No, just wood.

My friend just hooks his laptop up to his TV, connects to his VPN, and plays popcorntime (streaming torrents). He used to use streaming sites, but those have been getting taken down left and right.

Most fireplaces are just for looks, and don’t heat much at all. Wood stoves work a lot better. I think a cooler chimney would increase creosote build-up and negatively affect draft.

I think I’ve heard there are a lot of genetically male, but born female people in sports. I wonder if the same people are against those people playing in sports.

Idk how many transphobic people just care about specific issues. There’s a lot of “groomer” rhetoric, hate, and general disgust. It’s easy to get people to hate what they don’t understand; and a lot of media is trying their hardest to cultivate hate against trans people to create an out-group, so they can control the in-group.

Idk about this. I think most people care if their partners, sisters, daughters, and themselves can get healthcare that may involve an abortion. I think a lot of people do vote on vibes, and being “weird” is damaging. The Republicans are the party that won’t stop talking about transgender people; I don’t recall Harris mentioning transgendered people once.

I kinda agree with most of your other points. Economic well-being is what people vote on first and foremost. Dunno if celebrity endorsements actually hurt though. A thing to note is that, barring a tech advancement, recession, or depression, prices don’t generally decrease. I.e. wages (and government assistance) needs to rise at about the same rate as inflation (preferably more than).

Harris lost because she was seen as not going to change much of anything from Biden. She even conceded to false narratives of the right (such as immigration), instead of providing an alternative narrative that could inspire people. The economic changes she ran on were uninspiring, and I’m not sure they would’ve helped most people (mostly people don’t start small businesses, or even really have a desire to; not sure if downpayment assistance wouldn’t just increased prices and fees).

Meh, I would’ve given 3/5 stars to U.S. democracy since the Voting Rights Act. Stars taken away for FPTP, gerrymandering, campaign finance, “lobbying,” and the electoral college. I believe we’re going to go to 0/5 stars with completely rigged elections rather than just manufacturing consent and lightly tipping the scales like they’ve been doing.

Yeah, I think this could be the end of free and fair elections in the U.S., and there’s no coming back from that without a revolution. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think most of us will directly be killed by this change; our lives will just be shittier. It’ll be like living in Russia. Given how utterly incompetent the administration is looking, and the things they say they’re going to do (mass deportation of a significant part of our workforce, blanket tariffs, gutting social safety-nets), we may speed-run an economic and societal collapse. That could sow the seeds for a horrible and bloody revolution.

Or, maybe I’m wrong and the important institutions will somehow hold against a christo-fascist party controlling all branches of the federal government and a president with immunity. If there are still are free and fair elections, then congress could block a lot of things in 2026, and start repairing some of the damage in 2028.

Still, it does not bode well that the U.S. elected these people in the first place, and at best, the U.S. will slowly crumble for decades.

If I understand anarcho-syndicalism correctly, anarcho-syndicalism involves federalism.

Yeah, the employee-employer relationship is exploitative in itself. The sex industry has similar problems with exploitation as other industries have. Within a capitalist society, I suppose unions and worker cooperatives can mitigate some issues.

Do you remember when it was commonly advised to use fake names and birthdays on online forms, and when “spyware” was a term?

I’ve heard it said that chattel slavery was more expensive than it would’ve been to just pay people poverty wages and let them fend for their own food and shelter. Dunno if it’s true or not. I imagine it also damages the mental health of the slave owners, and society as a whole.

Some men, you just can’t reach.

Severance is great. Silo is OK. For all Mankind was great in the earlier seasons. Foundation is good. Extrapolations is good, but too unrealistic for the subject matter, IMO. Dark Matter (2024) is pretty good, reminds me of Sliders from my childhood.

Edit: Oh, Sunny was good too.

Court mandated drug counselor told us it makes men grow tits.

Find your local state delegate.

Would this be “State Democratic Party chairs?” I’m not really sure how the party is structured and who votes. And apparently, the chair for my state resigned.

I remember liking Opposing Force and Blue Shift too.

know how to lobby the government.

I’m thinking this may be how it’ll work. More like “bribe” though, and Trump is probably doing this on purpose to coerce companies for bribes. Aka, racketeering on the highest level.

Happens when you’re not proud of what you’re contributing to. Probably most workers, tbh.

I don’t think federation has to be an obstacle for non-tech people. They don’t really have to know about it, and it can be something they learn about later. I really don’t know if federation stops people from trying it out. Don’t people think, “I don’t know what instance to join, so I’m not going to choose any?”

Personally, having no algorithm for your home feed is what I don’t like about it. Everything is chronological. Some people I follow post many times a day, some post once per month, some post stuff I’m extremely interested in sporadically, followed by a sea of random posts. Hashtag search and follow is also less useful because there’s no option for an algo.

The UI seems fine to me. I guess I’m not picky about UIs. The one nitpick I have is on mobile, tapping an image will just full-screen the image instead of opening the thread.

Idk. Maybe it’s because I learned OOP first that it makes more sense to me; but OOP is a good way to break down complex problems and encapsulate them into easily understable modules. Languages like Java almost force everyone on the project to use similar paradigms and styles, so it’s easier for everyone to understand the code base. Whenever I’ve worked on large non-OOP projects, it was a hard-to-maintain mess. I’ve never worked on projects such as the Linux kernel, and I’m hoping it’s not an unmaintainable mess, so I’m pretty sure it’s possible to not use OOP on large projects and still be maintainable. I am curious if they still use OOP concepts, even though they are not using strictly OOP.

I also like procedural python for quick small scripts. And although Rust isn’t strictly OOP, it obviously borrows heavily from it. Haskell is neat, but I haven’t used it enough to be proficient or develop good sense of application architecture.

I’ve done production work in C, but still used largely OOP concepts; and the code looks much different than code I’ve seen that was written before C++ was popular.