This exactly.

I looked into setting Plex up a few years ago. It installed, and then starts talking about making a cloud account. I don’t want to talk to a cloud I just want to organize my own shit on my own network. Why does that need a cloud?

I uninstalled it. Everything I’ve seen since, and I mean EVERYthing, tells me I dodged a bullet. Not once have I read an article that makes me wish I’d continued the install.

They’re gonna shut down old reddit

Day they do that is the day I never go back to Reddit.

Yes. You are always adding net energy to the system. That’s why a heater is a self-contained unit (turns energy into heat) while an air conditioner requires two units- one to suck up the heat outside, another to reject that heat outside. It’s not ‘creating cold’, it’s using energy to pump heat from the inside to the outside. The total amount of heat rejected outside is a net addition- it’s the heat sucked up from inside, plus the waste heat from the compressor.

The air conditioner (current design) works on the simple principle that the boiling point of a liquid changes based on ambient pressure, and that phase change (between liquid and gas) carries a lot of latent energy. To boil water with heat alone, it takes about 100 calories to heat a gram of water from just above freezing to just below boiling. But to boil it, to heat it less than one more degree and turn it into gas, takes another 433 calories. That means if you adjust its boiling point by pressurizing and depressurizing it, whenever it boils or condenses it’ll suck up or release a lot of heat at the same time.

Obviously we want colder than 100c, so we use a refrigerant like tetrafluoroethane with a boiling point of -26c.

This gadget uses a similar concept. Instead of using pressure to tweak the boiling point of a refrigerant, it uses a solid that heats or cools in response to pressure. Then water carries the heat around.

Yes but China, Russia, Iran, etc all have national-level firewalls in place. You can go in China and chances are your VPN won’t work, and if it does the whole country is fucking network-hostile (like I’ve seen reports of the USB charger ports in hotels trying to hack into phones).
UK, as far as I know, doesn’t have any kind of similar national level firewall. Nor does USA or most other ‘civilized’ nations.

And without that national firewall, all these laws are crap. Because unless you’re physically prevented by the firewall from downloading or using VPNs or similar tools, all the laws in the world are just a padlock on a cardboard box.

I have the same thought. I still use Reddit, 100% on Old Reddit and I think objectively you could say I contribute a lot in terms of comments and participation. If old Reddit goes away, I’m done.

this is exactly it.

It’s far better for Ukraine to blow off arms and legs than kill soldiers. The more wounded sent back to RU, especially those who can’t be rehabbed back into combat readiness, the better. And the more of such people who get into RU society the better- SHOW the RU people the cost of the war. Don’t let it be some abstract concept like war is to Americans.

Exactly this. Ukraine has started open cooperation with foreign weapons companies, inviting them to come test their autonomous systems in real battlefield conditions. Given that the rest of Europe is arming up against potential Russian hostility, the opportunity to test your new weapons against their most likely opponent is a golden ticket. My guess is a lot of these new designs are proving effective, and Putin is realizing that any more ‘special military operations’ will be taken as proof positive that Russia has turned conquistador and met with overwhelming force by most of the rest of Europe.

It’s also possible he’s just running out of troops. The last estimate I saw was something like 340,000 Russian casualties…

The problem is that the internet is fucking global. As long as that is the case, it is simply not possible to fix this problem.

You can put whatever regulations you want on online content, and some provider from a different jurisdiction is going to say screw you I abide by the laws of my own jurisdiction. The restricted citizens will use that company.

It is like making drugs illegal when there is still an illegal drug dispenser in every home. It doesn’t work.

The most you can do is try to block this at the payment level, but that requires setting up a very intrusive payment blacklist or whitelist system. And then some VPN provider will just make themselves ad supported and you are back at square one.

And that doesn’t even touch the issue of torrents, p2p file sharing, and decentralized networks. Go back to the early to mid-200s and everybody used those things because most of the content they wanted wasn’t easily available legally. Then it became easily available and people started paying for it. But you throw enough roadblocks, make people subscribe to too many streaming services, require too much age verification type crap, and the world will sail the high seas once again.

We come down to the same underlying problem that we have today- the people of the country are not actively engaged in the political process, not nearly to the same degree the Framers intended.

The difference between those people who wrote our constitution and the people we have today is those people recognized the importance of what they were doing. They were willing to stand up and fight and die if necessary to create a free society. Today the inheritors of that free society largely can’t even be bothered to vote, let alone put in an hour or two of research to figure out who to vote for.

