No, you’re quite right. To be fair, from slavery to robber barons, I don’t think we have ever been free of corruption. But now we’re speedrunning into the level of corruption of having to bring extra cash for the bribes when renewing a drivers license.

Well, you have the actual, physical cost of the datacenter – the land, the design, the engineers, the permits, the environmental studies, the lawyers, the construction, etc – and then you have the cost of removing roadblocks along the way. Especially in Louisiana, if you’re not familiar with Huey Long: he’s been gone for many decades, but his way of doing business down there hasn’t changed a bit.

It’s exactly like the East Wing ballroom: there’s a private fund that Trump opened specifically for businessmen to contribute that will fund the ballroom construction, which has been open and taking donations since he tore the East Wing down, and there’s also the bill before Congress, right now, that will have the ballroom paid for by tax dollars, all of it.

“But,” you may ask, and rightly so, “why are private contributions needed to fund a ballroom that will be funded entirely by taxes?” and the answer to that is, “Yes.”

One of the sure signs you’re in a banana republic is that every palm must be greased on the way to getting legal consent for anything, no matter how small. The US is now no different.

She always looks like a female Brett Kavanaugh to me, not sure why. Maybe she likes beer.

I already assume that everything that goes into a cloud somewhere WILL be used for other purposes, at the very least as AI training material, and this will be no different. And the plan is for at least some (possibly all?) video to automatically be extracted to some kind of cloud storage, no matter how temporarily. From the article:

The AirPods will have a “small” LED light to indicate when “visual data is being fed into the cloud.”

That’s a hell of a non-answer to all the privacy concerns Apple already knows the public has. Since this entire article is itself just a manufacturer-friendly puff piece for pre-release promotion, the only conclusion I can draw is that Apple is willfully holding back the specifics on all of that.

And again with the fucking notification light, like that’s the solution to all privacy concerns. On AirPods a light can’t possibly be more than a pinhole itself, just because of the size of the device, so that’ll be even worse than Meta’s joke of a notification light.

The first unmistakeable clue was that it was a man doing this to a woman. The BBC article that saimen@feddit.org posted in this thread removes all doubt as to the purpose (emphasis mine):

Alice was walking into a London shopping centre when she was approached by a man wearing smart glasses. She says she had no idea she was being filmed.

“In the moment I just thought ‘OK this guy is just trying to talk to me, to chat me up’,” she said.

“I was hoping that he would leave me alone eventually but he did actually follow me.”

The video was posted on social media and viewed about 40,000 times, though Alice only found out about it after a friend sent it to her.

“My initial reaction was complete shock,” she said. “He had no phone, he did not have a camera directly in my face.”

The videos are often posted on social media under the guise of giving dating advice to other men online.

That last line . . . think about what’s going on in that area of the internet, use your imagination, fill in the missing blanks.

That said, I appreciate that your character is such to have not instantly jumped to this conclusion. But in the world we now occupy, there’s generally not a whole lot of innocence in a dude filming a woman without her knowledge or consent.

A great deal of this has to do with mainstream, established media. There is still a strong unspoken assumption that mainstream media speaks for all of us. This is how we can all be pissed off about a specific thing and yet honestly think nobody cares, just because mainstream media doesn’t report it as a problem.

When the media reports something across the board as a problem and continues to do so without letting up, change is quick to follow.

But when it reports something as not a problem, or fails to report it much at all, that seems to be a cue that no correction is necessary.

For example, compare and contrast reporting on presidential mental acuity during the Biden administration vs Trump’s administration: this is a perfect example of how the media treats the same problem very differently depending on who’s got the problem, even when the problem itself is magnitudes more obvious, serious, and damaging in one case than in the other.

This media selectivity has always been there to some extent, but this weird media equivocation toward Republican misbehavior really seemed to go off the deep end in the summer of 2015; I remember hearing some Republican who got caught doing something and expecting the same old tired apology, but instead he said the equivalent of, “Deal with it, I don’t care.” And it’s been that way ever since, as though they all got the memo that the fix was in.

Even now, no one I know personally has stopped talking about the Epstein files or caring about them, except the media. Same thing.

