once in awhile you might have a leap minute...either that or use leap microseconds as needed once/year...say at the spring equinox.

Yeah, let 6:00 AM be defined as the local sunrise time! (I live shaded by a hill at astronomic sunrise.)

Well, I really think running everything on Zulu (Greenwich) time makes more sense. The number you put on the time is arbitrary. It's not like schools consider the schedules of the parents anyway, and everything that's automated runs 24 hours/day.

Well, time zones make sense unless you want to run everything on Zulu (Greenwich) time...which would have some advantages.

You're being silly. If the time is stable, then you'll set your hours to what it is. There's nothing special about the time number "10:00 AM". Businesses could have summer and winter hours if they chose to...at one time that wasn't uncommon.

This is a complete non-story because this is dead in the Senate. Really tired of the news media wasting my damn time with stories that are meaningless.

Brick and mortar stores want daylight savings Time changes because their Big Data models indicate people spend a little bit more money in their stores during daylight hours. So we're not going to be able to get rid of daylight savings time because every time it comes up they just splash a bunch of cash around.

This is most likely just a fundraising average by a bunch of people in the House of Representatives

Well, I can think of some uses if it were actually up to the job. I'd often like to have it read something to me, but it would need to be able to understand the emotional background.
E.g.:
Strange thing are done neath the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold,
The arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold,
(etc.)

Or possibly have it read me The Lord of the Rings. And I have some fond memories of the radio program "X minus one".

But I *really* doubt that current AIs are up to that.