So I will agree with you that the wording of the original document is imprecise, and a lot of what we now call constitutional law comes as much if not more from various Court decisions than from the document itself. But given the situation that we have currently, I am genuinely curious what you think could be improved? Knowing the players in question who would be writing the new constitution, knowing the amount of influence various people and groups and companies have over our political process, a. What do you think could or should be changed or improved, and b. How likely is it do you think that would actually happen without the process being corrupted?

The problem is-- who is going to re-write it? This is a serious question. Do you really think a consensus of those currently running the US government could do better than the Framers?

Both of your points go back to the same underlying issue- Americans don’t do their homework. Expecting the American population to do their own independent research into candidates and select the candidate that objectively best serves their interest is not a winning proposition. I really wish this was different, but that is just not a thing that happens.

But that means that a candidate wins or loses on marketing. This marketing is a combination of having the reach, and hitting those people with the right message.

That’s a big reason why I say DNC handed the nomination to Hillary. The DNC was supposed to remain neutral until the primary was finished, however they helped the Hillary campaign by sharing their mailing lists. So you say Bernie was unpopular, thank you if you limited that to voters who were familiar with his platform as well as Hillary’s I think you would have a different result.

But look at Trump. He won the PR game. He said lots of crazy shit that got him constantly in the news, then when he got the spotlight he used it to say things that directly addressed the American people’s pain points. His message was that he sees the country not working for the average person, but instead working for companies that outsource American jobs. So to stop that he will throw some tariffs and bring jobs back! If you’re in American Blue collar worker or especially factory worker, that is the first time back in quite a while that a politician has said ‘I hear you, you matter and I’m going to stand up to big business and fix your problem’.

Now you can objectively point out problems in his budget proposals and his stated agendas as of campaign season, you can point to the gop’s track record of abandoning lower classes, but that all just becomes more words on a very crowded page, more talking heads. None of that overcame the power of Trump’s message.

Obama did the same thing by the way, the whole hope, change, yes we can campaign was brilliant and it did the same thing of speaking directly to the American people’s pain points. And it was also simple enough to resonate in someone’s mind. Unfortunately Obama had the right idea and he was a good president but he didn’t have the balls needed to railroad his desired reforms through.

My point is though, if the DNC had two brain cells to rub together they would be learning from this. You need a candidate who’s willing to stand up to big business, who is willing to ruffle feathers among the donors. That wasn’t Hillary. And it wasn’t Kamala either.

Exactly. Not to mention often those boring candidates push wedge issues like gun control, trans issues, and race / gender based identity politics which make them very unpalatable for rural moderates.

The sad thing is, if the Democrats gave up gun control and focused on economic reform, they would clean house.

If the Republicans gave up their religious anti-gay agenda and focused on efficient government, they would clean house.

Both parties are so far in bed with a handful of big donors that they are totally out of touch with their electorate.

I don’t think the Constitution at all needs a rewrite. I think the ideals of the Framers are just as important and valid today as they were when they were put to paper. Our problems come not from inadequacies in the Constitution, but from our own inadequacy to follow its teachings.

It’s not just Israel. It’s also the strategy of trying to get boring middle of the road candidates when the American public wants radical reform. Problem is, the radical reform the public wants isn’t good for big business and Wall Street, both of which donate a lot of money to DNC.

I was not evaluating his effectiveness as a leader. Only his effectiveness as a candidate. Simple fact is, both times he pushed a message of radical reform. Both times his opponent did not. Both times he won.

I am not a fan of his presidency for a great many reasons, and I did not vote for him either time.

I’m aware. I also know that the DNC (the centralized organization) has a lot of influence through things like superdelegates. Look at the 2016 primary- openly colluding with Hillary against Bernie, and it worked.

As opposed to nominating candidates that have actual reform plans rather than going for the ‘safe option’ Hillary/Kamala status quo candidates.

Donald Trump was not the safe candidate for the GOP. He pushed radical reform. And it got him elected.
Hillary and Kamala were the safe candidates for the DNC. Status quo, don’t rock the boat, appeal to the base, don’t take risks. They lost.

The American people are hurting. The American people want radical reform. And so they vote for a radical reform candidate.

Bernie would have wiped the floor with Trump, had he gotten the nomination. But the DNC saw him as too radical and unpalatable in the general election. How’d that work out?

You’re very much on the right track, but I think it goes much much deeper than violence. It goes to self-reliance.

Go back to the time of the Framers. If you wanted something to happen, literally anything at all, you had to do it yourself. Criminal stealing your shit? By the time you get to town to ask for help he’ll be gone, so either say goodbye to your shit (and maybe your wife too) or grab your rifle and confront him. Government not doing what you want? Grab your pitchfork and head to City Hall, or run for office yourself. Feeling hungry? Better start cooking. Want to have meat this winter? Better start raising a cow today. Bully picking on you? Better learn to fight his ass. Your house is broken? Better grab a hammer and a saw because nobody else’s gonna help fix it.

