As someone who was in Christian Schools/Home-School for my entire education, this is lowkey the real reason. Most won’t (openly) admit it, but the whole Christian school movement was a response to desegregation. Eventually the reasons would grow into “we don’t want our kids being taught Evolution” and now “we don’t want our kids learning that LGBT exist” but the original reason was desegregation and racism.

As someone who has casually considered running for office in South Carolina (because our local representative is an incompetent buffoon, and while I don’t consider myself qualified to run, I know I could do a better job), I kinda agree. If you want your representatives to be normal people, and understand what reality is like, then you really need to pay them at least a somewhat liveable wage, because as it stands, the only people who can afford to do the job are those who are basically independently wealthy, own a car dealership or some other business that basically runs itself, or are retired. I’m not saying politicians should be making boatloads of money. But their pay should also be a liveable wage for the area they represent.

Considering Eric Adams already is running as an independent, Cuomo is more likely to siphon votes away from him. Although I think it will be ranked choice anyway, so “splitting” the vote won’t really matter.

I also want to think it’s a little bit the management/CEOs who think their employees are their friends who get lonely realizing the stripper doesn’t actually love them. Meanwhile they refuse to develop a personality or real friendships.

Not one of those gun people, but I still support the 2nd ammendment to some extent (down to ban AR-15s and other “scary-looking” guns simply because they are often used by mall-ninja types who do mass shootings). But I think most responsible gun owners are refusing to give fascists a reason/excuse to accelerate or escalate things (for the record, none of MAGA qualify as “responsible gun owners”). I know things are terrifyingly bad right now, but guns/violence are only going to make the current situation worse faster - at least for now. We do seem to be charging full-speed into a situation where they’ll be helpful and useful, which is terrifying. But with as much as it might feel like an “easy fix” to nip things in the bud now, it’s more likely to give fascism even more power and fuel for their propaganda.

So, I never believed the “Golden Dome” was going to actually be a thing, but wasn’t the contract for that supposed to be going to one of Elon’s companies? Is the project just off now? And follow-up question: is anything (short of scrambling some nearby jets) preventing Elon from “landing” a Falcon Heavy Rocket on the White House?

Unironically a top-5 movie for me. It’s bad, but it’s also everything I want from a movie.

Elon Musk is #26 and Tracer is #27. So there are definitely some edgelords fucking around and messing with the stats.

Fakespot was somewhat accurate at catching when Amazon sellers take a well-reviewed item and swap out the product for another, by changing the title, description, and pictures. We’ve probably all read a review on Amazon that feels like the reviewer is posting a review of a completely different product, like a review that seems to be about a kitchen utinsil on a listing for an unusually affordable camera. It’s a pretty common scam that Fakespot was pretty good at catching. It didn’t seem as good at adjusting ratings for legit products and seemed to kind of randomly knock off a a half to one and a half stars on pretty much every listing, even on quality products.

Yeah, I agree it’s weird. As an American who grew up in an area where sweetened tea wasn’t the norm, I hate having to specify. But I also don’t have any faith left in my fellow countrymen, and feel like I have to make it clear for them.

Unfortunately, most bioplastics are more like 300 years, which yes, is significantly better than 300 thousand years, and with industrial compost heaters you can push those 300 years down. But I’ve also had to come to terms that my failed 3D prints will likely outlive me (although I do collect the waste to hopefully recycle someday). I don’t print that much compared to most in the hobby, but it is something I consider before I print things.

That said, I’m not going to let perfect be the enemy of good, and the biodegradability of bioplastics is still exponentially better than petroleum plastic.

I beat the rush and stocked up in December, and I hate that that purchase is already feeling justified. One option to keep in mind as well is that tea is relatively good natural source of fluoride. So if things get bad enough, becoming an unsweetened tea-drinker might help.

I was going to say there’s no way they still are since Silverlight was discontinued by Microsoft in 2013, but it is Riot Games so ¯\(ツ)/¯

A bunch of Disney movie sites did for a while, back in the day when every movie had it’s own website with trailers, promo, and a link to buy tickets and/or the DVD release.

I wish I was joking, but he doesn’t like the straight line border on the map. He wants to “get rid of that artificially drawn line.”

You would think, I have a similar intramedullary rod in my leg, and my screws also stick out. Since the screws are there to hold the rod down the inside of the bone in place, they care more about that stability than the screws being a bit long.

I’ve been told that now that I’m healed, if the hardware is giving me problems, I can have them go in and remove it. Unfortunately, being in the US, that would probably be another 15-20 grand to have done (basically as much as I paid to have it put in when my leg was broken). So at least for now, even though I do have some hardware-related pain, it’s not bad enough for me to justify the cost.

I take one taco, and then go tell Mike Johnson that there are free tacos and where to get them.

I was absolutely on a version of the alt-right pipeline a decade ago. I was raised by far-right, Mike Johnson-style “Christians,” so I was already pretty far down that path before I was drawn into any pipeline.

Luckily, I ended up on a weird libertarian branch of the pipeline (LearnLiberty rather than Prager U), and somehow the YouTube algorithm steered me into Veritasium’s content on climate change, and clips from Adam Ruins Everything. It sounds a bit crazy, but those things started opening my eyes and expanding my worldview. Probably didn’t hurt that my favorite TV show at the time was Leverage, which had plenty of its own anti-corporate-grifting themes.

Eventually, I realized that the Libertarian utopia doesn’t work because greed is an unlimited resource, and that makes regulation important.

Of course, there were other things that helped me escape my upbringing and the alt-right pipeline during gamergate (I wasn’t into gaming at the time, so that probably helped), but looking back and seeing how easily I could have ended up being a January 6 insurrectionist. I’m so thankful for all the little things that nudged me out of that worldview, and helped me see reality.

I wish there was an easy way to show young guys that the people they are listening to are liars and grifters who are manipulating young men into believing that their real pain is somehow the fault of women. But if I look at my own journey, it was a thousand little nudges. I didn’t change overnight, but there was a day during the 2016 election cycle that I remember realizing that even though I had spent almost 8 years despising Obama, that he had been an alright president - especially compared to the Republican nominee, Trump.

Mine (early LCD model) has “Made in China” on the label, which even if most of the parts are made elsewhere, if final assembly is in China, that’s the tariff rate that will apply.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the SteamDeck doubles or triples in price before long. We already knew Valve wasn’t making much, if anything, on them, and with a 245% tariff, I kinda doubt they’ll just eat that.