That gives a false picture since it only counts legal declared spending.

For instance, what’s the effective value to Trump’s campaign of Elon Musk buying Twitter and using it to explicitly promote right wing views? How much did Russia spend this time to promote Trump? What about Israel, cause I’ll wager Netanyahu prefers having Trump in office, since Kamala might’ve demanded at least some holding back.

Actual spending to promote Republican and right wingers was way higher.

It doesn’t need anyone to convince devs to implement it. I can do it whenever I run an emulator of old console games already, and devs of those games never implemented it.

If Sony wants to add it as a hardware feature they can.

As far as the patent, hopefully it’ll get denied but I doubt it. Once they have it it’ll cost someone time and money to challenge it, even though it should be a slam dunk that it is neither a new idea nor innovative and novel. This is how a lot of these egregious parents continue to stand - the cost of challenging them is high, especially if some blistering idiot of a judge ruled in a farcical manner.

Ice sinks to a certain point. If being attached to the shelf was holding that ice up higher than it would float, it’ll sink.

Don’t know if the movie shows it sinking further than that though, but the general assertion that ice doesn’t sink at all is definitely mistaken.

Are they running anyone in elections they might actually win? I might vote for a party like that for mayor or something. But I wouldn’t even vote for them for state house representative unless they were well known enough in my state that they might actually win.

‘Third’ parties in this country can show themselves as serious if they try to establish themselves from the bottom up. If all they do is run for president and occasionally Senate or House, then they show themselves as unserious parties which are probably nothing more than attempts to siphon votes that might have gone to a real candidate.

It’s better if the police budget is spent on replacing tires rather than purchasing even more unnecessary surplus military equipment which they will then try to justify using.

Don’t feel like a dick for that! That again is management’s fault!

Remember that bagging your groceries used to be part of the service and part of the price, they eliminated that job to increase their profit margins!

At least around here Walmart still bags them for me, except they now have the cashier doing it instead of a dedicated employee for bagging.

Self serve gas was actually lower priced than full service back when the transition was happening, so there was actually a reason to do the work yourself.

If it had been the same price, only I have to do the work of pumping it, damn straight I would have felt the same.

In retrospect it was a bad deal because once full service went away entirely, so did the price difference, so I’m smarter now and wouldn’t use self checkout even if they gave a discount.

It’s possible to. Are they? Correct me if I’m wrong, but they’re not. They’re going after Microsoft and not Google.

Not that it makes any difference since Edge is just reskinned Chrome now anyway. If it was still it’s own thing I’d be rooting for Microsoft, at least up until they start to become bigger, then I’d turn on them.

The funny thing is he might be the one in the right, if we examine with logic.

A mayor probably has no particular skills or abilities to help personally in that sort of situation, and if he was doing his job correctly in the past, then everything in his power to do would already have been done. The appropriate experts are ready. Emergency plans are in place. There’s backup plans, and backup plans for the backups, all carefully considered and planned by the best people the mayor could get to do them in the past.

But humans are weird and have stupid ideas, so we want to see the mayor in his office, giving interviews, or even better, at the site of the disaster, helping. Except the most the average mayor is likely to do in an emergency situation is get in the way and be a distraction.

That’s the sad thing - your city’s mayor may or may not have done a good job, I have no idea, but the average mayor will definitely be attacked if this happens and he doesn’t make a show of ‘helping’.

To be fair I’m not as smart as Data, so I doubt it would need that much to outwit me.

When the technology gets there, this will be amazing. I’ll be able to sit down at the computer and say “make me a mystery detective RPG in the style of Sherlock Holmes but set on a cyberpunk styled city on a space station like the Citadel from Mass Effect” and I’ll get just that, generated exclusively for me with a brand new story that fits the themes I asked for.

But that is gonna be a couple decades or more I expect. I dearly hope it happens quickly so I can live to see it, but it’s not going to be in the next ten years, that’s for damn sure.

