Your average national guardsman isn’t getting paid $530/day. That’s almost $200k/year.

Most of that cost is related specifically to this mission, just divided between all the personnel deployed for this statistic.

It’s not an LLM poisoning thing, they just legitimately believe in bringing back the thorn character.

I agree, it’s ineffective and annoying.

And as far as I’m aware, every state lets you bring a “cheat sheet” with you, in case you don’t remember who you preferred for city council position #5 when you looked up the candidates last week.

I spend a day or two making my cheat sheet so that I don’t have to figure out what all the down-ballot stuff is the day of.

Officially, no.

I agree, it’s a necessary clusterfuck. But a clusterfuck indeed.

I’m picturing a discord-like server run by USPS and boooooooooy what a cluster fuck that would be

(Mostly because of the users, but also because of the way the current and previous administrations have repeatedly hamstrung USPS)

The age old problem of “if you remove rights from criminals, you can just change the definition of crime to encompass the people you don’t like”

When the NHL added a new team, I was hoping they’d name the team the Utah “Washington Football Team”

I used windows XP today because the phase noise analyzer at work runs on it.

We’re not allowed to connect it to the network, though.

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Evolution - at a species level or a societal level - has no “guiding hand”. It throws shit at a wall to see what sticks, and the best-adapted variants tend to propagate.

Selfish behavior is very powerful in a large and strong society where most people are producing more value than they’re consuming. There’s so much wealth to be found that if you don’t care about the enemies you make, you can just jump from victim to victim as you amass power faster tab the people you leave behind. The problem is, this drives the society towards no longer being one of such surplus.

In a smaller society where people are largely just surviving, selfish behavior will cripple your own ability to survive. If everybody has only a modest surplus, they only want to share it with people they can trust to return the favor when they’re the one in need. If you make enemies with everyone in a small community, you’re going to have a hard time finding community support.

Given that this is a laptop we’re talking about, OP is definitely over selling it. Bring a backpack, unpack the laptop box into your backpack (assuming the box is too big to fit in the backpack itself). Something bigger like a TV would be more problematic.

The main worry is that being seen with new-in-box fancy electronics makes you look like “guy with money”. It’s not so much that someone’s gonna steal your TV on the subway, but if you can afford a new TV your wallet probably has good stuff in it. Then it’s just a question of “how bad is the crime actually on this commute?”. Most places it’d be fine but some rough parts of some cities I’d be worried.

It’s the apathy, or the belief that it somehow doesn’t matter. To quote Walter Sobchak:

Nihilists, fuck me. Say what you will about the tenets of national socialism, at least it’s an ethos.

I mean…

[Gestures broadly at the state of the world]

People see headlines and the comment section of the social media platform where that headline was posted.

This, basically

https://xkcd.com/1019/

Shit, even doing shades of purple without getting more granular than the state level would change the map drastically. This winner take all bullshit is the dumbest part of the electoral college.

Personal/Family use is fine, it’s kinda fiddly but so is most selfhosted software.

At an organizational level, that fiddliness spirals into a ton of work, which doesn’t really overlap with other IT Duties in the way that troubleshooting OneDrive usually ends up solving problems with the whole Microsoft suite.

The US may affect the whole world less next year if everyone else works hard to find alternate markets, but it’s going to take longer than that for the rest of the world to totally detangle themselves from our mess.

What if they’re more important than ever before in American history?

Don’t use bar keepers friend to clean them. That fucked up ours.