Still, kinda poor form not to cite your source. I know you're a frequent poster. I read your posts frequently. Usually you're pretty good about providing your sources. Don't stop now!

Young men "turn away" from "feminism" because they are intimidated. If they are worried they can't act appropriate around women, then maybe they should be? "Sexual harassment indoctrinators managed to make men draw way back", well were the men sexually harassing women?

I like the "turn away" thing too. Are young men supposed to be "turning towards" feminism? Most feminists are just advocating for a level playing field and not a full swing to a female dominated society. (See below too. I address your latter point down there.)

I will grant you that false accusations of sexual harassment should be punished as much as the the legit ones, and that goes both directions. I would also offer that the social media revolution made it easy to shame someone globally. Why put yourself out there if you're just going to get abused on the public internet? Again, that goes for both men & women.

Ok, and so what? Are you suggesting women should be forced to reproduce? Maybe they don't want to? 8.5 billion people and counting don't we have enough people here already? We certainly don't have enough housing. Setting that aside, economic outcomes for both men and women are better without children. If we're so concerned about the breeding population, we need to make having a kid be not an economical detriment.

Late middle age middle age man shocked to learn modern dating is complicated (different ) than back when he was dating. Hopes son will find suitable breeding partner soon for grandkids. It's not the 1950s anymore.

We can find plenty of women who have similar horror stories about men they have dated.

And for every article you can find of a radical feminist saying "all men are evil", I can find one that says something to the effect of, "All women belong in the kitchen. Dinner better be ready when I get home and if the house isn't spotless I'm going to be angry!" There are extremes on both sides. It's being intellectually dishonest not to recognize that.

Furthermore, there are plenty of other societies that men demand women be subservient to men. Your son has options?

"(As long as women are making babies for young men,) I loathe any form of discrimination."

Sounds like it.

So we're not going to talk about modern male emotional fragility?

"And young men. When you are raised being told you are the enemy and the cause of all the world's problems, yet you see women getting more education, preferential hiring and promotion practices, while you are sitting in your parent's basement playing video games, and still being reviled as the cause of everything bad, you are not being irrational to believe that voting for the party that hates you isn't the way to go."

Roughly translates to, "I can't compete {because of this artificial boogieman} so I'm going to sit in my basement." Get rid of DEI for all I care. That's not going to solve the problem. "I'm white, have a penis, but now I have to go out into the world and earn my keep?!?! Fuck me that sounds hard!!"

Everyone's all concerned about Huawei's networking equipment being backdoors into sensitive networks, and TikTok being a vehicle for CCP influence. Maybe putting a Chinese company's phone (tracking device) in your pocket might warrant more consideration.

Your locale is showing.

There are places in the United States where the signs say, "Next gas, 50 miles." You can guess how many EV charging stations they have there. If all ya do is bump around Delaware in your Tesla, you're fine. For much of Central and Mountain timezones in the United States, even if the infrastructure was in place to charge the vehicle, the time it would take to recharge is still not there. At least 4 times a year I take road trips that my manual Ford Focus can't complete on one tank of gas. Then what do I do when I get there? Unfortunately, the energy density and portability of batteries has not yet matched that of gasoline/diesel.

Range is the reason I won't buy an EV the next time I shop for a car - 2ish years. Though, maybe a hybrid? But I'll be first in line to buy an EV when the technology is at parity. I won't deny that for performance things (like 0-60), they're superior, without that lag.

You RTFAs?! OMG!

Well said.

"Farmers are in debt up to their eyeballs" isn't exactly correct. I know a lot of farmers in Iowa that do quite well for themselves. It's sorta the laugh of the farm subsidies bills. Most of those are designed to help a farm last through a bad year or two where they can't recoup their costs. Otherwise, one drought year would bankrupt most farmers. Not because their in debt, but because the costs of inputs are quite high. The risk that it's a bad season and they can't cover/profit with the yields from that year is the problem. Hence the farm subsidies. But in good to great years, they still get the subsidies as well. It's free money.

Would it make sense to have a program that only helps farmers in the bad years? Absolutely. National and food security alone makes that make sense. But it would be political suicide to propose anything that would only dole out the subsidies in down years.

Hell, outside of that the tax writeoffs alone are staggering. That $80k pickup truck is a complete write off.

pebkac Sorry bud.

On a OnePlus 10, the UX isn't great. Not to mention the security concerns. I am to understand Firefox allows all of this https://tech.slashdot.org/stor.... More extensions? Yay? Please "make better" what is already there before we need extensions?

The tax thing is pretty real. Though, it maths out to about the same for an FTE. Taxes are just that much more "in your face" when one contracts.

