Perhaps foolishly, I got rid of most of my older systems 20 years ago, so the oldest one I have left is my Sega Genesis.

In small (population-wise) rural areas like that, where positions are running uncontested or only contested in the primary, it’s actually possible individuals could make a difference. But there’s some caveats.

If the area is extremely Republican and would never vote for a Democrat, don’t run as one. Unlike in races like President and Senate, independent and third party are actual choices at this level, they’re not simply false choices.

An individual could find some local issue that matters to a lot of people in the area but seems to be being ignored. Talk to neighbors, local people, etc, figure out what they’re upset about that actually falls under the purview of local or state government, then make that the core of your platform.

As long as you’re not officially listed as a Democrat, you’re not platforming on things that the locals would never vote for (and you probably couldn’t do anything about anyway in the lower office you’re running for) and you’ve actually done some local research and found an issue that a significant number of people in your area are upset about, you actually have a chance. You’d probably lose, but there’s a real chance.

If they raise the prices in those countries they would make less money because volume of subscribers would go down enough for total income to decrease.

If they lowered the price in the US, they would make less money because the subscribers they would gain would not be enough to offset the reduced income from each.

That’s it, it has nothing to do with operating costs or fairness, it’s just a question of what price point they believe will make them the most money in a given market.

It’s kind of a difficult issue. Jury nullification has been used for both good and bad, with the simplest and most obvious examples being from Civil War type stuff - people who unambiguously broke the law against helping slaves escape have had their verdicts nullified. Good thing. But also people who lynched black people in the south have had their verdicts nullified. Bad thing.

Making sure that verdicts are determined purely based on the law and whether the law was broken means that people need to work to change the law, they can’t just apply the law unevenly by nullifying against some defendants and not against others. So I can see the case for nullification being a bad thing. Ideally, you deal with that by removing or reworking the law so that it doesn’t come to the point of needing nullification.

But, well, reality isn’t ideal. Still, it’s unavoidable - as long as a jury can’t be forced to explain the reasoning behind their verdict beyond insisting ‘I was not convinced of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt’ and as long as a jury verdict of Not Guilty is final and cannot be retried, jury nullification will de facto exist. That said, it’s the entire system not just ‘this judge’ that is attempting to prevent jury nullification from happening. The judge’s question about following the law is boilerplate standard basically everywhere, and it’s a systematic and intentional attempt to weed out potential jury nullifiers.

That’s exactly the reason for those questions. So they can ask ‘would you consider using jury nullification’ without informing people that jury nullification exists.

And also so that if you at some point admit something that sounds like you’re voting not guilty because you disagree with the law, they can kick you off the jury and possibly charge you with perjury.

If you ever find yourself in a jury and intend to nullify, you must not admit it ever: you must maintain simply that you are not convinced by the evidence.

Yup, exactly. The only regulation I’d be in favor of for AI is this: if it was trained on data which can be accessed by or was posted by the public, it must be freely available, such that if anything in the training data was posted online in a way anyone can see, then then I have free access to tge AI too.

Basically any other regulation, even if the companies whine publicly, is actually one that benefits them by raising the barrier of entry and making it more expensive for small actors to create AI tools.

They’ve gotten smart enough to use reverse psychology on this kind of thing.

This very much feels like “Only please, Brer Fox, please don’t throw me into the briar patch.”

It feels to me like people did unite after those attacks…it was the crazy conspiracy theories about them that really seemed to get the ball rolling as far as division goes.

Thing is, Republicans have been using any crisis and our ‘unite behind leadership’ behavior to fuck us since before Reagan, so I’m not sure it’s really such a bad thing that we stopped ‘uniting’.

I don’t think ‘going’ anywhere would be an option. If you’re in basically, most of the civilized world, and not in a very secure structure, you’re immediately fucked. I said more than 50% but I guessed that as a very conservative estimate. We don’t normally realize just how many living things are around us, mostly bugs, but also small rodents and the like. If every one of those within a significant radius of every human suddenly went berserk and wanted the humans dead, most people are not in areas where the number of attackers would permit much survival.

Those who currently live in certain desert environments, in certain cold environments, and so forth, would probably survive the first day, and then might have a hope of making it longer. But most environments in which there isn’t enough animal/bug life around to immediately kill you present serious other problems such as food supply. If you live at McMurdo Sound Antarctica, you’re probably not going to immediately be killed. But you will soon have issues feeding yourself and keeping warm.