Over the last 100ish years, that attitude has been slowly changing. Individual self-reliance has given way to a sort of mutualist service society where self-reliance is no longer the norm, it’s no longer the exception, it’s become almost an outlier.

Criminal stealing your shit? Call the police and hide until they arrive. Government not doing what you want? Write a letter or whine about it online. Feeling hungry? Grab your phone because food’s an Uber Eats order away. Your house is broken? Call a repairman or a carpenter.

What’s missing there? Any kind of self-reliance, self-empowerment to solve your own problems. Every problem involves asking or paying someone else to fix it for you.
I argue that the result of this is a society of people who’ve forgotten that they DO have the power to solve their own problems.

I don’t blame malice for this, I blame a combination of laziness along with a LOT of well-meaning people and policies that only further disenfranchise the populace from their own agency, usually in the name of safety. You mention zero tolerance for bullying, that’s certainly one as it teaches the victim not to fight back. Police say the same thing though- police always say if confronted with a threat just give the criminal what they want and run away when you can.

There’s pockets of resistance to this sort of attitude, but they are largely isolated and focused on their own agendas without real connection. The most obvious might be gun owners and the concealed carry movement. But there’s plenty of others- the open source community, the right to repair movement, the maker community, the free range parenting movement, and just about any other DIY community. They’re all focused on their own individual niche, but the attitude is the same-- you CAN do ____ yourself, you DON’T need someone else to do it for you.

We need more of that. And I think it starts with school curriculum. If I was in charge, I’d take one academic semester out of high school (or at least a few credit hours) and devote it to purely empowering and constructive practical lessons. Wood shop, auto repair, plumbing/electrical, coding, cooking, industrial design, financial planning, etc. I don’t think this should be optional electives to bypass, I believe these lessons are just as important as reading writing and maths, because if we create kids that are book smart but life stupid, we’re doing them a disservice. And that’s what we’re doing now.

For our society to find our way out of this, we (the population) need to empower ourselves, recognize that we are NOT helpless, and take back agency over our lives.

Unfortunately I think that won’t happen until either a. a real leader comes along who can energize people- think Obama before his first term, but with actual balls to FIGHT rather than watering everything down. Bernie could have been that. But I think we need another MLK type person. Or b, things get a good bit worse, for the population to stop desperately trying to stay afloat in a rigged game and instead doing a table-flip rejection of the rigged system.

Microsoft one would be:

Microsoft: Microsoft Copilot

Look at the wording- ‘premium experience’. He’s not selling coffee, he’s thinking big picture of the whole experience from the moment you walk in the store. He’s not even wrong here. This is good business management- that he’s taking charge of everything about the store from the decor, the furniture, the colors, how the employee talks to you, etc. That’s all part of the experience.

What’s wrong is that people keep going. Most people don’t give a fuck about the experience, they just want a tasty coffee. Our economy is based on competition and free choice. If he makes his coffee cost $8 or $9 or $15 or $50 that’s his right and his company’s right. Just as it is your right to go elsewhere, which you should be doing anyway.

The thing is- IMHO, Starbucks coffee isn’t worth anywhere near $9. Here’s a challenge- go to Starbucks and order a double espresso shot. Now find a local artisan coffee place, like the type with a chalkboard that says where the beans they’re brewing today were grown. And get a double espresso from them also. Compare the two.
What you’ll notice about Starbucks is that it’s burnt. And that’s because it’s literally burnt- the typical Starbucks bean is roasted MUCH darker than average, so the resulting coffee flavor is dominated by a burned smoky bitter-ish flavor.
Compare that to your local artisan coffee place- you’ll notice it’s NOT burnt, the flavor is NOT dominated by smokiness, but you have a lot more layers of flavor. Then order whatever drink you want- better coffee in means better drink out.

Keep in mind also most of what Starbucks sells isn’t really coffee, it’s milky sugary drinks that incorporate a few drips of espresso. So you’re paying $9 for a sugary calorie bomb made from overly roasted coffee that just makes you fat.

Also- if you usually order the same thing at Starbucks- just learn to make it. Even if you throw $1000 at a nice fully automatic espresso machine, taking the per-coffee cost from $9 to $1 means you’ll break even on the machine in 125 coffees. For most people that’s less than a year. And you can do it yourself- next time you order, watch what the barista does. They are not wizards and nothing behind the counter is magic. An espresso machine and a blender will make like 95% of the menu. Here’s a guide