It’s NYT. If you can’t defend Thompson as being worth keeping alive, may as well play the woke race card and say we only like him because he’s an attractive white male.

create an out-group so they can control the in-group

That’s not just the media. It’s basically everyone in power. Media, politics, government, corporations… Everyone.

It applies to the Democrats too. Especially in the 2016 election, they managed to successfully make Republicans the out-group. But I believe that was hugely damaging to the country, it created a lot more division when what is really needed is unity to focus on the issues that most people can agree on.

Because here’s the cold truth- there is a body of policies that probably 80% of Americans would agree on. Things like efficient government, ending government corruption, reducing corporate control over government and elections, reducing income inequality, etc.
To quote Dylan Ratigan’s famous rant, the United States is being extracted. And I think most people would like to stop that extraction.
But no major candidate stands for that. Bernie did, but the DNC iced him out because their wealthy corporate donors didn’t want Bernie.

And that in my opinion is why Trump won. Harris certainly didn’t push any major message of radical reform, just a bunch of the usual ‘help the middle class’ talk. Trump may be terrifying, but he does push a message of radical reform and changing the system.
To write that off and say half the country is racist or misogynist is to avoid learning from this situation.

I think most commenters here are missing the point.

There is a more extreme reaction to transgender people as opposed to gay or lesbian people, because of issues like sports and bathrooms. And that hits at people’s sense of injustice. For example if you have a young daughter, a lot of people will hate the idea of a person with a penis going into the women’s room and being around their little girl. Or if that daughter grows up and joins a sports team, the idea of somebody who is hormonally male and thus naturally more muscular competing against your daughter is unpleasant.

Put differently, I think a lot of people we now classify as ‘transphobic’ don’t actually have much problem with trans people themselves. Rather, with how the efforts to ensure trans people receive the full treatment of their chosen gender can affect the rest of society.

For me personally, I don’t know what the answer is. I generally don’t care which bathroom you use as long as you wash your hands. I have no problem with anyone presenting themselves to the world as whatever they wish, if it makes you happier than by all means. At the same time though, I don’t think it’s transphobic to point out that somebody who is largely or entirely biologically male will have a natural competitive advantage in the field of sports.
So while I certainly don’t want to exclude anybody, I think there is at least a little justification for restricting some women’s sports to those who are genetically female.

American here. Didn’t vote for Trump, didn’t want him.

I sincerely hope EU and other nations can and will step in to pick up the slack when US shirks on our responsibility.

Ukraine embodies the American ideal of independence far better than Trump will ever understand.

The chlorine does its job, and whatever shit it kills becomes chloramine. Chlorine does have a smaller smell of its own so maybe they just put a shit ton of it in also.

Here’s a fun one

You know how you go to the public pool and you smell the chlorine keeping the water clean? That’s not chlorine you’re smelling.

Chlorine is a great sanitizer but when dissolved in water it has almost no smell. However, chlorine binds to organic substances like dead skin cells and especially strongly to urea (aka pee), forming chloramine. Chloramine has significantly less sanitizing capability than chlorine, but it has a very strong chloriney smell.

You can get rid of chloramine by ‘shocking’ the pool- adding an oxidizer or increasing the chlorine level very high to what’s called breakpoint chlorination. Shock powder is expensive though so it’s not always used as often as it should be.

So when you go to the public pool and you get that strong chlorine smell, all that means is either the pool water is dirty and hasn’t been shocked in a while, or someone peed in the pool recently.

Enjoy your swim!

That’s the sort of shit I hope they get away from.
Lower taxes and more efficient less intrusive government are good ideas. They’re just too far in the pocket of big business so ‘lower taxes and more efficient government’ often comes off as ‘let’s give the 0.01% more tax breaks and defund the bloated inefficient EPA’.

If the Democrats lose, there is not going to be any soul searching. There is going to be a lot of finger pointing and blame. And most of it is going to be at Republicans, at the media, at Trump idiots, etc.

I am hoping that Trump loses if only because I think they’re actually be some realignment within the GOP. Unlike the Democrats, there is some actual question of direction within the GOP currently from what I’ve seen. Not everybody over there is happy with Trump. Many who just want power see him as too divisive and cultish, a Trump win is a win for Trump not necessarily for the GOP. There are some actual conservatives in the GOP who feel (IMHO correctly) that Trump is more of a cult of personality than a reflection of conservative values.