People in Iceland or northern Norway and other similar places might have the best chances. Probably not quite enough things around to kill everyone immediately, but the environment is one in which they might be able to become self-sufficient, but in the long term I have my doubts even for them. If the bugs and animals and such are so focused on killing humans that they no longer perform their normal functions, then you’re looking at immediate and total ecological collapse. If they’re not, then the population of bugs and animals will increase in all areas other than the most extreme environments, and sooner or later what few humans survived in those extreme environments are going to have to attempt to emerge.

If humans had prep time, maybe. Assuming we could get over our normal difficulties cooperating and actually prepare for the event. There’d at least be a lot of survivors. But if it came as a surprise, suddenly someone flips a switch and the entire animal kingdom is trying to make every single one of us dead? We’re pretty much fucked.

If this means that every animal immediately goes berserk and tries to kill all humans, and ‘animal’ includes bugs, then the animals probably win.

Those people in relatively secure places without enough animals when it starts could survive, but there’s probably be 50% or higher casualties among the general human population in less than a day.

I did years ago when Google started censoring my search results even with safe search off.

Unfortunately Bing is doing it too now and I can’t find a search engine that isn’t, though I would love to learn about one that isn’t.

The big question is how many times to press it. Once at least is a given. It does specify the death as gruesome, so I don’t really want the death, but I’d also like enough money to not have to worry again until a non gruesome death.

Like, if it was painless death, I’d probably say something like 20 or 30 times, but with a gruesome one…maybe 5 max, or perhaps even less. Still, one or two pushes is a given.

I think abolishing intellectual property would hurt capitalism more than it would benefit it. Already it is strongly in favor of the rich and the big corporations. Getting rid of those limitations even without abolishing capitalism first, would, I think, be more to everyone’s benefit than detriment.

Yes, as long as people keep focusing on fighting the technology instead of fighting capitalism, this is true.

So we can fight the technology and definitely lose, only to see our efforts subverted to further entrench capitalism and subjugate us harder (hint: regulation on this kind of thing disproportionately affects individuals while corporations carve out exceptions for themselves because ‘it helps the economy’)…

Or we can embrace the technology and try to use it to fight capitalism, at which point there’s at least a chance we might win, since the technology really does have the potential to overcome capitalism if and only if we can spread it far enough and fast enough that it can’t be controlled or contained to serve only the rich and powerful.

For a few people, this kind of thinking helps. It does for me, actually. When I feel like my life sucks it can help to compare myself to an imaginary Anglo-Saxon peasant woman during the invasion of the Sons of Lodbrok, and it actually helps to realize just how much better I have it than her.

But that doesn’t work for everyone, and even those it works for kinda need to do the comparison themselves, not have it pushed on them.

I bet some people flashed that one and such too, but I could find no indication that it was shut down because of that.

It feels like society has backslid tremendously on some freedoms in the past 15 years, particularly where it comes to prudishness.

These days we even have otherwise progressive people jumping on the prude bandwagon along with hyper religious controlling anti feminists and it just makes for such strange bedfellows.

If it is solved it will definitely be through technology of some sort. While I agree it will not be one brilliant scientist, technology will be the solution.

That technology may come in the form of a way to produce more energy without fucking up the climate, and the engineering and logistical capacity to roll out the change at a breakneck pace.

It may come in the form of simply developing a way to control the global climate directly.

It might come in the form of some technology to control the behavior of humans so that we can actually respond appropriately.

Or it might come in the form of the singularity, when self improving machines grow so far beyond us so fast that they can just do what is needed whether we like it or not.

But one way or another I guarantee that if it’s solved, it’ll largely be a technological solution, because getting humanity to just…stop using energy at our current rate…is just not going to happen.

You probably had the same damn book I did, with an illustration of him eating an orange and seeing the wings of a butterfly coming up over it and supposedly realizing they look just like the sails of a ship and so, gasp, the world must be round like this orange!

Yeah, these projects done by one or two people could be better with a larger team, but it’s definitely not a matter of hiring a big pile of people suddenly.

The ideal size is probably a couple dozen people, but scaling up to even that will take months since the one person currently in charge has to do a lot. And it’ll almost fully pause work on the project for a while.

Cause if there’s one person, they’ve got to find all the candidates, do all the hiring, then bring people up to speed.

The real problem is if the person who made it doesn’t have the skills to manage even a small group of people.

I don’t understand the complaints about the expansions for these games. Ok, there’s a lot of them? But they’re generally good. And if you don’t want them, just…stop updating and stay on whatever version you liked?

And unlike most, they make it easy to play an older version. Did I like a particular patch better and hate all that’s come since then? Easy to roll back to it. What do people want…for them to not put out expansions?