And there you go from the moral/intellectual high ground, mocking them as toddlers and saying it’s right and normal to laugh and make fun of them.

I can’t stand vaccine hesitancy and anti-science bullshit. I’ve had to deal with this becoming a Fox News thing in my own family, and lost too many people from alternative “Eastern” medicine over “Western” medical science. But the mockery and ridicule only feeds into the Christian persecution complex most of that rural white population already embraces, and causes the wagons to circle.

I don’t think those are inherently opposed, the whole point of libertarianism being about liberty. Power gained through free market principles is no different than any other power, and thus can and should be opposed through competing ideas/services. If I don’t like your service being provided, I or anyone should be free to provide a competing service that matches my needs/values.

Being a libertarian doesn’t require keeping Fountainhead as your Bible and worshipping at the feet of oligarchs instead of politicians/the State, and I would argue selling your soul to the company store is as antithetical to liberty as selling your soul to a centralized State. But as you’ve indirectly mentioned, there is a rather huge spectrum under the libertarian umbrella.

I won’t speak for other libertarians, as I know there are those that think do worship the oligarchy, and many of my views do probably put me on the left side of libertarianism. If I didn’t believe that government has a role is keeping free markets free and providing stability and peace for liberty to exist (most fiscally conservatively paid for by collapsing all social safety nets into an actual UBI requiring miniscule overhead, Universal Healthcare, and more Georgist tax codes), I’d probably be closer to the anarcho-capitalists maybe? Maybe some offshoot or flavor of Minarchist?

This may only be within the range of human hearing, and you can and do still suffer damage from excessive amplitude by frequencies above and below what is human detectable. ANC is not a protective technology for this reason, it is a quality of life technology.

I’ve been wanting that since 1994. Jawsome!

Each Wyoming is worth one California in the Senate due to the fact that California and Wyoming are both single states. The messed up part is the missing like 140 representatives that should exist to balance population to representative for each state.

The Virtual Boy was released in 1995. It wasn’t wildly successful, but was roughly the start of home VR gaming. There were many VR arcade games and attractions after that in the intervening years until the Oculus DK1 and “modern” VR in 2010. That’s ignoring the really early VR stuff in the 70s and 80s. Just because we have had major breakthroughs in the last 14 years with consumer cost doesn’t mean time starts there.

Palmer Luckey didn’t invent VR at 16 in his garage out of whole cloth without the decades of tangible growth and development done in the prior 2-3 decades. His breakthroughs in latency paved the way for the the current renaissance in consumer home VR, not minimizing his contributions, but VR didn’t start with him, nor Valve, nor HTC.

Seems like Trump isn’t the only person with a selectively blind cult judging by the down votes and angry replies. Any opinion that we should be able to do better than Biden around Lemmy gets flamed way too hard to be reasonable.

Uh, yeah, the “native” population of a country is more deserving to be in their country regardless of circumstance than an illegal immigrant, that’s how countries work. Legal immigrants are also deserving. The citizenry of a country get to have those discussions about how they want their country to run, not other countries. The citizens not paying taxes, shoplifting, and breaking the law should be prosecuted for those crimes, the same as someone breaking immigration laws. It’s not a good thing when any government picks and chooses which laws don’t apply to which people, because it’s not usually the poor and the immigrant that benefits. Based on your apparent support for unlimited and unregulated immigration, I will assume you also claim to be anti-colonial and I’ll assume you disagree with countries meddling with or toppling other governments.

The US illegally flooded Texas with both legal and illegal immigrants, who didn’t integrate into the Mexican culture, kept isolated, and tried to impose their values on Mexico (hint: slavery was a “value”). They eventually caused a rebellion, and flipped the territory to join the US in the end. Europe sent a lot of illegal immigrants all over the world to impose their values on the countries they pulled into their empires. China flooded Tibet with immigrants to the same effect as Texas. The western world had a habit for not liking when a part of a countries citizens would try to impose socialist or communist values on everyone else in that country; I’ll assume you wouldn’t support the foreign intervention that happened to stop those movements, believing that those countries should get to make they determination themselves. I’ll even go out on a limb and assume you condem Israeli settlers illegally immigrating into the West Bank and Gaza.

