I mostly scream in agony to make it weird.

The history of censorship is littered in the most braindead contradictions like that.

Not always voluntary. Some tried for a third term and failed. Theo Roosevelt tried for a third term in 1912. Though his first term was taking over after McKinley was assassinated, but it was only some months in, and that would be covered as a first full term under the later amendment.

It is, but those late model CRTs often had a lot of digital circuitry that displayed a solid color on channels with nothing on them. Unless there was a much older CRT around, they never would have seen it.

This is the actual problem with these types of retirement plans, though. People are expected to know a lot about managing the investments themselves. There’s a whole industry whose job it is to give you bad advice. The real advice is “drop it in a mix of an sp500 index fund it and bonds according to your risk level” and the rest is bullshit.

It wouldn’t be my first choice, but it’ll probably do the job. Depends on what you want to do with it. There’s fewer people choosing this path, which means that when things go wrong, you’ll have fewer sources of information to help.

Some old Dell office PC with a good amount of RAM and an SSD would be just as well.

Series of boxes built around the same basic shape as a WWII vehicle, only bigger.

But only one of those people gets a book deal.

Not sure that’s right on all phones. Browsing on my Pixel 6 shows noticeably fewer ads when I’m at home compared to anywhere else.

It’s not like we have great options here. Safari isn’t supported on Windows or Linux. Opera has its own issues (like predatory loan apps) even if you’re willing to pay for it. Crossing my fingers that Ladybird will work out, but it has a long way to go (though it did better than I thought it would when I tried it a few months back). Everything else is some variant of Chrome.

If you need to be on the web at all, Firefox still seems like the best of the shit pile.

Highly recommend setting up a PiHole. It may not be quite as comprehensive as uBlock, but it cuts the ads way down, and it’s not something that browsers can easily bypass. You do have to make sure to shut of DNS over HTTPS, or setup a separate solution for that to tunnel into PiHole.

For most people, yes.

For my best friend, no. The reason is that he and his wife really wanted a kid, and they got everything together and had one. He is the happiest new father I’ve ever seen.

My wife and I don’t want kids, and have taken permanent action to make sure we don’t. In part, this is because we understand the responsibility that would be carried for years. We have other things we want to do with our lives. So for someone else to have full knowledge of that responsibility and embrace it gets respect from me.

Here’s some solid numbers:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Launch-Cost-Per-Kilogram-to-Low-Earth-Orbit-LEO-US-Thousands_fig1_361415873

The Shuttle was so expensive that it might have been better to keep using the Saturn V. It accomplished a lot, but was ultimately a failure at its original goal of a reusable rocket with a fast turnaround. Some of the old hopes for it were to launch 100 Shuttle missions per year. As problems were found, it was clear it would never be close to that.

Falcon 9 was already an order of magnitude drop from what came before. Being able to grab the Starship booster by the chopstick method means it can quite possibly do the quick turnaround the Shuttle promised. That could mean another order of magnitude drop. Possibly even two orders of magnitude.

That’s transformative. It’s not just cheaper. It let’s things be done that weren’t possible before.

One subtle thing that’s already come out of this is related to Starlink. Now, this has a whole lot of problems that I won’t get into here, but it does have one fascinating effect. A rocket coming back down generates plasma that blocks radio signals to the ground. This means there’s a blackout time where everyone in mission control stands by nervously while waiting to hear if it blew up or not.

What Starlink does is provide a high bandwidth link above the rocket, letting them relay data back to the ground. This means that not only do we have full communication during reentry, but even a live video feed of the exterior. This was not possible until fairly recently.

It should also be noted that we SpaceX didn’t do this on their own. They benefited from decades of NASA R&D, launch facilities, and funding. Their biggest success comes from working around the pork barrel politics that hangs around NASA’s neck.

RO also puts about four times as much water down the drain as it filters. A whole house RO filter is extremely wasteful. You don’t need to be filtering every toilet flush.

Notch funds a real life Mooshroim when?

I don’t think there’s a way to commit identity theft in this hypothetical that would work. Being immortal would mean it had to work in the long run, or at least a few decades until you can do it again. Someone will notice eventually. You can call it “people being stupid about it”, but a mistake will happen if you wait long enough.

See, that’s the kind of “America is a shithole” argument I can support.

Calling the US a “shit hole” because it’s hard to commit identity theft is odd.

FWIW, scientists who study supercentarians think Jeanne Calment was legit. She answered some extremely detailed historical questions about her village. She was either a walking Wikipedia about the area she grew up, or her claims were real.

That said, most supercentarian claims probably are bogus. They often come from areas that had bad recordkeeping a century ago, had their records offices bombed out during a war, or are generally well known for pension fraud. They’re often very poor areas that tend to have a low life expectancy, and it’s very strange that a real supercentarian would pop up there.

First off, nobody takes Marxism by itself. If it’s accepted, it’s always with extra things attached and other parts removed.

Second, my issue in this case is the Lennist part. A vanguard party degrades into cult-like behavior, and this is very consistent with ML groups big and small.