Agreed. Misallocation of resources by a bunch of astoundingly credulous capitalists is a far more likely apocalypse, even if it wouldn’t make for a good Roland Emmerich movie.

Fair enough. This is honestly about the limit of what I would be willing to do as far as DIY electrical is concerned. Anything more complex, and I’m calling a professional.

Easier than replacing a light switch, which I’ve also done. And then had to re-do when I accidentally put it in upside down. The main thing about doing any minor electrical work is to ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS turn off the power at the breaker box and ensure it is off before you start. Better to be cautious than a crispy critter, lol

You can modify the outlet so that only one plug is controlled by the switch. It’s very easy to do, actually. I had to do this in my home for that exact reason, incidentally - the only available outlet for my PC was on the switch. Just modified the outlet, and now only the top plug is controlled by the switch. I have the lamp plugged in the switch half and my PC in the other half.

“Do you have nothing to protect?”

Yeah, but every game has an expiration date if you have to rely on a server still being live to download the full game, which is kinda my point.

If the disk cannot install and play the full game, then it holds little value as physical media for preservation. At that point the only value it has is for collectors.

You’re not as strange as you think, but I have a sneaking suspicion that you’re still quite young (20s?). Your 20s are largely about trying to fit in and following social conventions - you do all the things you think you’re “supposed to”. As you hit your 30s, you stop caring so much about what other people think and what other people have told you that you’re supposed to do and start figuring out what you want to do. A big part of growing up is learning that there are no “rules”; you can eat candy for breakfast if you want, sing in the shower, be an absolute cringe goblin - sky’s the limit so long as you’re not hurting anyone.

Finding a partner to avoid being alone is a terrible, terrible idea for all involved. Learn to enjoy your own company first and figure out what you actually want your life to look like, then you’ll be much more likely to find someone going the same direction. Figure out who you want to be and take the steps to becoming that person. Be unapologetically yourself, and you’ll find people who like you for you, which is absolutely preferable to trying to fit yourself into a tiny box of what you think you’re supposed to be and earning the admiration of people you despise.

As some other commenters have mentioned, investigate whether you may be neurodivergent, because you’ll be much more able to make sense of yourself and the world around you with that knowledge if you are.

If this isn’t an op, then that’s even more pathetic, honestly. Imagine doing this shit for free.

As always with The Atlantic, there is not a single mention of class in the entire lengthy article. These movements away from the written word are not happening in a vacuum and cannot be divorced from the further concentration of wealth in the hands of capital. Capital has decided that it would rather we be idiots (or dead, even better) than pose the risk of a communist revolution. They are all-in on AI because they want to make the worker obsolete; they want to live in luxury without having to pay anyone, and when they have achieved such a feat, they’ll cull the rest of us like the cattle they think we are. It’s a pipe-dream of course, but it’s still up to us to resist before climate change does us all in.

Go read a book. Seriously.

Revolution comes out of the barrel of a gun, not a ballot box, not because we seek violence but because capital will respond to nothing less.

Platner could have won and nothing would have changed. USian politics is all kayfabe. They’re all on the same side, even if they play it up when the cameras are rolling. The Democratic Party will always have a few “defectors” to keep them from passing legislation, by design; if those representatives are replaced, someone else will fill the role. You can’t vote your way out of a corrupt system.

The 9/11 we should actually remember.

I haven’t shopped at Amazon for a year or two now. It is not as cheap as people believe and anything worth buying can be found elsewhere, usually for the same price (sometimes less). Most places even have similarly fast shipping and some use Amazon as a shipping service, which I wish they would disclose up-front so I could choose to shop elsewhere.

Seconding Ace. They also tend not to have surveillance in their parking lots unlike Lowe’s and Home Depot, which are known to employ Flock cameras.

I think successful stylometry would require either a known target (whose writing can be compared to suspected accounts), or a public body of work to compare to. I think this poses the greatest risk to say, known authors writing something anonymously on the side. For the average individual, I think avoiding social media or posting anything written under your government name is probably sufficient. If you’re a known target, obviously your threat model changes drastically.

At the point when someone has volunteered to do that many tours, I think the burden of proof is on them to prove that they did not commit war crimes.

Half want to kill us and the other half don’t care if we die.

I’m not a fan of electoralism, but it’s worth pointing out that ICE does not have the manpower to patrol every polling place. I don’t think they could even cover every polling place in a large metropolitan area, let alone an entire state. They’ve only got like 10,000 guys. That’s not that many in a country with over 300 million people.

Butlerian Jihad when?