All questions that your local gun store clerk would be more than happy to answer for you.

I'm fairly certain Google Maps also lists busy times for specific locations, at least it does for restaurants and stores.

This is all very on-brand from Florida, a place where according to Republican logic, this is not supposed to happen because open carry should've brought all those supposed "good guys with a gun" out of the woodwork. Gee, I can't possibly imagine why more guns isn't making us safer. /s

I thought it was a series of tubes. *smirk*

It's also clear he's never actually tried running his own business. The way that the deck is stacked against you isn't that you'll be targeted and run out of business (what is that anyway, a TV trope?), it's that you'll have a hard time achieving profitability because small businesses get raped on wholesaler pricing, and the bang for your buck when advertising does not scale down linearly.

Plus, unless you're staring a business to compete against something people really hate (like say, the cable company), you really do have to be some combination of cheaper/better than your competition, or people will just collectively shrug and wonder why they're supposed to be giving you their hard-earned money instead of to some business with an established reputation. Call it the incumbent advantage, I suppose.

So, UBI is great in the context of a false dichotomy where it's either that or starving. That's not high praise, and it's also not what I asked. Would you be happy living on UBI? Or better yet, would you take pride in having a child who amounted to nothing more than a life on a government stipend?

You're still laboring under the delusion that UBI is some sort of stopgap for a better situation that might come along eventually. That isn't what the politician in TFS is proposing - he's saying if AI fucks up capitalism and we've got a society with a bunch of people who are now rendered obsolete, UBI isn't going to be a temporary solution, it is the solution.

This is just government cheese all over again, except now you can choose the flavor.

That a euphemism for swirlies in the public toilets?

Here in the US, you can get a learner's permit at 14 in a few states, and in the vast majority of states at 15 (with a few outliers at 16). I'm really not seeing how a freakin' car is somehow more age-appropriate than a smartphone. Anything you don't want your kid to access on a smartphone can be locked down with parental controls. Can't really say the same about sending 'em off into the real world with a vehicle.

I think some schools do ban phones during what should be students' "free" time. That's great if your goal is to send a message that you can't trust them to be responsible with their device usage after laying down rules as to when it is and isn't appropriate to use their phones. Also, making something into contraband almost never backfires. /s

Would you want to live on UBI? Realistically, if your proposal isn't something you'd be happy with for yourself, it's just another "let them eat cake" proclamation from the ruling class.

People not being able to fully participate in capitalism because their labor is now worthless, is not an easy problem to solve.

This.

You won capitalism and still aren't happy? Cry a river about it to your therapist. It's not like you can't afford one.

The Bird scooters in my town have been looking pretty shabby ever since they went under new ownership after their bankruptcy. I'd recommend evolving into a Lime person instead.

That Bird should've pivoted to AI a long time ago, too. Then the scooters could say things like "Your mom's ass is so fat, when she goes into the store she's still blocking the sidewalk - just like your lousy parking job!"

A shoe factory can't easily pivot to AI, but they're not a shoe factory. Many American companies selling a branded product line act more like IP holdings and logistics businesses, with the actual manufacturing taking place overseas.

Realistically, the flaw in their scheme is mostly that the AI gold rush isn't likely to be profitable, not the act of pivoting to something else. Most of these type of businesses act like private equity firms anyway, so the actual end product can be anything they believe is worth investing in.

Because often these folks aren't actually talented and are just being opportunistic criminals. Lots of things aren't secured particularly well in real life too, but we don't offer well paying jobs to every kid who learns lock picking from YouTube, either.

Admittedly, because these companies being breached have their systems connected to the global internet, they should be taking security a bit more seriously since the culprit may not always be an American or from a country with an extradition treaty. But at this point the risk should be obvious, and the fact they're not properly securing their systems is a matter of not wanting to hire and pay for competent IT staff, not a lack of talent. To use a car analogy: You can't fix the situation of some idiots driving around on bald tires because they're too cheap to buy new ones, by assuming that the problem is that the auto service industry needs more tire installation technicians.

This.

I did the Raspberry Pi thing for awhile and they've got more than their share of annoyances. The big ones are:

Wi-Fi reception sucks. Most people aren't using Ethernet at home and the Pi's built-in Wi-Fi antenna is marginal at best. Yeah, you can work around this by installing a USB Wi-Fi stick, but those alone can end up costing as much as Walmart's Onn streaming box.

Last time I tried to get paid streaming services to work on a Raspberry Pi, it involved manually installing some DRM support that was extracted from Android to make streaming work through the browser, and I'm really stretching the definition of the word "work" here. I doubt the situation has improved much.

Finally, Raspberry Pis are still prone to randomly shitting their SD cards. You basically have to keep spares around to re-image when the unlucky day comes along that it just decides it's time for a new SD card. This will most likely happen on an evening when you're exhausted from work, just put a plate of food on the coffee table and want to sit down for a meal and a movie.

Walmart's Onn box on the other hand, is $25 (as of this posting) and you can just install Kodi from the Google Play Store. It also has clients for all the major paid streaming services, and those also just work without any headaches.

Killing whales for oil seems pretty bad until you realize that we also kill people for oil, too.

It's probably a good thing we can't communicate with sperm whales, because diplomacy would immediately break down as soon as they discovered what we named them.

Unless of course they also named us something like "dork monkeys", in which case both of our species would have a good laugh about it.

Look, we know governments have ulterior motives, but that doesn't change the fact that kids actually are accessing things online that they shouldn't be. It doesn't cease to be a genuine problem just because the nanny state solutions have thus far all sucked.

The reason there isn't much pushback against these age gate laws is because most rational people do agree that kids shouldn't be looking at porn, we just disagree on how that can best be accomplished. Yes, parents should be using the damned parental controls that are present on every modern smart device these days, but many of them are not.