Yes, sadly, they do not cure mental illness.

Have you ever see pictures of the land in question? It's a high altitude volcanic wasteland. There's no agriculture. There's no industry. There's no commerce. And the only "housing" is for the occasional overnighters (or overDAYers) because astronomers work on odd schedules. But no one LIVES there.

Some unnamed native Hawaiian was undoubtedly the "first on the land". But whoever that person was, they were "first on the land" in the sense that Hillary was "first on the land" at the top of Everest. And neither he nor Norgay personally own or control THAT mountain.

Both OSX and iOS are good. And if you're willing to lock yourself in the walled garden, the ability of laptop, tablet and phone to work together is very nice. I'm not so willing; in fact, I don't own any Apple hardware these days. But Apple should be lauded for their integrated system, and then excoriated for their paranoid money-grubbing which keeps them from allowing non-Apple systems into the garden, and for their inability to build their own secure-but-flexible cloud services.

Apple designs amazing hardware and great software. But when we get to online/networked/cloud... It's kinda shit, yeah. Which is notable because other companies have done extremely well in that space, to the point that Google's good-but-imperfect network services get more public complaints than Apple's dear-god-why network services. We just expect it now.

Truth Social I'm sure. As hard as it is to believe, there are still people who think Trump is a genius, and still want to "own the Libs".

Oh, they're still there. The difference is that instead of paying pennies on the dollar to offshore; some businesses are willing to cough up a whole nickel for an agent who's had the voice coaching to not *sound* Indian. But if you pay attention... I'm thinking specifically of some recent interacions with Amazon support... the occasional "prepone" or "do the needful" still slips out... in a texan or southern or even midwestern accent.

Also, the Philippines, especially Cebu, have become huge for offshore tech support over the last decade or so. It has many of the advantages of India... good schools, english education, hard working population, developing ecomony where the exchange rate makes everything cheap by western standards. But because of its historic close ties to the US, the english taught is closer to US english in the first place, so there's less of an accent and they know more of our cultureal lingistic idioms with which to sound more authentic.

How are these people not in prison?

Look at the company Tim Cook keeps these days

Eh, kinda, established case law, even citizens have limited rights near the border (with "near the border" being interpreted quite loosely). US citizens can refuse to give a password, but the govt can refuse to return the device and can make your life very difficult. This case, where data was destroyed, doesn't fall under existing case law, but if it gets to SCOTUS as long as a Republican is in the white House I expect SCOTUS to give all power, all the time, to the executive branch and none to us lowly peons, err, citizens.

Of course, ICE is known for laughing at laws and judicial rulings, so YMMV, IANAL, good luck and stay safe.

So where is the prison time for the crooked cops and prosecutors and any (lying) "witnesses" who all perjured themselves to frame and railroad the guy into prison?

(haha... I know... qualified immunity makes it all but impossible to punish officials who abuse the public like this)

When was the last time you bought a game on disc, took it home, put it in, and were able to immediately start to play it? It's been so long for me, I honestly can't remember. But I would guess not since Vice City or FF12.

I've bought the occasional PS game on an impulse at B&M stores over more recent years. And you know what? I've not been able to just load up and play ANY of them. I put in the disc, and it starts a 20 minute process of installing itself to the hard drive first. THAT part, I don't really mind since games play faster off the HD/SSD anyway. But... the other half, besudes the installer, is the tens-of-gigabytes worth of updates and patches that come after you install but before you can play... ... because ever since the proliferation of residential broadband, game studios have been half-assing it. They don't bother with QA anymore... because WHY bother? The customers will find the bugs for FREE and you can patch them after the fact instead of paying for QA engineers. And more and more often, games are not even launced as the complete game. 'Can't be bothered to meet your deadlines? Can't finish those missions or item assets on schedule? No worries! We'll just release them after the fact online. And... BONUS... we'll SELL that incomplete and missing content for MORE MONEY by calling it DLC or a "Season Pass" or other whatnot.

Even with the disc... even if you don't need to be online to play... you're not playing that game if those servers are switched off. Or... I guess technically you COULD play that game. Remember

TOTP has the huge disadvantage of being a pain for non tech folk to understand and use. The selfie-video is less secure than TOTP, but more secure than SMS texts. Passwords are reused between different sites.

If you are happy with your security, keep using it. And if you have a friend or relative who use ones password for every site, switch them to the video.

40% of Canada's land area is covered in forests. It is simply impossible to "manage" that much forest, and it's utterly fucking absurd to suggest otherwise. And to try to take climate change out of the equation is just a way of misdirecting away from the actual fucking cause; GHG emissions raising surface temperatures.

When will humans stop buying the most trivially fucking moronic red herrings? What a disreputable idiotic species.

It's almost as if allowing emissions to ramp up with little meaningful effort to control them is having the inevitable consequences predicted decades ago. But let's not deal with that, because it's hard. Instead let's have the President of the United States demand Canada hold back the tides.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.