I make a point to just not open any thread that mentions US Politics.

Clairvoyance and kids shouldn’t mix

There’s that whole “children of Dune” book that tells us why.

The thing is

“The law says it has to happen” doesn’t mean it happens.

And the weaker labour protections are in your country, the more bosses can walk all over their employees.

In the US, with their so-called “at-will” employment system, you can be fired at any time for any reason, and if you need the job to like, live, you won’t even bring up your legal rights.

Mind you even on countries where polling happens exclusively on Sunday (like mine!) there are other subtle ways The Poors ^tm are kept from enfranchisement. “Voting happens on a work day” is just one of the ways it happens in one of our world’s oligarchies.

It really depends on how much you need that job to like

Not be homeless

And how hard it was to get the job in the first place.

You can make your legal rights count if you have options.

If you don’t, you let your boss walk all over you and thank them for it.

Because they don’t want the workers voting.

If you “can’t go to the ballot because you need to work” you are a plebeian, and so they have a way of excluding you while technically not excluding you.

A lot of modern oligarchy is powered by these technicalities. Technically everyone has a “right to” participate in the system, but the whole apparatus is rigged in such a way that in material reality only the same nobility caste that has called the shots since the bronze fucking age gets to call the shots.

I feel like Microsoft fully intends to remove the TPM 2.0 requirement in the nearish future

Otherwise it wouldn’t be so easy to disable when writing an iso to a USB drive.

Looking at it from a capitalistic point of view, they gain nothing by keeping people from installing their OS on the long term, the lock out was just for the short-term gains they got out of OEMs selling new computers for Windows 11 and such.

Golfussy

Opponent

Reposter is still OP, as they are the original poster of this thread

Creator of the OC is OOP, Original-OP, as they were the original poster of the OC

Yoshi and Kirby respectively

I just think they’re neat.

I learned some years ago that Rand wrote erotica before she wrote ““philosophy””

Then I read some of her porn. And everything clicked.

She let her self-indulgent porn fantasies leak into her philosophy, that’s all.

You got any idea how easy it is for those with power to convince a few thousand suckers to defend their evil interests, WHILE genuinely believing they’re doing the right thing? That’s like 90% of content on social media.

I just like getting my dumb blorbos without having to have a spreadsheet of where to find them scattered over 20 different services

Portuguese Wikipedia

I misunderstood the line that says “O Brasil se soma a uma lista de mais países que reconhecem o Estado Palestino,(…)Reconhecendo também a Organização para a Libertação da Palestina (OLP), desde 1975 como “legítima representante do povo palestino”.” as meaning we’ve recognised the state of Palestine officially since '75

Apparently, according to the govbr site OP linked in reply to me above, stuff is a bit more complicated than that but ye.

The list from english wikipedia says my country (Brazil) only recognised Palestine in 2010

But in portutugese wikipedia it is said we’ve recognised them since 1975.

I don’t know which one is right, so.

Bitch

Buying a game during a trip to another town, being away from your computer for a week, and spending the entire week just fondling the game box, reading it, reading the papers that came inside, doing game foreplay.

I am confused.

[shakes head]

Writers (both storytelling and informative) have a set of skills that is very useful but also entirely redundant unless in a well-developed society.

Humanity will always share information because d’uh. And we will always tell stories and make art, because that is just part of the human experience. But without the overload of information and media AND overspecialisation of labour that comes with an industrial society –

– We’d just revert to the olden ways where information spreads from person to person organically (there is a lot less of it to go around, after all) and stories/art are just made up by whomever.

Before television and radio, before most people were able to read, people would make up stories to amuse themselves and their friends while doing work. Tall tales around the campfire. Spooky stories while churning butter. These were all things people did in pre-industrial times.

But there would be no need for someone who is ‘just’ a teller of stories or a sharer of information. So I’d either drop dead or, more realistically, get my ass down with doing manual labour (hey, I might not know how to grow plants, but the amount of time I spend at the gym has gotta be good for something in post-apocalyptia) and save my creative skills to amuse my community during downtime. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Good use cases for AI already exist

And I’m saying this as a certified hater of GenAI

Machine Learning as an invention has already been used for good, useful things. It’s just that it never got caught up in hype like the modern wave of Generative Transformers (which is apparently the proper term for those overhyped chatbots and picture generators)

Me, a writer: [chuckles] I’m in danger