Too tall to die, too short to go to heaven

Yeah I get it, he’s a good dude and you sound like one too. The only real resentment I harbor is towards our government. Because the military seems to offer the only real path to a life like that if you don’t have the means to get on that track yourself. Plus, it’s such a perilous one, not for everyone. My bil was lucky enough to serve at an allied base during peacetime - he still ended up half-deaf from all the live-fire drills.

It’s already half way to replacing stack overflow and all the other trusty old forums for coding and tech issues. At some point people will stop using the old platforms and that’s when the well will run dry for LLMs, which will have to start consuming their own refuse err, content. There’s a looming cliff, and it’s coming up faster than you might think.

My brother in law is an ex-marine, no college and now easily makes 4x what I do. Free network, free training, free career, low-interest loan on his house. I promise I’m not bitter… But if that’s not socialism I don’t know what is.

We do have a couple lemon stealing whores in this community

Great video, thanks for the link!

Hail Tune!

2025 Santa doesn’t even stop for the bad kids anymore, he just rolls coal at their house from the sleigh.

Same here. Once my iMac G3 and 2nd gen iPod Touch shit the bed, I was out. My parents are mac people and frequently ask me for help with random, outlandish issues on their Macs (since I’m a “computer person”) and I’m usually at a loss.

I too was raised with religion (Catholicism) in the US, while my wife grew up going to Baptist churches - our childhoods could not have been more different. I was taught that studying science and the processes of observation and inquiry bring you closer to God, while for her the sciences were alternately ignored or lied about. Our family gave into the collection basket of our own will because we believed raising funds for good causes was the right thing to do. Her family was under compulsory tithing - 10% of all income. I was allowed to read whatever books, consume whatever media, and wear whatever I wanted, she was not. The list goes on…

I’m not trying to whitewash Catholicism - it obviously has its own major issues that shouldn’t be ignored, but it’s a far cry from the fundamentalist book burners who my family thought of as zealous nut bags.

Not sure what point you’re trying to make. The seat of Catholicism in Europe and American fundamentalists have very few things in common. Even American Catholics have very little crossover with their evangelical counterparts.

Is that some kind of labubu?

1. Sell many dongle
2. Remove port the dongle plugs into
3. Invent NEW dongle

Repeat

I miss channel 5

That tracks

To be fair, debate classes often involve arguing for positions you’re personally opposed to.

Must be the giant red circles and mixed fonts

I would go further and say they shouldn’t have the ability to block any transaction consumers are making, regardless of legality.

I basically want them classified like utilities (or the Internet), and the money they’re processing should operate like digital networked cash. If I hand you a dollar bill, it doesn’t arbitrarily decide to stop being money if it thinks the transaction might possibly be even tangentially related to crime. That’s how you end up with these corporations becoming so invasive in the first place, with their overbroad policies blocking entire groups/categories from being in the economy.

Don’t think that I’m pro-crime – but only actual crime is crime. A transfer of funds itself is only sometimes a crime. You don’t see the federal reserve trying to foil small-time drug deals in cash, and for good reason – legitimate crimes should be investigated by law enforcement, not “prevented” at the whims of overeager corpos. It’s not the payment processor’s right or responsibility to prevent or they to predict crime, especially once they’ve built such a system as to become indispensable for most of us. If they are allowed to do that they will always do it the easy way – blanket bans with massive collateral damage to non-criminals.

These companies should be disbanded and their systems should be handed over to the public. Hot take, I know, but I’m of the mind that transaction processing (much like air and water) should not be privatized. You may think at this point that I’m a crypto-head, but not really. It seemed promising at one point and may be still, but now it’s perhaps permanently associated with unsavory types. I’ll use it if it fits the purpose, but expecting the general public to use it as money is insanity. Crypto brought us part of the way there, but such a system can’t really flourish in furtherance of the public good in the current environment – even disregarding the bad PR.

Hey, that makes total sense. And thanks for filling in what I missed! Really too bad about those changes, too. Google set out to create an open mobile ecosystem in opposition to Apple (and, at the time, and to a lesser extent, M$oft). It was such an incredible success at the start. Lately though, it seems they want to run in the opposite direction by tightening their grip - not the best thing for the community of Android users at all.

Of course, the minority group of nerdy, early adopting users who are a dedicated bunch will bear the brunt of it (as always). It’s no surprise they’ll be facing backlash from those groups, which in part explains the surges in demand for better (yet somewhat adjacent) alternatives. I was all in when Google said “don’t be evil”. Now they seem to have abandoned that ethos. I’m still stuck in their ecosystem, have started looking for the exits and I’m definitely not alone in feeling that way.

Wouldn’t that be more of an inside job?