I can print to my Bambu printer locally by using LAN only or an SD card, not sure why you think I need their cloud to print at all.

Also https://orca-slicer.com/ is not offline, some kind of a fork of it is offline.

Completely disagree. 100% disagree. If I need something that my printer from Bambu cannot do I will get another printer. For what I need it though it is great and keeps me from *wasting* time. My time is what is important to me more than money.

I like their products. I just want printing without fuss and without having to learn every detail about leveling, etc. Their product works for me and I do not care about its openness, it is about as important for what I need it as my headphones being open sourced (not at all). So this product is for my use case, not for people who want to control every aspect of their printer and every software feature.

IF they decide to make it prohibitively expensive to operate their hardware, then I will go back to a less capable hardware kit.

I got an Idea. How about locating and deleting data centers that host these things? Deleting them from existance.

Democracy is for retards.

Government did this. All of this. Government regulated so much that only a rare few can afford to compete.

This is late stage statism. Retard voters are to blame.

Like you.

"chase kids on ebikes across parks and playgrounds."

The problem is they aren't in parks and playgrounds riding their "e-bikes" (they're more electric motorcycle than bicycle). They're on the road with cars and major traffic. I see it, particularly, in more affluent neighborhoods (Redondo Beach, Manhattan Beach, Santa Monica).

And we're not talking about a few... They're everywhere -- particularly after school hours and weekends.

So looks like AI is taking over everything, every platform, every product, every service, every job, it's a plague, a virus, a disease of some sort and apparently there is no cure, someone is always pushing it. Is it AI that is pushing AI?

Stop huffing trumps farts. If you want to know what bad policy looks like, it's the current administration. It's objectively awful. Project 2025 was awful before the election, and it still is awful, and it's what trump is doing. Runaway inflation? You mean like what we have now? And war? You're a fucking dipshit to even attempt to bring any of this up as if somehow Democrats are bad. What is happening how is the "this is fine" meme come to life, and you're the dog in that picture.

Why do you think I support anything this administration is doing? Why do you even assume I'm a Republican? I can assure you what Trump is doing is absolutely worse than what Biden did. I can also assure you that you didn't lose because your candidate had a vagina. Believe it or not, both can be true.

They lost their fucking minds because Democrats put up a woman to vote for (twice), and apparently America is very misogynistic.

Ah yes, this old chestnut. Any excuse to not accept any bad policy responsibility. That election result was stupid obvious. Biden was an unpopular president due to a number of bad policies (the most glaringly obvious being a failed border policy) + runaway inflation. Republicans jumped on it and Harris did nothing to distance herself from Biden, even when asked point blank what her policy differences were. Stop kidding yourself -- gender didn't matter at all, and you continue to keep thinking in these terms, you're going to lose again when you run another shitty candidate "of the correct gender" and wonder why you lost again.

40% Informative
    20% Troll
    20% Overrated /. has long become a voting system for political opinions that the moderators agree or disagree with, 'Troll' or 'Overrated' means that they disagree with the opinion, yet the opinion is a fact in this case. It is a fact that taxes are introduced by majority voting to take something away from a minority. It is a fact that income taxes were introduced only to tax the top earners and it was 1% for incomes of 3000USD and over, 6% for incomes of half a million and over, it is a fact that can be independently confirmed.

The opinion in this case is that such behavior is confiscation and that it is not a sound foundation for the economy and that eventually these taxes expand to the rest of the population because this is how taxes work.

So I wonder is it the fact or is it the opinion that the /. moderates here? Neither facts, nor opinions are a way to troll anyone, if we mark everything that we disagree with as 'troll' then there is no discourse at all.

So are you saying that a large number of people ganging together to take possession of property that is already owned by a small number of people is a fair way to run society, fair way to tax people, just invent new "taxes" on the fly on property that has been taxed already or that hasn't been sold yet, so there is no transaction, no money exchanging hands? Is THAT how "happy places" operate? Is that a sustainable path towards happiness?

This is just property confiscation, I understand that poorer people do not care about wealthier people paying anything, that's how taxes and subsidies are pushed through in the first place. However call it what it is - it is confiscation of private property. As a side note, the so called 'income tax' also started as a wealthy people's tax. It was 1% and it was only applicable to a small fraction of the population who were earning over 3000 dollars a year or so and 6% of additional tax on incomes above 500,000USD, which was a tiny number of a small fraction of people.

You can go ahead and figure out what happened to that idea of only taxing 1% of a tiny number of people over the last 113 years without my help.

Have you even seen the original series? Racism, bigotry, classism, human rights, ethics, not to mention nationalism, were all dealt with. TNG went further, particularly with Riker's penchant for rather open sexual interests, and of course DS9 dealt with everything from war crimes to the undermining of civil society. Voyager and Enterprise in their turn covered similar issues, though perhaps not always as ably as the first three series did.

I've never seen TOS, but I've seen all the rest. And in the end, it's an issue of subtlety and focus (which all comes down to writing). It's something the modern day PC/woke generation seems to woefully not understand (or just not care about...there's writers on record out there as going out of their way to put these issues centerstage, which wasn't the original Star Trek focus, which was telling a good story while sprinkling in progressivism). The perfect analogue of this is the "do better" speech from the Captain America TV show, where he basically rants at the audience -- that kind of thing didn't exist in 90s star trek. Like I've seen people try to compare the fact a biracial kiss exists in less than a minute of an hour long episode that had nothing to do with race be comparable to full modern day episodes that sledge you over the head with messaging for like 70% of the episode. And there's really no comparison. Modern day Star Trek writing has become so obvious, it's drifted into somewhere between "cringe" and "annoying". It'd be like if a liberal could actually read Atlas Shrugged (which is actually a great book) without getting an "ick" factor from Rand's political soapboxing (particularly in the final chapter). I don't blame them if they can't -- Rand only knows how to sledgehammer.

Your argument all rests on absolute average wages ($7 vs $30) and ignores that the overall purchasing power for Americans hasn't increased for decades (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/).

You'll note that all the articles making this claim come from 2018. Things have changed alot since then: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se...

Wage inflation is also currently still outpacing nominal inflation, and has been since mid 2023: https://usafacts.org/answers/a...

So the current production version of Mark Zuckerberg is building a newer version with a more intuitive human interface, I get it.