Meh, I would’ve given 3/5 stars to U.S. democracy since the Voting Rights Act. Stars taken away for FPTP, gerrymandering, campaign finance, “lobbying,” and the electoral college. I believe we’re going to go to 0/5 stars with completely rigged elections rather than just manufacturing consent and lightly tipping the scales like they’ve been doing.

Yeah, I think this could be the end of free and fair elections in the U.S., and there’s no coming back from that without a revolution. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think most of us will directly be killed by this change; our lives will just be shittier. It’ll be like living in Russia. Given how utterly incompetent the administration is looking, and the things they say they’re going to do (mass deportation of a significant part of our workforce, blanket tariffs, gutting social safety-nets), we may speed-run an economic and societal collapse. That could sow the seeds for a horrible and bloody revolution.

Or, maybe I’m wrong and the important institutions will somehow hold against a christo-fascist party controlling all branches of the federal government and a president with immunity. If there are still are free and fair elections, then congress could block a lot of things in 2026, and start repairing some of the damage in 2028.

Still, it does not bode well that the U.S. elected these people in the first place, and at best, the U.S. will slowly crumble for decades.

Do you remember when it was commonly advised to use fake names and birthdays on online forms, and when “spyware” was a term?

??? The cheapest new vehicle I’ve seen is $18k. If you’re talking about used vehicles, you can get used EVs even cheaper since they tend to lose value faster. I just checked autotrader, and they have a Leaf with only 40k miles for $9k. You’re going to have a hard time finding a decent vehicle of any kind under $5k. I really don’t understand what kind of point you’re trying to argue about. Yes, vehicles are expensive, but many people need one. I spent most of my life only being able to afford vehicles that barely ran, and repairing them myself (often improvising without having the correct tools).

Fucking Ridgid got me, because on paper, they have lifetime warranties on their batteries. But after buying an expensive combo, they made it an absolute hassle to register my tools, so I kinda doubt they’ll honor their warranty. Now I’m Ridgid + Dewalt. My corded tools and hand tools are whatever brand; harbor freight or walmart if not used often, Milwaukee, DeWalt, etc if I expect to use them often.

I’m not sure you understood what I wrote. EVs can pay their own difference. Depending on where you live (what your gasoline and electricity costs are), an EV can save $10,000+ in fuel over their lifespans, making some EVs cheaper than comparable ICE vehicles. I.E. you can get a new Chevy Bolt for $27k, then you’d save $10k on fuel over its lifetime. $17k is cheaper than a comparable car. I believe you’d also get a $7.5k tax credit.

46% of Texans voted for Biden. Before the election, there were (wishful) talks of Texas becoming purple. It’s much more blue than Florida, for example. But, the gerrymandering is pretty egregious.

Here’s one district that contains black neighborhoods in both San Antonio and Austin, which are about 100 miles apart.

And the footage from the cameras in his cell were coincidently erased?

I think the guards testified they were busy looking at motorcycles and vacation spots when this happened. You know, things people may look at when they suddenly came across a lot of money to spend, lol.

Depending on the EV, the total cost of ownership is cheaper than a comparable ICE vehicle (due to fuel savings, and being mechanically simpler to maintain and repair). I’m pretty sure personal vehicles are the largest source of personal CO2 emissions, since it takes an EV 34kwh to travel 100 miles, and ICE vehicles are 4x less efficient. Pretty sure that would produce more CO2 than a typical household’s heating and cooling.

I disagree. If Republicans take the presidency, the house, and the senate, I don’t think voting will matter anymore. It’s not so much, “Trump will be a dictator that never steps down,” and more like further erosion of voting rights and democracy to the point that the Republican party will always control all branches of government. The large majority of states have red legislature or governors, and the Republicans are passing laws and trying to get court rulings that would keep them red no matter what (which would ensure control of the entire federal government). In reality, U.S. democracy is so weak now that only a few more laws and court rulings are needed to ensure Republican control of the federal government forever. They are doing it out in the open, “lawfully.” As they say, “this is not a democracy, it’s a republic!”

Google has a great advantage in the SEO cat-and-mouse game (being able to hire and pay many very smart people). I think part of the problem is that Google has an incentive to not penalize pages with excessive and intrusive AdSense ads.

“Vice signaling”

Wow, that’s a little too impressive. I’m guessing that image was probably in its training set (or each individual image). There are open training sets with adversarial images, and these images may have come from them. Every time I’ve tried to use ChatGPT with images it has kinda failed (on electronic schematics, plant classification, images of complex math equations, etc). I’m kind of surprised OpenAI doesn’t just offload some tasks to purpose-built models (an OCR or a classification model like inaturalist’s would’ve performed better in some of my tests).

Autotune, more explicit woman pop artists, mumble rap, whatever the fuck “thrift shop” is, country rap, k-pop.

Also noticed much older genres being modernized a bit with the likes of Tyler Childers (a little bluegrass-like) and All Them Witches (psychedelic).

Poor banks :( The irresponsible poors need to do things the right way, and lobby congress to bail them out.

Nah, I don’t think that’s common. A lot of men swipe right on every woman, get a match with something like 1% of those, get a chat response with 0.1%, arrange a date with 0.01%, and have 100% back out of the date. At least that was my experience for a couple months of using dating apps, lol.

The simulations could be imperfect simulations. So, each nested simulation would lose fidelity, simulate a smaller universe, or simulate a universe with less life. I think one hypothesis I’ve heard is that wave functions are an approximation, and the simulation only fully simulates particles when they are observed. Kinda like how games do level-of-detail optimizations when you are further away from objects.

Edit: Another possibility is that nothing says the simulation we’re in started at the beginning of the universe, it could’ve just been given initial conditions and started yesterday for all we know.

I don’t know if we are in a simulation, but I think it’s plausible. I think a God (at least of the religions I know of) is implausible, but possible. I kinda like the many-worlds hypothesis better than simulation theory, but I guess they’re not exclusive.

Idk, it seems like a pretty big jump in addiction potential. I don’t hear of too many people going into sex work to support their alcohol and cannabis habits.

I do support at least decriminalization of all drugs though. As long as it coincides with adequate education, harm reduction, and therapy resources.

I’ve heard it’s cheaper if you mix with baking soda or something and smoke it.

Reminded me of this: https://www.trojanbrands.com/en/products/sex-toys-vibrators/trojan-tandem-couples-vibrating-ring And Louis Rossmann’s repair video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv88A4vI960