And so the appeal of older cars grows and grows. Enthusiasm for pre-enshittification era tech will only get more widespread. My daily is from 2006 (won’t ever buy newer than that) and my fun car is a 1989 that I can fix with a rock if I have to.

Yes, 1986. Just like you say. :D

Source of the whole thing is Xiaomi, so there’s that. The company that leads always has the headwinds to overcome, the rest draft along behind. Not too impressive on Xiaomi’s part.

School IT, eh? My SO did that for a long time, too. No shortage of horror stories on that beat, hope you’re in a happier position now!

This exactly. And with this conflict in particular, question everything you read and take every step you can to find the truth. If you hew strictly to what’s true, you’re never wrong, that’s the beauty of it.

Also, in this one, you gotta learn a good bit about local and regional history, and the religions as well. This is essentially a sectarian conflict framed as a fight over territory. And with the daily news, my god. I clicked on one link where the headline was “Scholars find evidence of genocide in Gaza”, and the substance of the article was actually about how the evidence in question was falling apart under the weight of independent review and single source reporting that came from Hamas. You really have to put the work in to get to the facts.

• Morrowind
• Chrono Trigger
• The full motion Afterburner arcade machine (that thing was so much fun)
• A link to the past
• Tetris

I hope they get married.

Did you read it? My brain went to the same place yours did, but this bill would require the State Department to use diplomatic channels to promote values. Basically just pestering and chiding.

The 80s were so brown… many “Love is…” cartoons on fridges, ashtrays everywhere, framed copies of that shitty “footprints” poem in bathrooms all over the country, american cars were outshittied only by british and Italian cars, and Randy Savage was talking about cups of coffee in the big time.

I had a keen sense, even then, that it was a great decade. I think human civilization peaked in 1986. The enshittification began in 1981 (thanks Ronnie), but our momentum kept us going on the upwards trajectory until about when Baby Jessica fell down that well.

The best part about this to me, who served with the Marines, is that the whole lot of 'em are so gay adjacent that Sgt. Morgan could very plausibly be straight and that other guy is just one of his Marine buddies who wasn’t on the deployment with him and the photographer just made an assumption.

“The Navy is the straightest bunch of gay guys you’ll ever meet; the Marines are the gayest straight guys” as the saying goes.

The UK was the first one to this particular bag of shit. There was a British MP, whose name I forget, who retired from Parliament having sunk a bunch of money into investing in the UK’s chosen third party service, run by his friends, and IIRC wrote the bill so that it would go into effect long enough after he quit that he wouldn’t technically run afoul of corruption laws. The whole thing stinks to high heaven, and I’m sick that this crap is creeping into the US as well.

So anyway, here’s a great usecase for generative AI to game this fucked up system with pictures of nobody.

Done. One thing that ought to be widely brought up as an argument against, besides the obvious, is that this regulation (as I understand things) is being proposed under the authority given to regulators under the Chevron deference law of I think 1984. In any case, this was thrown out by the supreme court last year, and quite correctly. The case that got it thrown out was about the ATF’s ability to make up whatever gun laws they wanted to. Dems argued that it needed to be preserved because it allows agencies to regulate things, but I asked myself if that was true, and decided that the wild deregulation of the 80s were enabled by it, and that things like net neutrality were able to be killed by appointed bureaucrats because of it. The argument for it is that lawmakers shouldn’t have to be subject experts on everything, but the argument against it is that any law too vague for a legislator to understand is unconstitutionally vague and laws should be required to be written well. Also, it’s the job of congress to make laws, not appointees of whatever President who happens to be sitting in office who’re doing as they’re bid.

At this stage, anything pushing back on executive power is a fine thing indeed.

Yeah, there’s enough posted on the open web that one might, if unfortunate, encounter it. I’ve seen it randomly put up on FB once, by some spam account.

Then there was this creep running for office in Virginia on a platform of enslaving women and getting rid of age of consent laws… I unwisely went to his campaign site to see just how nuts he was, and the guy actually posted CP on there, with a “If elected, I’ll legalize THIS” rant underneath. It was pretty appalling. He was promptly thrown out of the Libertarian party, and soon afterward went to prison for exactly what you’d expect… and he thankfully killed himself pretty quickly.

It was relatively recently when I learned how prevalent it is on twitter. What I’ve learned about CP on the internet is that it’s all over the open web, but the platforms it’s shared on don’t seem to be very interested in cracking down. If the EU wanted to do something about it, they’d light a fire under some asses to regulate their own sites rather than roll out nonsense like this law.

Good idea.

No, a guarantee of citizenship without actually going through the process of vetting people? Just “we casually tossed you, not having done our job, so this time we’ll not do our job a second time” is a pretty terrible policy, not to mention horribly unjust to everyone waiting in line. I worked with a guy who’d spent 17 years on the process to get his sister over to the US. Hearing about all the troubles he had, even as a citizen, trying to sponsor her and do things the right way and his frustration at the politicians wanting to just let people in ahead of her gave me a little more perspective on the whole process and what’s just.

Besides, if they go through the process and become citizens, there’s no revoking it anyway.

You know, if republicans responded to the elmo sign with a Caillou sign saying “No money for PBS if they show this little asshole”, they’d have a point.

I figure that if you can drink and smoke while you play it without any real impairment of performance, it’s not a sport. It’s a game.

I thought that up to annoy golfers, but honestly I think it’s a fair yardstick.

I mean, raising kids in the Elmo days, after growing up on a Sesame Street without him? Damn right Elmo hurt me. He’s not quite Caillou bad… but he nuked the show’s enjoyability.

Let’s be honest, of all the characters on that show, Elmo absolutely IS the one who’s the enemy of the people. That little turd totally ruined that show.

If they used Big Bird, or the count, or maybe Snuffy as an example…

It’s why I say it’s a dangerous game to play. I think we all have some notion of the odds.