If nothing else, if Trump loses this time, he is probably finished. At least I hope so and I think there’s a good chance of it. Look at the younger generations, how many people under say 30 do you see waving Trump flags?

At least I really hope that realignment happens. And I also hope it comes with a realignment of message. I think there are a lot of conservative positions that could have mainstream appeal, that deserve a voice in politics, but the GOP has abandoned a great many of them in favor of harassing gay people and immigrants. That’s not a good way for us to go as a country.

Oh yes for sure. Wasn’t saying otherwise. Was only pointing out the details because the way the program worked previously, it was kind of an all or nothing thing. And thus, Aqara joining could be taken as a sign that they are going to make everything completely open and interoperable and work perfectly directly with HA. I don’t think that’s the case.

This is still a very important step. Open standards may be the most important part of home automation, but the second most important part might well be respect. Go back just a year or two and HA and open source in general were basically ignored in the market. Now things are changing.
Every company that partners with HA further cements HA and open standards in general as a legitimate / major player in the automation market that manufacturers ignore at their own peril. The more that happens, the more products will be developed with open standards in mind.

It’s very important to note that this is not the entire brand joining, this is three specific products which already use Matter over Thread and thus would be interoperable anyway.

Mainly conflicts with mDNS. However it’s shitty IMHO that the mDNS spec snarfed a domain already in widespread use, should have used .mDNS or similar.

The smallest ones are the most agile and the least to lose by going virtual.
Big ones however have a conundrum. If the company has spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars building a giant headquarters, and then they go virtual or largely remote, then that money becomes basically a wasted investment. And so they have to admit to their investors that money was wasted, much of which can’t be recouped even if they sell the building. That goes triple for companies with big campuses like Apple or Google. That’s why you get a lot of companies demanding things like in office 3 days a week, to create justification for having the office in the first place.

There’s also a simple human factor. A lot of management, even tech management, still has the attitude that being able to physically watch the employee somehow enables better control or management or increases productivity. It’s crap of course, unless you have lazy unmotivated employees they will work just as well from somewhere else as they will with you breathing down their neck.

But it’s caused some interesting shake-ups. A while back I read a great interview with a (fully virtual) tech startup CEO, he said whenever their bigger competitors announce RTO his HR department quickly buys a bunch of LinkedIn keywords targeting them.
He found, as almost anybody could figure out with basic logic, that the best and most valuable employees know their worth and thus are the first to quit rather than RTO, and his company is right there with an offer of ‘work on some exciting new tech and we will never push RTO because we have no office to return to’. Said he’s gotten some of his best people that way.

So when the bigger CEOs are now saying they don’t see full return to office, I think that’s because they are realizing they have no other choice, the labor market has changed and demanding full-time in person or even hybrid has become the same as a significant salary cut.

This is absolutely the way. One of the companies I work with, a couple years ago had a great employee who was moving out of the state. They had an office, but they didn’t want to lose her, so they let her go remote. That employee became unintentionally a work from home trial. She did just as well remote as she did in the office. So when COVID happened everybody got a laptop and the exact same VPN setup she had. Business continued and the sky did not fall due to lack of ‘water cooler chat’.

So when lockdown lifted, it was ‘welcome back to the office everybody it’s great to have you back here, first order of business pack your shit and get it out of the building cuz we’re breaking the lease next month’.

They moved all their servers to the cloud and became a totally virtual company. Now they can recruit from anywhere in the country and pick the best people for the job no matter where they live. And what they pay for cloud costs is a tiny fraction of what they paid for office space.

This is exactly the issue. A friend of mine knew for a fact she never wanted to have children, but at the time was in her early twenties. Finding a surgeon who would do it was damn near impossible. Half of them refused without speaking with her husband (!) the other half just refused period saying she was young and didn’t know what she wants and would change her mind later.

At NO point was ‘my body my choice’ part of the discussion.

There was a similarly good thread on Reddit a couple weeks back about a woman who just gave birth and was having a lot of pain and knew something was wrong, and the doctor just dismissed her and said she’s being hormonal. It wasn’t until her husband threatened to sue the hospital that they finally got her a different doctor, who rushed her into the ER and as I recall said if she waited another day she’d have died.

The point is, and the problem is, that medical establishment has an awful habit of denying women agency over their own bodies. Always wrapped in valid reasons, but the result is still the same.

