FaceDeer

And I don’t know how else to explain that your laughter is misplaced because you’re going to suffer right along with everyone else anyway.

You’re saving a bit on gas by taking public transit. Whee, bully for you. Lots of people save a bit by doing little things to save money. I keep the thermostat in my house lower than most people do because I like wearing fluffy housecoats instead, but I’m not laughing. It doesn’t protect you when everything gets more expensive.

You’ll have the same amount of money, but things will cost more so you won’t be able to buy as much.

This is some very basic economics.

Do you sometimes find yourself needing to buy things? Those need to be shipped to the places where you buy them. And the parts they’re made of need to be shipped to the places where they’re manufactured. You pay for all that when you buy them.

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If some weird genie wish suddenly granted me the ability to rewrite the American constitution from the ground up, I think my main focus would be to end the two-party system by switching Congress to proportional representation.

After that, a lot depends on the details of the genie wish. If I can impose whatever changes I wanted I’d probably go further - a drastic reduction of presidential power is an obvious step, perhaps have both a president and a prime minister like many European countries do with the duties split between them. Strict term limits might also be good, though I’d want to study that issue a bit more - there are some upsides to having very experienced politicians in government along with the obvious downsides we’re seeing.

The Supreme Court needs reform, maybe give the judges a fixed term so that they don’t end up stuck with random health conditions determining who gets to appoint who and for how long. More broadly, we’re seeing a lot of flaws in the judicial branch and law enforcement that need correcting. Maybe have multiple Department of Justices with separate leadership to keep each other in check? Tricky.

Or just put an AI in charge of it all and see what happens.

It’s “No KingS”. They’re allowed to have one.

Oh the tantrum we’re about to see. That ballroom was Trump’s favorite soother.

Isn’t Anne McCaffrey notoriously anti-fanfiction? Must take care to avoid provoking her.

Do you enjoy posting? That’s all that really matters in the end. Karma is pointless.

Controversy can actually be good, as long as you’re not saying stuff simply to provoke it for its own sake. If I wanted to only speak to something that agreed with everything I said I could just go tell an AI to act that way and waste my time there. Should communities be insular bubbles where everyone believes the exact same things?

In Russia there’s long been a sort of “social contract” between the oligarch elites and the general population. As long as the general population “stayed out of politics” and let the oligarchs stay rich and powerful, the oligarchs wouldn’t interfere with their lives. The classic bread-and-circuses thing.

I guess the US could have a similar dynamic developing.

It very much depends on where you’re located, what sort of climate the place has, even what sort of neighbors you have.

I have a relatively small front yard and am located in a temperate region with reasonably good rainfall. So I planted a bunch of perennial flowers and clover in the existing grass of my lawn, laid down some decorative stone pathways weaving through it, and some shrubs around the edges. Bought a sign that reads “Meadow Habitat Restoration - Please Do Not Mow or Spray” to make it clear that I wasn’t just neglecting my front yard but was deliberately turning it into a patch of pseudo-wilderness. Now I can basically leave my front yard completely untouched all summer (occasionally pulling a few thistles because I personally hate them) and it looks lovely and has plenty of bees and whatnot visiting it. There’s no such thing as “weeds”, just wildflowers.

My back yard is much larger and I wanted to keep the lawn because it’s a nice space for activities. But I got a pushmower, and the lawn doesn’t grow fast because I’ve allowed trees to grow all around the edges and that makes it quite shady. The trees make for a nice privacy screen once the leaves come in, it’s like my back yard is a forest clearing. I scattered clover seed among the grass there too, you can mow clover just like grass so I figure whatever survives best gets the territory.

Personally, I’m not fond of gravel because it’s an unnecessary dead zone. There’s already plenty of bare concrete everywhere, we don’t need more of that. But if you’re in a dry environment that doesn’t support greenery without watering or fertilizer then some hardscrabble landscaping could look quite nice. Maybe plant a few sagebrushes or even cacti (cacti can put out some very nice flowers) with some interesting piles of larger rocks to add visual interest.

Maybe take a wander around your neighborhood to see if other folks have set up interesting alternatives to lawns and get some ideas off of them, they’ll have done the testing to see if it works.

There’s a bunch of different cryptocurrencies and a bunch of different government-backed fiat currencies, all with different ranges of stability. Even stuff like gold isn’t actually “stable”, the price varies. Pick whichever range of stability suits your needs. You could use a stabletoken that’s pegged to something else - US dollars are popular.

So the more powerful a country is, the less able it is to stand up for itself and do the right thing in the face of opposition? What an odd philosophy.

If the most powerful country in Europe won’t do it then who will?

Firefox has the ability to generate random secure passwords. Firefox Sync backs the (encrypted) passwords up automatically, if you set that up to do so.

Then Houston joins California and out comes the surprised Pikachu.

Yet another area where the big companies are voluntarily leaving money on the table for the open model users to rake in. I approve.

Or are they?

I love it when I have no idea where in the sentence the transition from truth to lie happened.

This is exactly as designed. The whole point of a prediction market is to encourage people who are knowledgeable about a subject to expose that knowledge in the form of bets. We should want people with inside information to be doing this to make the predictions more accurate.

If you don’t have inside information or special knowledge then you probably shouldn’t be gambling like that yourself. It’d be like buying stocks on the stock market without knowing anything about the industries the stocks are from.