It’s not a matter of helping people in general, it’s a matter of helping these people maintain power and control.

Tomorrow’s headline “The Trump administration removes the requirement to report US deaths due to war.”

Yes, the supreme leader of Iran stated he was opposed to developing nuclear weapons in 2003. The supreme leader then did not proceed to authorize two decades of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, a nuclear weapons program the West has not been negotiating about with Iran under his supreme leadership, a nuclear weapons program which was not bombed out last year, because of course it didn’t exist. /Sarcasm

Depends, in some technical fields it’s starting to flip because kids don’t need to learn computer skills as much when they just use iPhones and tablets where everything “just works”.

Yes, I got the joke. And I was suggesting that Americans have always been on about other Americans not assimilating into their American culture. I also just find jokes about fascists being hypocritical or contradictory are no longer funny when the assumption that it’s an indication of foolish lack of self-awareness no longer holds because double-think is the active goal.

The USA is not a monolith. The lines and features have probably shifted, but the idea of Colin Woodward’s “American Nations” rings quite true today.

We hate on Nintendo and Rockstar for DCMA’ing free/open source mods/project, not paid ones. If you’re charging money for a tool, you’re running a business. If your business involves another business’s product, like with AI training or freaking phone cases, legal demands like this become a fair part of doing business.

Granted there is still a power disparity to recognize, even if the guy is a douche. But it’s not unfair in the way DCMA’ing things made freely for the community is unfair.

Jesus, someone replace Jensen with an AI already. The bots could generate much more nuanced and empathetic responses. /SARCASM

They literally teach you this in highschool science. They teach you that the universe is a dynamic system driven by entropy. They teach you that equilibrium, i.e. a state of stability in a dynamic system, is achieved when the rate of structural formation equals the rate of destruction, e.g. bonds forming/breaking, population birth/death, organizing/disorganizing one’s room… Managing while not burning out is stability.

The classic question of “when would any of this be applicable in the real world” is intended to be a critique of how school curriculums can be dated or out of touch with chages in how the world works. It also highlights the often understated goal of a good education–shaping students into people who have the fundamental tools and the mindset to actively answer that crucial question for themselves.

The how does matter. You can appreciate the removal of a despot and still oppose unilateral regime change by force–especially one so explicitly motivated by resource exploitation. This is very different from the UN-sanctioned and NATO-led intervention that deposed Gaddafi.

Would you describe China attacking North Korea or Cambodia or another SE Asian dictatorship to depose their leadership as “accidentally doing something right”?

Part of the reason why it may seem like there’s little paying user demand is that you may be thinking of demand in terms of individual consumers as the source of demand. However there is also the world of B2B, where I imagine the bulk of demand is coming from. Business requirements for service tend to be more extensive and they will pay for it.

It’s a common mistake to assume that gun buybacks are being proposed as a solution. The solutions being proposed are a set of laws/policies to tighten gun controls, like who’s allowed to buy guns, what guns are allowed to be owned and how many, improving checks and mitigating newer loopholes.

Tighter gun controls are shown to reduce mass shootings. In Australia, the laws have loosened a lot since the big wave of gun laws in 1996. The buyback program is a consequence of bringing people in line with the new laws.

The realistic goal is not to make it absolutely impossible for a motivated extremist with lots of resources to plan and commit a mass shooting, it’s to make it much harder to prepare to do and to create more opportunities to notice their preparation.

Holy fuck, I think I conflated this with his BrownU comment, I saw some headlines referring to this one… But Jesus I didn’t know it was that bad.

True, but if Elon gave you $1 million in Tesla stock you could still easily sell it, be taxed on it, and use the remainder to buy a lot of bread.

Why did you have to draw my attention to this

I think it echoes that video of those two Apache crews blowing up civilians in Baghdad and then targetting people who came to help the injured. One of the most chilling parts of that video was probably how casually routine it all seemed. Can only imagine what footage existed that never got leaked.

I agree, I’m separating the justification of the engagement from how they label people. So the parallel I’m drawing only has to do with how they loosely label people as part of a group based on broad characteristics once they decide a group can be a valid military target, i.e. “insurgents” or “narco-terrorists”.

Declaring drug smugglers as valid military targets is certainly new, but ordering strikes on military targets on the thin rationale of “hey, they look like the group we said we can hit” is not new for the US military.

If it’s not obvious, I disagree with both of these issues.

I agree, but it’s also consistent with how the US operates. Through Afghanistan’s and Iraq, anyone appearing as a military-aged male in the vicinity of an operation (e.g. a village where insurgents were shooting from) was labeled an enemy combatant and treated as valid targets.

I don’t know, the Crolloa, RAV4, and CR-V are among the most common cars have good fuel economy without sacrificing visibility.

If you want not so big trucks, there’s the Maverick, Ridgeline, and Santa Cruz that can all get decent fuel economy.