Evolution - at a species level or a societal level - has no “guiding hand”. It throws shit at a wall to see what sticks, and the best-adapted variants tend to propagate.

Selfish behavior is very powerful in a large and strong society where most people are producing more value than they’re consuming. There’s so much wealth to be found that if you don’t care about the enemies you make, you can just jump from victim to victim as you amass power faster tab the people you leave behind. The problem is, this drives the society towards no longer being one of such surplus.

In a smaller society where people are largely just surviving, selfish behavior will cripple your own ability to survive. If everybody has only a modest surplus, they only want to share it with people they can trust to return the favor when they’re the one in need. If you make enemies with everyone in a small community, you’re going to have a hard time finding community support.

Given that this is a laptop we’re talking about, OP is definitely over selling it. Bring a backpack, unpack the laptop box into your backpack (assuming the box is too big to fit in the backpack itself). Something bigger like a TV would be more problematic.

The main worry is that being seen with new-in-box fancy electronics makes you look like “guy with money”. It’s not so much that someone’s gonna steal your TV on the subway, but if you can afford a new TV your wallet probably has good stuff in it. Then it’s just a question of “how bad is the crime actually on this commute?”. Most places it’d be fine but some rough parts of some cities I’d be worried.

I mean…

[Gestures broadly at the state of the world]

People see headlines and the comment section of the social media platform where that headline was posted.

This, basically

https://xkcd.com/1019/

Shit, even doing shades of purple without getting more granular than the state level would change the map drastically. This winner take all bullshit is the dumbest part of the electoral college.

Personal/Family use is fine, it’s kinda fiddly but so is most selfhosted software.

At an organizational level, that fiddliness spirals into a ton of work, which doesn’t really overlap with other IT Duties in the way that troubleshooting OneDrive usually ends up solving problems with the whole Microsoft suite.

Charlie Wilson.

Texas Democrat known for partying hard, and was investigated (by Rudy Giuliani) for a party he attended in Vegas.

“The girls had cocaine, and the music was loud. It was total happiness. And both of them had long, red fingernails with an endless supply of beautiful white powder…The Feds spent a million bucks trying to figure out whether, when those fingernails passed under my nose, did I exhale or inhale, and I ain’t telling”

The US may affect the whole world less next year if everyone else works hard to find alternate markets, but it’s going to take longer than that for the rest of the world to totally detangle themselves from our mess.

What if they’re more important than ever before in American history?

Don’t use bar keepers friend to clean them. That fucked up ours.

The easiest offsite backup would be any cloud platform. Downside is that you aren’t gonna own your own data like if you deployed your own system.

Next option is an external SSD that you leave at your work desk and take home once a week or so to update.

The most robust solution would be to find a friend or relative willing to let you set up a server in their house. Might need to cover part of their electric bill if your machine is hungry.

“Banned” and “burned” books go hard as hell

Every library I’ve been to in the last 5 years has had a poster of “banned books” specifically to advertise them because people (especially teenagers) love that shit.

A coworker was telling me all about how “once you own a truck, you realize all the things you can do with a truck that you couldn’t before”

And like, he’s not wrong but all the things he listed were my non-urgent to-do list that I keep written down and when it has 3-4 items I rent a truck from Uhaul for the day. I spend about $20 while they’re spending thousands on their monthly payment, not to mention gas.

Then you better believe it’s trying to fuck you.

I don’t think “mods per user” is that important of a metric. “Mods per daily/weekly/monthly post/comment” is a more useful gauge of a community’s activity.

They get non-voting representatives in congress.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-voting_members_of_the_United_States_House_of_Representatives

It’s a context thing.

Ohio = a bad place to be. Honestly, as a non-Ohio Midwesterner, I say this should be allowed.

Chat = like addressing the twitch chat. “Chat, are we doomed?” It’s actually pretty interesting from a linguistics perspective because it’s arguably a fourth person pronoun. But in-class I can see it getting out of hand.

Per that last bit, I’m guessing they never had a lawyer present. Would make any of those fabricated statements null and void, if the constitution meant anything.

A relative of mine just had a baby, and her mom came from out-of country to meet her grandchild and help mom and dad in those first crazy weeks with a newborn.

But when she told CBP that she was “coming to help her daughter with the new baby” she got detailed and questioned for 2 hours. Eventually they let her through but they were really trying to pin her coming to work illegally on a tourism visa.

If you or a loved one are in a similar situation, just say you’re “visiting family”. Apparently it’s a legal gray area in this shithole to help your child take care of a newborn.

Every election in the US is all-or-nothing.