So make it a one time only thing then? Next billionaire you have in the dock will know you can’t be trusted to keep your word (“return the money and your life will be spared“) and so will have zero reason to cooperate.

I admire your optimism! I could easily see us living in a Mad Max situation in 200 years.

One thing I never see people talking about with fossil fuels is that they were a one shot deal in earth’s history, never to be repeated. If global civilization completely collapses (particularly the industrial base) then attempting to start over without fossil fuels could leave us stuck in a 17th century type situation for an extremely long time.

The problem is that renewables just don’t bootstrap. They require huge amounts of minerals which we’ve only been able to mine and process using heavy equipment and manufacturing powered by fossil fuels. Trying to do all that from a minecart-horse-and-pickaxe level of technology isn’t going to work out.

The other major factor is of course all the really easy mineral sources are gone too. Instead of mining directly from the ground we’d be salvaging scrap materials from the mountains of disposable electronics we’re producing right now. That’s where things really start to look like Mad Max.

Was there a time in the past you would have preferred? I grew up in the 90s and I really miss that time period but I don’t think I’d prefer to live at any time before the 20th century over now. As complex and difficult as life is right now, other time periods tended to be much nastier for various reasons.

The whole history of compound interest is quite fascinating. Early arguments for it are that seeds and livestock are capable of reproducing and multiplying themselves. If I lend you a handful of seeds and a year later you give back the exact same size handful, I have lost a whole year’s production I could have gotten out of those seeds.

Furthermore, assuming you actually planted the seeds instead of tucking them away in a drawer somewhere before giving them back later, those seeds produced a crop for you. This crop you could harvest and sell or feed yourself or your family or livestock. You could even save seeds from the harvest and pay me back the handful while keeping even more seeds for yourself. So by lending you seeds interest-free I’m essentially giving you a gift of harvest potential as well even more seeds in the future, at my own expense. Thus is the time value of money.

From this initial seed of an idea grows a huge amount of the financial system.

Both Apple and Google take that stance all the time. Google is legendary for the number of products they killed (many that had millions of users). One of my biggest annoyances is how much they’ve dumbed down Google search and gotten rid of Boolean operators and other features I used all the time to narrow things down.

I would suggest avoiding news altogether. Look into hobbies and find other ways of spending your time. Doomscrolling is like a trauma addiction. There are tons of great people in hobbies who are so nice and helpful and they’re just really glad to share their passion with you.

This print shop I mentioned would just tell all their customers “include the fonts on the floppy/CD or we send it back” and then they kept every single font people sent them for years and years. Eventually they didn’t need to ask because they just had everything!

It’s common practice for outgoing presidents to wrap up loose ends like this. Late term pardons are not a new thing.

It was easy and fun until you had thousands of fonts in there, then programs would just crash when you opened the font selector. They weren’t expecting to be rendering previews for all those fonts and just ran out of memory. To solve this issue people invented font managers to allow you to carefully enable and disable sets of fonts before launching the apps you wanted to use them with.

Source: I briefly worked for a local printing press that had thousands of fonts.

Installing custom fonts has never really been a popular thing on any platform except in niche cases. Perhaps the best known use case is for print design and publishing where designers expect to be able to use any font they want in a magazine layout and have the printers able to put it on the page.

It wouldn’t be Lemmy without the preteen eyeroll!

You’d be surprised at how much the traffickers can adapt to this. They keep their victims in a group, renting out hotel rooms, constantly moving from place to place. The victims never know where they are, not even what city they’re in. They don’t have any local contacts, no social network, no supports. They basically have to work up the courage to escape from men (whom they believe will kill them) and run to the police in a completely unfamiliar city with no help.

Yes. Unfortunately human trafficking doesn’t go away when you legalize prostitution. You still need to do a lot of police work to track down the traffickers and free the victims.

I think even if the US legalized all drugs today the cartels would still be in business. Human smuggling, human trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, and even avocados! The genie has been out of the bottle for a very long time.

Try Wikipedia:

An intellectual is a person who engages in critical thinking, research, and reflection about the reality of society, and who proposes solutions for its normative problems.

Coming from the world of culture, either as a creator or as a mediator, the intellectual participates in politics, either to defend a concrete proposition or to denounce an injustice, usually by either rejecting, producing or extending an ideology, and by defending a system of values.

JD Vance is an intellectual. Doesn’t mean he’s a good one nor does it mean any of his ideas are any good. Hitler was an intellectual too. It’s a very low bar!

Basically all you have to do is think about society’s issues and come up with your own solutions which you traditionally would publish in a book. Vance wrote a book though it was as much a memoir as a meditation on society’s issues (in his view).

Wow. I really love the colour rendition in this one. Portra 400 and the 50 Summicron make an excellent combo. Tack sharp too. Cute kitty!

Lovely composition. So peaceful!

Time zones probably help with that!