Feel free to disagree, but I don’t even have to guess that if Zohran Mamdani, as a very hypothetical example, said religious freedom only belongs to Muslims, white billionaire heads would explode and no mainstream news outlet would let go of it until the end of days. But this well-connected right-wing white pseudo-christian woman can drop that load on live tv and mainstream media doesn’t even blink.

Yeah, I was wondering about that myself, but for USD. Right now (May 2026) the exchange rate is roughly $1.08 USD for every Swedish Krona.

So 300sek, a doctor’s visit, is roughly $32.50. 1450sek, the line above which everything is paid for by the Swedish government, is about $157.25. The 500sek or so Stoy paid per night, including meals and meds, is $157.25.

This, as an American, is literally unimaginable to me. It sounds like the numbers from 30, even 40 years ago.

I remember Bezos at the inauguration. He’s spent millions on the administration, including the inaugural party and financing not only the first lady’s documentary, but its positive reviews. All of them. And that’s just the highlights; Bezos has given so much to promote this administration at every turn.

Glad to see this kind of multiplicative return on his investment. He is very literally getting the presidential experience he paid for.

Standard contracts in the US include a severability clause anymore; I don’t remember the last time I saw a contract without one (as a non-lawyer who reads everything I sign).

It very much is against the law. Read to the end. Here’s the last paragraph of the article:

According to the law offices of Ned Barnett, Texas law prevents registered sex offenders from working in places frequented by children, including schools, daycare centers and playgrounds or attending school events like sports games. Some can interact with children at family gatherings or public events, supervised when interacting with children according to court orders and the nature of the offense.

This isn’t a problem with the law as much as it is a specific group of people trying to wallpaper a sort of compliance with the law while ignoring the substance of it altogether. First paragraph of the article, emphasis mine:

The Texas Home Educators Sports Association (THESA) thought it could get away with allowing a registered sex offender to coach minors by sending parents a waiver to sign, with the coach’s testimony attached, according to Amy Smith at watchkeep.org.

Note also from somewhere in the middle of the article:

The waiver mentioned nothing about his offender status.

And if you’re wondering wtf, you’re not wrong: all this careful arrangement of fact seems like a very creative effort on the part of the author and editor to actively distance point A from point B. It’s possible they’re just trying very hard not to piss anyone off in what is already a lost cause.

Or to put it another way, in a state with a very high year-round accumulation of snowflakes, this article involves three very special groups of special snowflakes all at once: a sex offender and his personal fans, the homeschoolers, and the evangelical Christians, and how they are faking compliance with state law by making sure the parents sign a waiver – one that hides the relevant information about a sex offender with a history of minors – before giving him free access to their children in direct contradiction to the law, a law they knew enough about to deliberately circumvent.

Yep, sure did. You got me, lol.

Lol, okay. Imagine my dismay and be happy. 👍

Entire quote in context, which held nuance you are clearly choking on:

While I’m personally in doubt the administration tells Goebbels Barbie anything of substance, there is also a non-zero possibility, however scant, this shooter event was staged for some other batshit insane reason the sane among us could not possibly begin to guess.

I mean, at this point can you prove it wasn’t staged?

So . . . where are those high IQ advanced thinking skills you’re sure you have? Because they’re not operative now.

“If you can’t disprove it then it happened”. That’s where your bar is.

That’s not even remotely what I said, lol. What I said had far more nuance, and referenced holding mental space for the unknown in the presence of fear.

By contrast, you seem to be holding onto tropes as self-referential proofs: your constant othering of those deemed intellectually lesser; your evidence-free “something dumb and pointless that would never happen,” argument, even as you plainly ignore the guts of what I said.

You needed strawmen, and you built a few out of nothing but your own imagination. Why?

And there it is, even if you can’t see it yourself.

Frankly, you’ve made my point better than I ever could have: emotional tolerances, and emotional states, have far more to do with belief in questionable evidence-light conclusions than any IQ point ever could. You even flash yours at the end:

Just another nail in humanity’s coffin and another reason to think we are doomed. The concept of evidence is apparently beyond our species now.

