One of the lessons we've had as the Federal, multi-branch nature of the US governmennt has frustrated Trump is that the government may be fucking us over, but it's not doing it in *unison*. It's doing it piecemiel, on the initiative of many interests working against each other, just as the framers intended. The motto on the Great Seal notwithstanding, there are myriad roadblocks to consolidating power in the hands of a single individual. It takes time and repeated failures. This is why the second Trump Adminsitration is worse than the first; they've figured out ways around things like Congressional power of the purse, put more of their henchmen in the judiciary, and normalized Congress lying down and letting the president walk all over them. It's a serious situation, although fortunately Trump isn't long for this world.

- hosting child sexual abuse material and taking a year to remove it
- creating a means for sex traffickers to turn their victims into $$$
- providing a means to sell sexual content of others (e.g revenge porn) without consent

I've seen a lot of comments here in discussion to gig work where it's considered exploitive for Uber/Lyft to not provide health coverage and other benefits, minimum pay accounting for externalities like vehicle wear, etc. Does OF provide any of that?

They can certainly be "better" than other porn sites in ways (although the lack of any physically present third party seems like a major exploitation risk, per links above) but that isn't itself some moral achievement. The guy who peddles crack is doing less harm than the guy who peddles heroin but I don't think he's due for any citizenship awards.

And OF is absurdly profitable so if they really wanted to engage in a humanitarian mission to make porn "ethical" they have lots of financial buffer to combat exploitation. It's clearly not their objective.

Certainly. But then, those non-Brazilian companies can mock-comply. Then Brazilians will continue using them all the same, in standard Brazilian fashion, with companies and people pretending to obey the law, the government pretending to enforce it, and everyone knowing everyone else is pretending but having no way to prove it.

Case in point, those external companies seem to be using Cloudflare's georestriction rules, which is fine with us, as everyone is quickly learning to use VPNs.

No, that's not it. It's a cultural difference. In first world countries skirting the law is something people do exceptionally. In countries such as mine, it's a way of life and survival, everyone skirting the laws because the laws aren't really meant to be followed in full, they're mean to be tool the government uses when it deems useful. If someone were to try, they'd be crippled to such an extent they'd be barely able to do anything, at all.

First world countries are so, in great part, because most laws are sane, mean to be followed by everyone, and most everyone does so. Although, granted, there's nowadays a level of "third-world-ization" going on there, what with more and more laws being approved that are similar to our more than they are to your old laws. I hope this process may stop and reverse at some point, but if not, well, once your legal system is fully corrupted, we'll be able to provide you with plenty of suggestions, tips, and tricks, on how to evade unjust laws, as we have literal centuries of experience doing so.

I'm Brazilian. The law has an article that allows regulatory bodies to define something as not being affected by the law if that's in the public interest, so it's likely the government will use that to classify everything they have no means to actually police as being fine. Which means this law can be actively enabled or disable to affect anyone the government wants affected, meaning mostly companies with deep pockets who can be fined for lack of compliance. Going after those without any money would be a waste of time for enforcers.

Also, Brazil has something first world countries lack: a population used to disregarding laws we dislike. People here have already developed plenty of workarounds for age verification in websites, and once it starts popping up on phones and PCs, will do the same. Since most already use a pirated Windows, they'll simply have that pirated Windows come without age verification.

Allow me to rephrase with exactly the same meaning, "The problem is customers could receive a $2 discount for coming in on the low-demand day." Are you sure that is... bad?

Stuff like this effectively winds up very economically progressive because people for whom that discount matters will go to the extra effort to get it and people with high-incomes won't care and will effectively subsidize the low price. What do you think that $2 coupon from the newspaper is doing? Setting up exactly the same $16.99 vs $14.99 price differential.

Conversely, consider on Saturday the person who absolutely needs the tomatoes to finish a dinner already in progress can pay the high-demand price and the person who was just thinking about things nice to keep stocked in the pantry can wait, vs pricing low so that the item is already out-of-stock from indifferent shoppers when that person who really needs it walks in.

It's easy to sell people a story in which price differentiation is a means of screwing them over but it is just as often to their direct benefit. People implicitly accept the good of this for things they already experience like coupons, but anything new sounds scary.

While that's true, a responsible generation aims to boost the next generation to a *higher* level than the education they received. The world has become more complex and faster-paced, and even if that weren't true, the consequenes of aiming high and falling short are better than the consequences of aiming for the status quo and falling short.

So while I'm 100% onboard with skepticism that technology will magically make education better, I think the argument that "the education I got worked for me should be good for them" isn't a strong argument. What we need is a better ecducation that would have been a better education fifty years ago: stronger math, science, and language skills, general knowledge, and, I think critical thinking and media literacy. Possibly emotional intelligence -- it's kind of pointless to teach people critcial thinking skills if they are carried away by emotions.

There are no economic or security reasons to blockade Cuba, so that leaves *political*.

It used to be believed that bullies were low status individuals who are lashing out out of frustration. But research has shown that bullying is an effective strategy for achieving and maintaining social status. In other words it's a political winner. So the focus of research has shifted from the bully to the people around him who enable the bullying. The inner circle are the henchmen -- people without the charisma and daring to initiate the bullying, but join in when the bully gets things started. Around them are the audience, the people who wouldn't risk participating but enjoy the bullying vicariously. And around them are the much larger group of bystanders, who don't approve but are waiting for someone else to stop the bullying. Then off to the side are the defenders, who stand up to the bully.

Perhaps the least appreciated supporting factor in the phenomenon of the high-status bully is the silence of the bystanders, which is dependent upon the perception of widespread approval. Since you can't visibly see the the line between the approving audience and the apalled bystanders, the silence of the bytstanders is absolutely essential in sustaining the bullying.