All severe examples of worst case scenarios and weaponized immigration, but why does territorial sovereignty apply in these cases while not applying to the current mass immigration happening worldwide right now. The intent may be different, 99.99% of illegal immigration across the Southern US border and across the Mediterranean is more “benign” economic migration, but laws should still apply. It is hypocritical to condem border and immigration enforcement in the US and EU, while then condemning border and immigration violation by Russia, China, and Israel. Countries can’t exist without enforceable borders, and enforcement should be consistently and fairly applied based on rule of law.

I don’t believe it did at the time, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it has been by now. I did keep 11 on one of my laptops because it honestly isn’t horrible on a single display.

Little problems here and there for me personally, but the deal breaker for me is that over/under monitor configuration is impossible because Microsoft insists that the taskbar must be locked in the same place on all monitors and it cannot be placed at the top of the display. If they want to force lockdown to iOS levels of “customization” because I apparently cannot be trusted to organize my own desktop, they can fuck right off.

Everyone should vote for whomever represents them best despite whatever letter follows their name, and everyone should know all of their local and state options to be able to do so. Please do the same for your primaries if you at least want a slim possibility of having a decent option. Ranked choice voting would help a lot, but engagement at least helps a little. Hell, third parties got elected this year even.

People blindly straight party ticket voting after skipping the primaries simply because they just hate the other team is how all the shitty entrenched old guard like Pelosi, Manchin, and McConnel (extra especially McConnel, who even republicans hate) stay in power on both sides. And forgetting about the primaries is how we end up with such weak ass candidates as Trump and Biden. It’s so good damn infuriating.

So what you are saying is that everything apparently boils down to two sides wanting nothing more than genocide, as Hamas’ goal since their founding has been the elimination of Israel and the Jews from the middle east. Under that reduction, we just need to choose whether we support a flawed but still functional democracy or another conservative theocracy under Iran in the region. Third option being to pull all support for both sides and just let them destroy each other with a statistically significant possibility of nuclear exchange in the end.

I also would like to know of any other country on earth that would allow a neighboring country to continually launch rockets at it for decades and take no retaliatory action whatsoever, like Israel is somehow an outlier. Is there honestly a realistic expectation that this time would be different if Palestine was given the full Two State system under the original borders? 5th or 6th times the charm on that one? Maybe this time there wouldn’t be another full scale war from all surrounding neighbors, but does anyone actually expect Iran to stop funding or conducting terror attacks on Israel through Palestine, Syria, or Lebanon?

It’s easier to dehumanize and homogenize the opposition than view them as people with real convictions. It happens on both sides, and it’s getting worse and worse as the polarization increases. Driven by the media and the 24 hour news cycle, capitalized on by the DNC and RNC, and keeping everyone fighting amongst ourselves instead of looking too closely at the accelerating wealth gap and banding together by class to restore healthy and competitive capitalism.

It was super shocking to find the Republicans actually knocking the third leg out of their wedge issues stool. All they really have is gun rights now, as the regular culture war stuff isn’t nearly as powerful as abortion was. It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens in the next 2 election cycles, but so help me if the Democrats manage to get back control of all 3 and STILL don’t codify abortion rights, gay marriage rights, interracial marriage, etc so they can capitalize on these suddenly stronger wedge issues. Again. So God damned pissed off at the Obama admin still because of that. Also the lack of federal legalization/decriminalization. And this is from a pro 2A former classical libertarian who wants the government shrunk by replacing all of the bloated agencies and welfare programs with a simple and solid universal healthcare system and true UBI, funded with a aimple tax code with no loopholes that incorporates something of a Georgist land tax.

Sounds like someone has DNACenter with fully deployed ISE and SDN fabric. I’m honestly a little jealous.

The Foundation series is absolutely amazing, and I am jealous of you if this is your first reading. One of my formative series growing up. You’re inspiring me to do the whole Asimov read through like your doing, because I don’t believe I ever read the Empire books and never read Robot beyond I, Robot.