Casey Neistat. Back when he was doing his daily vlog thing a lot of it was really interesting, covering him and his wife trying to make shit happen in the city as he was running and riding his powered skateboard around Manhattan. At some point his audience started drifting younger, way way younger, and I don’t know if it was him or me but I just kind of lost interest. It didn’t feel new anymore.

That might be me to be honest. I actually don’t watch YouTube that much at all anymore, unless I’m looking for something specific. Their recommendation algorithm is garbage and it is so obviously going for raw time suck engagement that it leaves me with a bunch of unfulfilling clickbait / ragebait where I could watch it for an hour and then just want my hour back so I end up not returning. The whole platform used to be more full of interesting genuinely entertaining and educational videos, now it just feels like a giant time sink. And every other video is now some paid sponsorship or plug where the creator is basically just whoring out their own influence. Case in point, look up reviews of laser engravers. Every single one that I could find, especially of a couple major brands, the creator got the laser hardware for free. Some of them are just advertisements that reuse the manufacturer’s own stock footage, and some seem more like real reviews, but for one or two brands I literally could not find one video where the creator wasn’t sponsored by the laser manufacturer.

It’s a very simple answer Apple has guaranteed that your data will stay on your device and stay secure. This is generally trusted because Apple has a track record of keeping user data secure on the device or encrypted in the cloud even in ways Apple cannot access. Point is, when Apple says they are going to do this in a way that respects privacy, and they outline the technical details of how it will work, people trust that because there’s a track record.

Microsoft has no such trust. They have a recent track record of being intrusive and using dark patterns to persuade users to give Microsoft their data, for example in Edge there have been new feature pop-ups that require data sharing with Microsoft and the two options are ‘got it’ and ‘settings’ so accepting requires one click and rejecting requires 4 going into the settings menu and changing a few things. Microsoft is also heavily pushing Copilot which is mostly cloud-based. Furthermore, Microsoft recently showed a system that would basically screenshot your computer at very regular intervals and store them in an insecure manner. Granted it was on the device, but the way they were going to be stored meant they could be stolen with two lines of code. And let’s not forget that Windows 11 cannot be set up without a Microsoft account, so to even use your computer you have to share your email address with Microsoft. In this and many other ways they just do not act like a company that respects privacy at all, they act like the typical big tech give us everything or we will make your life difficult type company that nobody trusts.

This is actually false.
There are not mass shootings with ARs every week.

Look at a website like mass shooting tracker, and actually READ some of the incidents. Most are like ‘victim1 and victim2 were leaving a house party on Crescent St. when suspect1 and suspect2 opened fire from a moving vehicle. Victim1 and victim2 returned fire and all four young men were wounded, along with bystander1 and bystander2.’ This will qualify as a mass shooting because four or more people are wounded, so it shows up on that stupid tracker. But there is no AR anywhere, just pistols. Read between the lines and you realize this is a gangland shooting. And in all likelihood all four firearms are illegally owned.

Reality is more people are punched and kicked to death every year than are killed by all rifles including ARs.

Furthermore, there are several million ARs in circulation, and only a couple hundred rifle deaths every year. From a pure statistic point of view, that makes it actually a pretty safe product.

Yeah it’s all about appearance. It’s human nature.
Same thing in the US. We have a ton of people trying to ban AR-15 rifles because they look scary. They act like it’s some sort of urgent public health emergency and tons of people are dying all the time because of these awful terrible military death sprayers. In reality more people are punched and kicked to death every year or beaten to death with bats than are shot with all types of rifles including ARs.

In a country of 320 million people, rifles of all sorts kill at most a couple hundred every year. It’s not at all as serious threat to safety, but people obsess over it because it looks scary. Obesity related illnesses kill 300,000+ Americans per year, but you don’t see anybody talking about banning cheeseburgers.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, the happy little almost cartoon-shaped frag bombs dropped from hobby drones are killing Russians with great efficiency. But they don’t look scary or gruesome so this stupid thing gets the attention.

I think it’s just human nature. We focus on what looks frightening, not what actually threatens us.

How fucking stupid can you get?

Here’s a flying lethal explosive frag bomb with a radius of at least 20’. Let’s stand 10’ away and throw another lethal frag explosive at it!

Seems to me the correct action would have been to back off 50+’ then shoot it with the rifle.

So it’s an ugly, heavy fragmentation bomb that looks like it was made from spare parts found at an auto parts supplier.

Other than the fact that it’s especially ugly, how is this different than any other standard military frag bomb or grenade?