Lot's of Americans are apalled at the idea of using military force to inflict suffering on the Cuban people. But that's only politically advantageous *because* of *them*. Tney are indistinguishable from the relatively small number of people who are thrilled when Trump announced he can do anything he wants wtih Cuba. The gap between actual approval and *perceived* approval is absolutely critical in establishign and maintaining any kind of authoritarianism. This is why would be authoritarian leaders are so focused on punishing and marginalizing any kind of expression of disapproval.

Let me get this straight: unless scientists go straight to the cure of all cancers plus eternal youth provided in a single pill you take once for $1, all medical research is useless. After all, one must never, ever, start small, with an easier, achievable, controllable target, and improve iteratively upon it to develop better knowledge, better tools, better techniques, slowly developing a new bioengineering field, no sir! It's either absolute perfection right this very instant, or not at all!!!

I came here to look for this and add it if I didn't find it.

Lunar "soil" is essentially neutral, just needs some additives. Conversely, Martian "soil" is actually poisonous. Additives alone aren't sufficient to get things to grow in it, you need to remove the poisonous parts first.

Net: It's easier to grow plants in lunar rather than Martian "soil".

Is this a case of extreme reading comprehension failure? Here, let me "translate" the summary then:

"Scientists found that we can plant potatoes on the Moon by shipping, with rockets, 1 pound of compost for every 50 pounds of lunar soil we want to use for planting potatoes, and those moon-planted potatoes will be nutritious enough to feed moon colonists. One problem though is that moon-planted potatoes will have more metals than is safe for human consumption, so further research is needed to fix that."

Is that clearer?

In 1790, the US population was 94.9% rural. There is no country. in the world today that rural -- Burundi, which looks like blanks spot in the world at night satellite picturs, is 88% rural.

The largest city at the time was New York, with a population of 33,000. Northern Manhattan was near-wilderness, mid-town was farms and country houses.

In 1790 the US was. country you could "police" with sheriffs and volunteer posses, largely to keep the peace. If you got robbed, you hired a private thief catcher. This works in a 95% rural country with just 3.4 million inhabitants. It would be chaos in a country 87x larger.

8GB is plenty of RAM for what most users use their laptops for, if the OS doesn't gobble it up with background tasks. Probably be a good idea to steer clear of Chrome as a browser on these things.

It's actually more like an iPhone 16 Pro runing MacOS in a laptop form factor. Apple basically rummaged through their parts box and pulled out a mobile CPU that'll deliver 50% more single core performance than what's in a high-end Chromebook with only 80% of the power draw. And Apple's got *massive* economies of scale on those parts, so they can afford to deliver a lot of bang for the buck.

The only place the Neo appears to falls short is in RAM, but this is *not* a power user machine, it's for basic office tasks and multimedia consumption. Realistically 8GB is plenty for many users.

In any case, the desktop isn't the center of most users's universe anymore; the switchboard of their life is their smartphone. This is a gateway drug to MacOS IOS integration, and eventually onto the upgrade treadmill. Users will switch seamlewssly between their iPhones and Neos all day long, with data on iCloud and iMusic etc., and when it comes time to upgrade their phone or their laptop, they won't be *stuck* exactly, but if they leave the reservation they lose a lot. But they certainly could upgrade to a *much nicer* Macbook....

It's no wonder the other laptop makers are sitting up and taking notice. Apple has set up a one way conversion ratchet for people tempted by a really nice and perfectly adequate entry level machine at an entry level price.Nobody else has the vertical integration -- chip foundries to device manufacturing, to software platform -- spanning desktop and phones that's needed to do this.

As a foreigner who never travelled to the US, theee are the risks I'm aware-ish of from reading and watching news both in my native tongue and in English, from both American and British news sources, were I to try and travel to the US.

To try and obtain a VISA, I'd need to provide, for the last 'n' years:

* All my social media account handles.
* All my email addresses.
* All my phone numbers.
* And for my active social media accounts, I'd need to set them to public.

I'm not doing any of that, so for that reason alone I wouldn't be trying to get a VISA to begin with. Many researchers and other people similarly wouldn't want to. So any event would, for that reason alone, miss a lot of VIPs.

Now, for those who don't mind doing that, they get to the US and there's the going through customs. There, we learn that:

* My phone, laptop, tablet etc. can be taken and their entire contents copied, for any reason whatsoever.
* They may request me to unlock my chat apps and look into the chat groups I take part in.
* If they find, either in their copy of my storage, or in the groups I chat in, criticisms of US policies, even tame ones, they may decide to refuse entry.

I don't like Trump and I speak negatively of several of his policies, both international and domestic. Ditto for Vance's, Rubio's, Hegseth's, RFK Jr.'s etc. And I talk a lot about those. News sources have shown cases of researchers who were refused entry because of memes. So why would I want to risk that humiliation?

Which is why the EU recommends people visiting the US with any kind of sensitive data to only carry formatted phones, laptops etc. with them, and to download their data from a cloud provider only after they've crossed US customs. The same policy, notice, they recommend to those visiting China.

And then, supposing I do cross customs and I'm in the US, then at some point, being a foreigner and therefore having friends who are also foreigners who live in the US, if I visit them (which I would), I run the risk of running into ICE, who have the legal right to detain me for days despite the fact I'd have a valid VISA, also for any reason whatsoever. Sure, after what might range from hours to days to weeks I would most likely be released. But why would I want the risk, small as it may be, of running into that headache, when I don't need to?

As far as I know, that's how most other countries perceive things. Is it accurate? No idea. But the widespread global opinion is that one only goes to the US if one really, really needs. Otherwise, it's best to avoid it. After all, there are dozens of other destinations with much better reputations on how they treat foreign visitors.