In small (population-wise) rural areas like that, where positions are running uncontested or only contested in the primary, it’s actually possible individuals could make a difference. But there’s some caveats.

If the area is extremely Republican and would never vote for a Democrat, don’t run as one. Unlike in races like President and Senate, independent and third party are actual choices at this level, they’re not simply false choices.

An individual could find some local issue that matters to a lot of people in the area but seems to be being ignored. Talk to neighbors, local people, etc, figure out what they’re upset about that actually falls under the purview of local or state government, then make that the core of your platform.

As long as you’re not officially listed as a Democrat, you’re not platforming on things that the locals would never vote for (and you probably couldn’t do anything about anyway in the lower office you’re running for) and you’ve actually done some local research and found an issue that a significant number of people in your area are upset about, you actually have a chance. You’d probably lose, but there’s a real chance.

I’m not sure what to think of this. On the one hand the author is right, for this to happen days before release does speak to some massive incompetence in oversight of this project.

But if the game was really that bad, I kinda have to applaud somebody for finally making the decision to shitcan it. We complain a lot about unfinished garbage being released, so if this was that, then good that they didn’t push it out and try to at least make some money before it flopped. Reminds me of back when Blizzard actually cared about quality and scrapped some of their games because they decided they were not good enough.

If they raise the prices in those countries they would make less money because volume of subscribers would go down enough for total income to decrease.

If they lowered the price in the US, they would make less money because the subscribers they would gain would not be enough to offset the reduced income from each.

That’s it, it has nothing to do with operating costs or fairness, it’s just a question of what price point they believe will make them the most money in a given market.

Odd to me is Her Majesty’s instead of His, considering Charles is now King.

Do these places just retain the gender of the ruling monarch at the time of their construction?

I never really thought about the fact that 3/5 scions, plus the twins, all have white hair before…

Nier Replicant?

It’s kind of a difficult issue. Jury nullification has been used for both good and bad, with the simplest and most obvious examples being from Civil War type stuff - people who unambiguously broke the law against helping slaves escape have had their verdicts nullified. Good thing. But also people who lynched black people in the south have had their verdicts nullified. Bad thing.

Making sure that verdicts are determined purely based on the law and whether the law was broken means that people need to work to change the law, they can’t just apply the law unevenly by nullifying against some defendants and not against others. So I can see the case for nullification being a bad thing. Ideally, you deal with that by removing or reworking the law so that it doesn’t come to the point of needing nullification.

But, well, reality isn’t ideal. Still, it’s unavoidable - as long as a jury can’t be forced to explain the reasoning behind their verdict beyond insisting ‘I was not convinced of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt’ and as long as a jury verdict of Not Guilty is final and cannot be retried, jury nullification will de facto exist. That said, it’s the entire system not just ‘this judge’ that is attempting to prevent jury nullification from happening. The judge’s question about following the law is boilerplate standard basically everywhere, and it’s a systematic and intentional attempt to weed out potential jury nullifiers.

That’s exactly the reason for those questions. So they can ask ‘would you consider using jury nullification’ without informing people that jury nullification exists.

And also so that if you at some point admit something that sounds like you’re voting not guilty because you disagree with the law, they can kick you off the jury and possibly charge you with perjury.

If you ever find yourself in a jury and intend to nullify, you must not admit it ever: you must maintain simply that you are not convinced by the evidence.

Yup, exactly. The only regulation I’d be in favor of for AI is this: if it was trained on data which can be accessed by or was posted by the public, it must be freely available, such that if anything in the training data was posted online in a way anyone can see, then then I have free access to tge AI too.

Basically any other regulation, even if the companies whine publicly, is actually one that benefits them by raising the barrier of entry and making it more expensive for small actors to create AI tools.

They’ve gotten smart enough to use reverse psychology on this kind of thing.

This very much feels like “Only please, Brer Fox, please don’t throw me into the briar patch.”

It feels to me like people did unite after those attacks…it was the crazy conspiracy theories about them that really seemed to get the ball rolling as far as division goes.

Thing is, Republicans have been using any crisis and our ‘unite behind leadership’ behavior to fuck us since before Reagan, so I’m not sure it’s really such a bad thing that we stopped ‘uniting’.