From where I sit, it seems possible that part of your overwhelming scorn for the “low intelligence individuals” with “flawed thinking” your pointedly label is born of the fact that your own emotional needs require you to hold onto a different bit of propaganda – “we’re all DOOMED!” – than theirs do.

I say this only because your mental mechanics of holding onto what you need to believe to assuage your own fears seem to be exactly the same as those you scorn: deny, discard key portions, reshape, lather in pejoratives, and regurge.

But people who can understand their own fear and sit with it have no need to prove or disprove anything at all, much less have any desire to do so outside conclusive evidence one way or another. Maybe give that a shot (no pun intended) before calling other people idiots for doing exactly the same mental gymnastics that you do.

If you believe this is not a coincidence and that she’s really referring to the gunman, you are exactly as gullible as an info warrior and you should do some soul searching.

Huh, that’s some strong language for something still unproven. While I’m personally in doubt the administration tells Goebbels Barbie anything of substance, there is also a non-zero possibility, however scant, this shooter event was staged for some other batshit insane reason the sane among us could not possibly begin to guess.

I mean, at this point can you prove it wasn’t staged?

In the absence of evidence, one has to ask if it is even possible to definitively prove anything that happens with this administration: what used to be basic assumption and the understanding of norms, what you seem to be relying upon to call others idiots, has all been destroyed for many of us via the deluge of Trump’s excesses and extremes of behavior.

So while I understand your scorn and frustration, I can’t say I share it to the same extent, if only because there is a world of difference between fear and idiocy, and everyone’s tolerance for fear and in what measure is different. “Gullible info warriors” are made out of people desperate for something that makes sense in times of dread, and none of us here are any different except to the degree that we are not consuming the propaganda and we mentally hold space for the unknown in the presence of fear.

As an ex-Christian still vaguely acquainted with eschatology, seeing him choose that passage about the dedication of the temple put me directly in mind of this:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+24%3A15-16&version=NASB

And specifically baked separation of church and state into the Constitution because they didn’t want that never-ending European War Between the Christians to ruin the new place too, itself written in large part by a guy who was more spiritual than religious and who had zero patience for churches in national government?

We have a perfectly good Constitution, be nice if it wasn’t being shat on by a discount Burger King.

Good luck with that.

Even in the 70s, if you went to Catholic school in a very Catholic city, or had a number of friends that did, whether male or female, you knew. The only ones keeping quiet about it were the press and the church itself.

Yeah, unfortunately I’m one of those who understand. We’re not yet at a place where you can be proven right, but that said, you may not be wrong.

There is a whole world of inexplicable “coincidences” and patterns that happen around these people. I’m not saying RFK Jr “has a demon” – and how the hell would I know anyway? – but I am absolutely certain that he IS a personal “Shit Happens” event walking around on two legs, and sometimes that language/cognitive construct is all someone has to try to explain what is otherwise inexplicable. And all that surrounds RFK Jr is most certainly inexplicable.

To explain to those who do not understand, the book People of the Lie, simply put, is a book written by a psychiatrist about his observations of those without conscience among us, and the draining-to-overwhelmingly-destructive effect they have on the people forced to remain in their personal orbit, like children or dependent spouses.

Long before the explosion of works in the 90s and later written for laymen in regard to psychopathy and narcissism, there was People of the Lie, and that’s ALL there was at the time except for works by and for clinicians, like Cleckley’s Mask of Sanity which you couldn’t just check out from the local library, and that’s if you even knew about it. People of the Lie is all about the line – and if there even is a line – between this kind of aberrant, conscienceless behavior and what the religious know of as evil. That book was there when I needed it, and I’m not ashamed to say it changed the course of my life for the better, profoundly so. I suspect I am not the only one.

So all that said, I am a diehard atheist, yet I have personally seen wayyyyyy too much strange and inexplicable shit surrounding the conscienceless among us to tell anyone else they’re wrong. Especially when the kind of folks Dr. Peck was talking about are involved.

I’m jealous of the people that can just write what you said off as foolishness, because once you know, you know.