Contracts don't include retirement benefits or health care. True. If you're only insuring yourself, the health insurance thing is relatively cheap-ish. I'd rather be an FTE if I had a partner and a dozen children I have to provide health care for. Hell yeah make my employer contribute to that. But a lot of the other benefits that come with an FTE role don't apply to an individual. I'd rather that be represented in my paycheck instead of a benefit package I'm only going to use a third of. With that money in my paycheck, I can handle retirement myself.

Most FTE jobs I've had say they'll help you with professional development, training, etc, but in reality that's rarely followed through on, or just a general dismal offering. "You get one class in A Cloud Guru a quarter!" with the unspoken expectation we still expect you to get all your normal work done too.

"Given that you have to bid on contracts using un-paid time, that's like $15 an hour. " Are you at your FTE looking for new jobs during your 9-5? If I was your supervisor I would find that to be an undesirable use of my employees' time.

This also fails to mention that having effectively unlimited time off is kinda nice. If I want to go to the BWCA for 3 weeks, PTO what? "But that's time you're not making money!" Of course. Learn how to budget or learn how to bid your contract with the expectation you'll have to "pay" your own PTO.

Yes, I've contracted before. 1099'd through an LLC I had to create. If anything the overhead of 1099ing through a LLC is the most obnoxious part about it. I could make money contracting, but the operational overhead of this dickery is about the one thing that keeps me from going back to it.

Contracting isn't any better or worse than being an FTE. Just different trade offs.

If you're going to quote xkcd, please do it right. It wasn't about some elite hacker, it was about cryptography nerds.

"cryptography nerds are kinda hackers aren't they?"

Come on. Be better.

I've been saying this for years:

"The bad news is Social Security & Medicare will be gone by the time I reach that age and I'll never be able to retire. The good news is I don't have to worry about the next generation taking my job."

First:
We've seen how well Russia has been able to use various social media to try and sway American elections and sew division & FUD in our country. They have been able to do this on these platforms without having access "behind the curtain" to say. The CCP can force TikTok to give them whatever data they want, for whatever purpose the CCP wants. "Let's sew division! That person has a photo with herself and a gun, sugest more things from gun favoring political spectrum! That person has a pro choice sign! Let's suggest more condoms!" These are trite examples, but the door is wide open for the CCP to use social engineering on anyone they want to target for any purpose that they so choose. Do all social media sites do this? Certainly, controversy & echo chambers sell. But at least for now (?), the US government isn't got that level of access as the CCP has on TikTok. Again, the Russians have proven you don't really need it.

Second:
This is an app that is getting deployed on millions of American phones. If a zero day is discovered on those devices, or someone's not up on patching their phone, the CCP can compel TikTok to put whatever exploits they want into their code. Think your 14 year old or an elderly senator keep up on their patches? Your contacts, your location, your wifi passwords, your text messages, your photos, all could be theirs. It would look real bad if China obtained nudes on a senator's phone and were able to use that for leverage. Or plant whatever on said phone? Spying on the politicians kids is awfully handy if you want to abduct them.

Again, lots of people install lots of apps from lots of different countries, so this threat vector isn't unique to things coming from China. But the ubiquity of TikTok is unmatched by any other (possible state) actor's apps. Remember when people claimed Macs have no bugs? Really that was only because Windows was everywhere, so the exploiters were only writing for Windows. TikTok is everywhere, and the (potential) exploiter (singular) is a (possibly state backed/based) actor who will happily advance their cause at the detriment of ours.

Third:
While Senator Hawley may have zero issue with goods manufactured in China, there is broad concern across the government and echoed in the telcos (whether Senator Hawley knows it or not). https://www.reuters.com/busine... This has been something that's been on the telcos radar for several years - the government was slow to get around to this one. The problem is that Huawei gear was relatively cheap price-point wise for it's quality. So Huawei is deployed fairly widely across many countries.

The reasons for the Huawei ban are very similar to the reasons of my second point. The CCP has the potential to have their hooks in our nation's network infrastructure and millions of pockets around the US.

I wish it was as simple as saying, "I don't care if they know what cat videos I'm watching."

I guess the thing that eats me about the e-bikes is that it allows a lot of people that have otherwise been trained to get around via other methods to fall back on the e-bike. Same story with the e-scooters. With a conventional pedal bike, ya have to want it & earn it. With the e-bikes & scooters, the etiquette and general self preservation isn't learned. They enable folks who otherwise wouldn't be on a bike, in those bike lanes, on those trails, in downtown traffic, who can't be bothered with putting in any physical effort who certainly didn't put any intellectual effort in on rules, etiquette, and self preservation. On the other hand, still one less car on the road. Who am I to hate on the folks that would otherwise not get off their couch to do something? While I find them annoying, on the other hand those people are getting out and doing _something_ besides sitting on the couch.