Compared to the US, very hefty.

Is it enough, though? I can’t say if it is or not, but my gut tells me it’s not enough.

That’s wonderful news to read.

Mostly Neverwinter Nights.

We’ve had more active players on the server I DM for, so I’ve been popping in more often to run quests and ambience for all the newbies.

To be clear: I 100% think people should be able to enjoy their things without being robbed, public or no.

I’m not amused, just glad I have different habits.

Fair point.

Let me be perfectly clear that I think you should be able to look at your phone 24/7 without getting robbed.

Still glad I don’t, though.

Not blaming the victim here, just glad I have different habits.

Stories like this make me glad I’m not one of those people glued to my phone 24/7.

It’s way harder to snatch it when it’s in your pocket.

But the fun of these stories is when someone writes an article about the thieves trying to scam the victim into giving up their codes. That’s always amusing.

Yeah, that’ll be misused. Without a doubt.

What an awful development.

Barf.

I love the idea of using AI as tool for studying the past, because conceivably, you can train it on every piece of art and writing a particular civilization ever produced and it can analyze that information in a more thorough and efficient way than a human. In my head I hope it’s possible to see ancient cities, or dinosaurs, or battles in historically accurate (and safe) VR experiences one day.

The problem is, as we’ve seen, AI tools are trained on garbage and stolen IP and none of the companies producing these tools care to differentiate between junk and good data, so the information these systems produce is always going to require human validation.

What then is the point? Yes, the image may be pretty and look suitably historic, but we can’t really trust a tool trained on shit not to spit out bad information.

What’s the argument against it being illegal? This seems like a no-brainer.

I spent part of the last two weeks reading ‘Bad Blood’, a book about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, and how they mishandled and faked test results, creating problems for many of their customers. It just seems obvious to me that this kind of deception and fraud is particularly immoral.

If you know how to fix this where I can get qualified competent medical assistance with my issues before they snowball together and murder me, please tell me how because I cannot solve this.

I wish I did, man.

Stories like yours are what I think of every time someone tries to tell me we have “access” to health care, when the reality is we were all sold as a commodity to the health industry by people we elected to protect us.

I respect your honesty. I think gun control’s going to take a few steps backward before then, myself. We’ll see how it goes.

Just the thought of DIY medicine scares me, and honestly, it’s sad that such a thing has to exist.

That’s a fair assessment. Kind of a bummer that the centrists won and not Cynthia Nixon.

I like those headlines as much as the next guy, but a year from now, would it surprise you if these are still the only two instances of parents being held accountable?

I agree.

But I’d wager my life savings that laws holding parents accountable will either simply be unenforced or fail to pass in most of this country.

I want it to be different but it’s never going to happen. School shootings are a fact of American life whether we like it or not. That’s just reality.

You can respond as you like (provided you’re not going to be an a-hole), but understand that if you don’t like my point of view, you do have the option to block me. If you’ve decided, over the course of seeing lots of my posts that you don’t like what you have to say, then you probably should.

With that said, my point of view on this is informed by history and poverty. I grew up poor and have had some lucky breaks the last few years, but even so, I have 80 year-old parents driving for DoorDash, using my car, so I am less focused on social issues than I am on the widespread poverty evident in this country. They’d be destitute and starving if I didn’t have a car to loan them, in Joe Biden’s America, and potentially Kamala Harris’ America.

With those precarious circumstances a daily part of my life, Trump isn’t particularly scary. What’s scary is the knowledge that no matter who we elect, I can trust nothing meaningful is going to be done to help my elderly parents survive.

What makes them equally bad to me is that they have bipartisanship in the worst ways for majority of the US population, and I can see it every single day when my parents are out delivering people’s food.

He’s right.

They are.

It sucks, but he’s right.

I saw the headline above this morning, and my first thought was that it was being done as a preventive measure in order to speed up response times for mass shooting events.

And then I read it, and no, it’s meant to protect property and address theft that, depending on your source, may or may not actually be happening in the first place. It makes sense that Hochul’s focus is doing potentially useless shit for major corporations in a time when her constituents are struggling to pay rent.

I also worry about having a ‘sic police’ button available all major stores in a state known for having a very diverse racial population.

It’s a wild time.

The Republican candidate is a legit insurrectionist, proven pathological liar, impeached multipled times, and has collected indictments like Halloween candy. None of this, presumably, has changed the minds of the 49% who vote Republican obediently and robotically every two years.

The Democratic candidate, meanwhile, has taken no documented public positions and is answering all of this with memes. (And if you don’t believe me, go try and find a public platform on her website.) Her position is: “Just trust us,” which I imagine is hard to do in a time when your party just held the presidency for four years and Congress for two, and nearly everyone is vastly poorer or working harder for the same pay.

It really is the Giant Douche vs the Turd Sandwich.