That... didn't happen. What you are probably thinking about is that during COVID, during both the Trump and Biden administrations (so your "sides" comment is laughable), there was a govt group which identified misinformation about COVID (yum yum gullible ivermectin!) and notified the social network owners. Those social network owners (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc) added this data to their own internal checks, and decided to allow, deny, or demonitize based on their internal decisions. So the govt notified about potentially false information, but the decision to do anything was 100% made by the individual companies. And while some countries treat "suggestions by the govt" as law, the US did not (until CBS cancelled Colbert to make conservatives happy, so huh, your "sides" comment does have some validity!)

So "control what people were allowed to discuss" was false until the current administration.

20 years ago, which was a few years after conservatives supported the Patriot Act which greatly increased govt surveillance of US citizens? Yeah, no real changes. The folks who want the police state now are the folks who have always wanted the police state (mostly through some idiotic idea that THE OTHER will be persecuted, but never themselves).

They've been trained to believe that anything said by their bubble is Truth, anything said by anyone else is lies. Which is why yesterday's Truth (release Epstein files) is today's lies (don't release, oops Trump is in it lots and lots).

"The truth has a well-known liberal bias" -a smart cancelled man

Come for the voting, stay for the gerrymandering!

But yes, quite a few Ohio folks (and other Americans) are getting the day they voted for.

But conspiracy theorists need both the government and the media to be simultaneously incompetent (so they cannot be trusted) and hypercompetent (so they can organize a illuminati-level conspiracy including tens of thousands of conspirators with no leaks).

It's the only way that conspiracy theorists can feel in control of their pointless lives, by loudly "proving" that someone else has all the control. I don't get it, but whatever.

Ivermectin is also given to humans who get worms, though in very carefully controlled doses and courses; ivermectin is a neurotoxin, so probably no change for MAGAts but in large doses a problem for rational humans. Ivermectin from Tractor Supply: yeah, sell it, they won't get any more gullible with nerve damage.

Since it doesn't really work unless you already own an Apple phone, I can say that there is no way that this is the "best map app" for most of humanity. There are many mapping apps that work on any modern phone.

Huh, looks like Apple maps now works in a web browser. Not useful for a mobile device, but still far more functional than in the past.

Sturgeon's Law has always been true, and 90% of music has always been crap. But we don't always agree on which 10% is uncrap.

AI has the capability of moving the 90% up to 95% or 99%, sadly. Current AI is great at rehashing the input into different variants, but truly new things (which are any good) are purely accidental, and AI cannot tell when it produces new, good things.

* Illegal immigrants are immigrants.
* Legal immigrants are immigrants.
* In the USA, immigrants (legal or illegal) have kids at a higher rate than citizens. This is what I said in my OP, and it was true then and is still true now.
* A high or low birth rate is neither good nor bad by itself, though the effects of a certain birth rate can have good or bad effects of many parts of life/culture/economy/etc.

The birth rate has been declining for a long time, and has many reasons. However, the declining birth rate has declined less because of immigration (since, again, immigrants have more kids on average). The current administration has deported many immigrants, both legal and illegal immigrants. This will make the (already low) birth rate decline quickly.

Does this make sense? Do you disagree with any piece of this? Because it sounded like you disagreed with my point, despite my comments being accurate for all immigrants regardless of their legal status.

The current administration has deported quite a few legal immigrants who entered properly and were working with work visas or green cards, or were waiting for citizenship. So yeah, "nobody minds legal immigrants" is willfully ignoring what conservatives are saying and deporting in 2025/2026. Do you consume non-partisan media? Because that's important.

Nope, ICE and bigotry. Immigrants have more kids than citizens on average. If it weren't for immigrants, the US birth rate would have been below replacement for years. Bigots know this, so in their fear and hatred they try to racially cleanse us by deporting honest workers and denying birthright citizenship.

Bigots gonna bigot, but we don't need to elect them.

And this tells me that you've never had to find replacement parts for a 25 year old car. I had a '95 motorcycle in the shop for an entire summer trying to get parts for the shaft drive.

Dedicated e-readers are generally designed to work closely with a particular company's servers, and keeping that code running is very expensive. I suppose they could let the code run without maintenance, so that it would either fail someday with zero warning (which people would complain about) or cause massive security issues (which people would complain about). I'd love eternal tablets that work forever with magical fairy dust, but in the real world, 14 years for a device with an expected 5-year lifespan is pretty damn good.

Huh. Many of the paperbacks I bought in the 90s are yellowing and the paper is cracking. The paperbacks from the 70s that I 'inherited" from my siblings (when I moved away from my parents) are all in bad shape. Nothing against paper, but a single-minded "paper good, four legs bad" mindset is just as bad as the opposite single-minded view.

I'm not always a fan of Amazon and their policies, but I gotta respect a 14 year support window for portable devices.

DEI (Diverse Energy Infrastructure) is truly evil and anti-american!