I would not count on this requiring the app to update.

The fact that "walkable cities" scare you indicates the problem is on your end, not your fantasy Europeans.

Making the stolen phone worthless is what they want.
And from the video, the thieves did not get farther than across the street. No time to reach the ocean, or even a storm drain.

Nuclear power cannot solve climate change without electric cars and heat pumps. I would blame the idiots who spew hate, fear, and uncertainty about those. Quite a few people in favor of those are in favor of nuclear power too.

CPB and the government have been collected data directly from the airlines ever since the aftermath of 9/11 through a number of programs, for example to check passengers against watch lists and to verify the identity of travelers on international flights.

What has changed is that by buying data from a commerical broker instead of a a congressionally instituted program, it bypasses judicial review and limits set by Congress on data collected through those programs -- for example it can track passengers on domestic flights even if they're not on a watch list.

Fascism isn't an ideology; it's more like a disease of ideology. The main characteristic of fascist leaders is that they're unprincipled; they use ideology to control others, they're not bound by it themselves. It's not just that some fascists are left-wing and others are right-wing. Any given fascist leader is left-wing when it suits his purposes and right-wing when that works better for him. The Nazis were socialists until they got their hands on power and into bed with industry leaders, but it wasn't a turn to the right. The wealthy industrialists thought they were using Hitler, but it was the other way around. The same with Mussolini. He was socialist when he was a nobody but turned away from that when he lost his job at a socialist newspaper for advocating militarism and nationalism.

In any case, you should read Umberto Eco's essay on "Ur-Fascism", which tackles the extreme difficulties in characterizing fascism as an ideology (which as I stated I don't think it is). He actually lived under Mussolini.

I think people expect commercial social media networks to be something they can't be -- a kind of commons where you are exposed to the range of views that exist in your community. But that's not what makes social networks money, what makes them money is engagement, and consuming a variety of opinions is tiresome for users and bad for profits. When did you ever see social media trying to engage you with opinions you don't agree with or inform you about the breadth of opinion out there? It has never done that.

The old management of Twitter had a strategy of making it a big tent, comfortable for centrist views and centrist-adjacent views. This enabled it to function as a kind of limited town common for people who either weren't interested in politics, like authors or celebrities promoting their work, or who wanted to reach a large number of mainly apolitical people. This meant drawing lines on both sides of the political spectrum, and naturally people near the line on either side were continually furious with them.

It was an unnatural and unstable situation. As soon as Musk tried to broaden one side of the tent, polarization was inevitable. This means neither X nor Bluesky can be what Twitter was for advertisers and public figures looking for a broad audience.

At present I'm using Mastodon. For users of old Twitter, it must seem like an empty wasteland, but it's a non-commercial network, it has no business imperative to suck up every last free moment of my attention. I follow major news organizations who dutifully post major stories. I follow some interest groups which are active to a modest degree, some local groups who post on local issues, and a few celebrities like George Takei. *Everybody's* not on it, but that's OK; I don't want to spend more than a few minutes a day on the thing so I don't have time to follow everyone I might be interested in. Oh, and moderation is on a per-server basis, so you can choose a server where the admins have a policy you're OK with.

No, there are all kinds of information the government has that are legitimately not available. Sensitive data on private citizens, for example, which is why people are worried about unvetted DOGE employees getting unfettered access to federal systems. Information that would put witnesses in ongoing criminal investigations at risk. Military operations in progress and intelligence assets in use.

The problem is ever since there has been a legal means to keep that information secret, it's also been used to cover up government mistake and misconduct. It's perfectly reasonable for a government to keep things from its citizens *if there is a specific and articulable justification* that can withstand critical examination.

And sometimes those justifications are overridden by public interest concerns -- specifically when officials really want to bury something like the Pentagon Papers because they are embarrassing to the government. "Embarrassing to the government" should be an argument against secrecy, because of the public interest in knowing the government is doing embarrassing things. In the end, the embarrassment caused by the Pentagon Papers was *good* for the country.

All you need to know about RFK's fitness for office is out in public for everyone to see.

Although this is earlier than the current AI stuff, I do think we are missing something serious about how human brains work, because a child can learn to recognize a dog with only seeing perhaps a dozen dogs, they do not need to see ten million dogs and ten million "not dogs" pictures.

I'm pretty certain he is trying to make a joke about shoplifting.

How thick are people here???

The idea with UBI is you CAN get a job. Getting the job does not mean you lose your UBI, which is a serious problem with welfare (which this idiot compared UBI to). This means the job can pay a lot less and still be worth taking. It also means people will gravitate more towards interesting jobs.

There are problems with UBI but you are not identifying them. As I see it there will be vast numbers of job openings, limited only by regulations needed to prevent scammers from fooling people into doing work for no or negative reward.

So every country in the Europe is not in any way socialist. Got it.

I'm not sure about that. The republican trick is to make sure everything is "means tested". This allows them to complain about cheating, and they completely ignore the bureaucracy needed to prevent cheating probably costs more than the payments. It also means the average person never actually gets one of these payments, since they would easily learn how exaggerated the "cheating" stories are. Yes you can buy lobster using EBT, but so few you will starve, and direct knowledge of this would defeat all the stories.

No that obviously won't work. If getting a job means you lose the UBI, then the job would have to offer substantially more than UBI. If UBI is enough to live on that is going to effectively mean minimum wage is huge, more than twice the rent for a single person.

Generally with UBI people can get a job and that income is in addition to UBI. The tests have shown that people do this quite willingly. It is possible the minimum wage can go way down (probably not to zero to avoid scammers fooling people into doing work for nothing) and this is kind of difficult to test (ie minimum wage was removed for people in a test, the local McDonalds would immediately lay every body off and hire exclusively the testing subjects).