It’s really just about what markets well. Come up with a catchy name and that name will stick.

The Democrats didn’t go far enough accepting the Obamacare name. Obama was all ‘sounds good to me, yes, I care’ or something along those lines when he was asked once, but the Democrats should have officially renamed the bill to Obamacare. Because there’s people who support the ACA but are against Obamacare and don’t realize they’re the same thing. If they’d changed the name there would only be Obamacare and a few of those people, a very slim amount, might realize that the bill thats helping them is Obamacare.

There is a place for actual conservatives, people who want to change things slowly and make sure we aren’t breaking shit with our changes.

But what calls themselves conservatives these days would be more accurately referred to as reactionaries, who want to reverse many changes that have been made and go back to some old time they preferred.

I am not sure if the relabeling of reactionaries into conservatives was always a global phenomenon, I think in many countries, at least until recently, conservatives were really just conservative and not reactionary. But I can’t say for sure.

Moron is no longer enough. Republican voters at this point are malicious, not stupid, not poor gullible fools, they are malicious people who actively seek to harm others, no matter how ‘nice’ they may seem.

I am not interested in hearing about how someone knows a Republican who is such a nice pleasant person, willing to help just about anyone, kind, caring, etc. It is a mask, like that of…I forget the precise medical term, either psychopath or sociopath. But the irony is they are worse because they do have the capacity for empathy, but they choose not to.

And this is, and always has been, who they are. This is not new. This is exactly who they have always been, people who, if they lived in a different time, would happily own slaves, or watch someone tortured for the evening’s entertainment at the coliseum, or any number of such things.

That’s the people we’re dealing with, and they are a significant portion of the population as they always have been.

25 years might actually be a potentially realistic timeframe for that. But I’d still bet on a little longer myself. I hope it happens within my lifetime.

If I had to choose between global high speed internet access, and ground based astronomy, I’d pick the Internet every time. I’d completely blot out the sky forever if that’s what it took.

We don’t need ground-based astronomy to learn about the universe, I’d rather encourage more space-based astronomy. Or build some observatories on the moon if you really want to build on a solid space body.

However, Starlink is a for profit company run by Elon Musk. I don’t really want them doing it, because they’re not going to provide unlimited global Internet to everyone. So as the guy said, the idea is good, but Starlink is bad, although it is currently the only such option.

First I even heard about this game was a comic talking about it’s unattractive characters. I looked it up out of curiosity to see if this was an exaggeration like it has been with some characters like Aloy, and…ehhh…mostly true.

One of the big draws of these types of games is cool character designs people want to play. This game definitely doesn’t have that for me. Overwatch quickly pulled me in with cool character designs, this one…does not.

Hey, deep fakes are awesome. They are a necessary step in the evolution of the technology that leads to holodecks.

I want holodecks, I bet you want holodecks, practically everyone wants holodecks, so we have to go through this stage of the tech to get there.

Consider this question: how is it that anyone under the age of 40 today has ever smoked?

By the time they were born, the bad effects of smoking were well understood. By the time they were teenagers, not smoking should have been as obvious as not jumping in front of a train. People already addicted find it difficult to quit, but it in no way explains anyone starting.

The question is different and yet very similar, because the things you mention wind up in a similar way. Somehow people start in that route even though it should be obvious not to. And these things you mention are much easier to fall into than smoking because parents, family, etc are all pushing it on people. Smokers generally aren’t pushing their kids, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, etc to smoke, and somehow smoking still proliferates to some degree, just consider how much more difficult to avoid it is for those whose families are actively encouraging them to fall into these methods of belief and hate.

In order to go back to having two decent parties at this point, I think the Republican party needs to die.

So it really would be good if any remaining Republicans that follow the principle of ‘even evil has standards’ would openly join the Democrats. Then a couple elections go by as most remaining Republican offices are taken by Democrats, then the Democratic party splits.

Not the best possible outcome, but probably top ten as far as potentially realistic ones goes.