Smart in one way but it did cause a lot of storytelling problems because they constantly had to come up with half baked excuses for why it wasn’t working this time when just using the transporter would solve a major problem without fuss.

No shit! That’s our fucking election system. After the primaries, we wind up withtwo candidates that most people don’t like, and we vote against the one we think is worse. It’s been this way for a very long time. Case in point:

https://youtu.be/riDypP1KfOU?si=xwlInd1CS9p7rYcT

Acting like this is shocking news is disingenuous bullshit.

I don’t think ‘going’ anywhere would be an option. If you’re in basically, most of the civilized world, and not in a very secure structure, you’re immediately fucked. I said more than 50% but I guessed that as a very conservative estimate. We don’t normally realize just how many living things are around us, mostly bugs, but also small rodents and the like. If every one of those within a significant radius of every human suddenly went berserk and wanted the humans dead, most people are not in areas where the number of attackers would permit much survival.

Those who currently live in certain desert environments, in certain cold environments, and so forth, would probably survive the first day, and then might have a hope of making it longer. But most environments in which there isn’t enough animal/bug life around to immediately kill you present serious other problems such as food supply. If you live at McMurdo Sound Antarctica, you’re probably not going to immediately be killed. But you will soon have issues feeding yourself and keeping warm.

People in Iceland or northern Norway and other similar places might have the best chances. Probably not quite enough things around to kill everyone immediately, but the environment is one in which they might be able to become self-sufficient, but in the long term I have my doubts even for them. If the bugs and animals and such are so focused on killing humans that they no longer perform their normal functions, then you’re looking at immediate and total ecological collapse. If they’re not, then the population of bugs and animals will increase in all areas other than the most extreme environments, and sooner or later what few humans survived in those extreme environments are going to have to attempt to emerge.

If humans had prep time, maybe. Assuming we could get over our normal difficulties cooperating and actually prepare for the event. There’d at least be a lot of survivors. But if it came as a surprise, suddenly someone flips a switch and the entire animal kingdom is trying to make every single one of us dead? We’re pretty much fucked.

If this means that every animal immediately goes berserk and tries to kill all humans, and ‘animal’ includes bugs, then the animals probably win.

Those people in relatively secure places without enough animals when it starts could survive, but there’s probably be 50% or higher casualties among the general human population in less than a day.

This started to become noticeable years ago when Google decided to start censoring searches even with SafeSearch off.

I switched to Bing at that time, which was good for a while, but eventually they have started doing the same thing.

I can now no longer find a search engine that actually works to find me all the relevant results. I’ve tried all that I’ve heard of, and none will provide complete results.

The easiest canary in the coal mine for this is NSFW stuff. If I search for a popular character of which I know there’s lots of porn/hentai, with SafeSearch off, and do not get a heavy mix of SFW and NSFW results, I know that search engine is messing with those results, and is also definitely doing it with searches that are not so obvious.

I don’t think this argument would go in the right direction, cause there’s plenty of Republican types who’ll just go ‘ok, then let’s just shoot them on sight, bullets are cheap’.

Little known fact: in addition to independence, the United States also claimed primary ownership of English as spoils of the war. 😁

Nope, wouldn’t really be in less danger. That’s something that bothers and concerns me, people act like it’s Trump that’s the problem, but he’s really kind of irrelevant. This is the Republican party, this is all Republicans. Trump is not some bizarre outlier, at least not in the sense of the things he wants to do and will push for and enable as President. Every Republican wants those too.

Protests are effective if there’s a credible threat to those with the power to change whatever is being protected about. If the protesters do not pose a threat of any kind (and I don’t mean just one of physical violence, since that’s often one of the least effective potential threats, although it can have value at times) then nothing will change.

But protesting where you cause an inconvenience to those who neither support nor oppose the protesters can often be a bad move. On occasion it can serve to bring people’s attention to the issue and convince them, but in my experience, if the first experience someone has with an issue, the first awareness they have of it is some protest that caused them problems, that person is likely to be disinclined to become a supporter of the cause, and indeed is often likely to be pushed towards opposing and cracking down on the protest.

This of course can backfire, since if the protesters pose an electoral threat, for instance, and the protests cause a bunch of people to be angry at them and just want the crap to end, those in power are given the message that hey…there’s support for just getting rid of the protesters.