If they ever flip back to a Democrat majority, it’s going to take decades to undo all the damage this court has done (and they’ll still have the incentive to not undo stuff like this).

I believe this happened, and is still happening in regards to Texas ignoring the SC ruling about letting federal Border Patrol agents access to certain parts of the border.

Just listing reasons why small towns are shitholes… or at least that particular small town. People there are at a high risk of drug addiction because of “shit-life syndrome,” (which is arguably caused by the low wages of the factories).

If you just want it for emergency purposes or irrigation, rain water harvesting can be fairly cheap and easy. Even a proper cistern, with a pump, and plumbed into your house is probably cheaper than whole-house off-grid solar. Probably want good filters for PFAS though.

The town I grew up in is in the middle of a cancer cluster. The largest factory (where most people work) got caught illegally dumping chemicals in the ground. They were just made to pay a relatively small fine. The corporation was threatening to move the plant somewhere else if it became too expensive to operate there, and all lawsuits were dismissed.

That factory, and most other factories in the area primarily just hire “temp” workers that they keep as temps for years, never actually hire them full time, and pay them near minimum wage with no benefits. Many young people who do end up staying in that area become drug addicts and die in their 20s or 30s.

There’s a lot of corruption in the local government and police as well. The police harass anybody they don’t like, and they know pretty much who everybody is and what they drive. A few people in government got caught embezzling money. A sheriff tried to frame somebody for murder. Also, I think the people in the courts have some kind of deal with the juvenile detention center, because they give kids very long sentences for minor things (6 months for being 10 minutes late to school while on probation in my case).

Small towns, in my experience, are shitholes with corrupt and authoritarian local governments, and are exploited by corporations in ways similar to third-world countries.

I think SPDIF is being phased out because it needs to use compression to do surround sound.

Lol, good catch.

Wary of the bill. Seems like every bill involving stuff like this is either designed to erode privacy or for regulatory capture.

Edit: spelling

It’s very unlikely they’ll control the Senate. I don’t even think they’ll control the presidency.

Here are some that I’ve liked (haven’t played them in years though):

• Warsow
• Red Eclipse
• Speed Dreams
• OpenTTD
• LinCity
• FreeOrion
• Oolite

It’s also trained on data people reasonably expected would be private (private github repos, Adobe creative cloud, etc). Even if it was just public data, it can still be dangerous. I.e. It could be possible to give an LLM a prompt like, “give me a list of climate activists, their addresses, and their employers” if it was trained on this data or was good at “browsing” on its own. That’s currently not possible due to the guardrails on most models, and I’m guessing they try to avoid training on personal data that’s public, but a government agency could make an LLM without these guardrails. That data could be public, but would take a person quite a bit of work to track down compared to the ease and efficiency of just asking an LLM.

I use LLMs just about every day. It’s better than web-search for certain things, and is useful for some coding tasks. I think they’re over-hyped by some people, but they are useful.

I think the best you can do passively is keep the home at the average daily temperature, which is still uncomfortable in some areas at some times of the year. Average daily air and soil temperatures where I live are typically in the 90s in August. I guess that’s better than the 100F-110F highs though. I think I’ve read it’s better to insulate homes from the ground in areas where it’s hot or cold both day and night. AC can be pretty efficient in well-sealed highly-insulated buildings.

I’ve never used it, but the idea is that nutrient uptake will be faster than if someone just dressed the top of the soil with compost. The extra aerobic bacteria could also be beneficial.

White nationalists consider Nick Fuentes white enough?

I mean people say stuff like this all the time; doesn’t really mean anything. Trump has said much more damning things, and media that nitpicks everything he says can be easier to dismiss has having Trump Derangement Syndrome, or whatever.

Meh, this is similar to, “if you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black.”

I don’t think Russia cultivated Trump as potential political figure (at least not until 2015), but I agree with everything else you said. I don’t think winning in 2016 was Trump’s initial goal when he announced he was running; I think it was just another one of his grifts and to gain publicity.

Source about the money?

Stock buybacks. Enron and WorldCom. Mass layoffs when not needed. https://sci-hub.se/http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.52686 https://sci-hub.se/https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.491627