It’s because a lot of social norms about that kind of thing tend to be set by religion, and the US has been heavily influenced by a particularly puritanical strain of evangelical protestantism that cares a lot about impropriety and sex.

I bought a little $15 phone stand from Amazon that does this great only without the charging stuff. It does have a slot on the bottom so you can plug the phone in while it’s on it tho.

You can never truly confirm any scientific theory, unless by confirm you mean something other than prove definitively. All you can do is keep looking for evidence that disproves it and failing. And people have done that, like, a lot over the last 100 years or so. You can become an evolutionary biologist and do the work yourself, but those people have also helpfully published their work so you can just go read it.

They’re still collecting data that helps them sell ads.

Is that… is that a portrait of Reagan on the wall behind him? The man has no concept of irony…

Indeed, I quite like it, cause I’m here for discussion not just shouting into the void.

Yeah it felt a little empty here at first, but then I realized I get way more replies on most of my comments here than I did on reddit where most people just scrolled right past it.

Oh they only care about tyranny that affects them. It’s not tyranny if it’s hurting the people they want hurt.

That doesn’t make sense. They totally control the platform, they can (and surely do) datamine every ounce of it.

Whataboutism is ‘Well it’s not bad if we did it because these other guys did it too!’. That’s not what this is.

What I’m doing is reflecting that this is a global issue that is not UNIQUELY an American problem (you must’ve missed the word uniquely before.) That phrase, ‘not uniquely American’, means that while I acknowledge that it is also a problem for us - and in fact I have no reservations about saying that it’s worse here than anywhere else (so far) - that it’s happening elsewhere too.

I think I saw that post, and IIRC it was something like 60% of people own guns, and 90% of people support more gun control - there was no mention of getting rid of guns. But, fair enough.

Yes, America has been sliding into a hypercapitalist hellhole because the right breaks the rules and wins no matter what and then throws wrench after wrench in the works, while the left has no positive vision for the future and has abandoned the working class, so yeah, it’s not surprising that there’s been little to now resistance and lots of appeasement and collaboration with this bullshit. It’s infuriating. But it’s not, as I said, uniquely American; we’re just further along than everyone else.

Well yeah, I meant economically, but fair.

I both love and hate that Trump’s isolationist bullshit that is purportedly about rebuilding American jobs is actually hurting American jobs in direct and measurable ways like this.

First, your premise is inflammatory and I’m pretty sure it’s intentional, so apology not accepted.

Second, this is not a uniquely American problem. The UK, for example, has been dealing with the rising conservatism, the dismantling of their government, the privatization of major public services like the rail network, etc. This is the natural conclusion of that process: oligarchs gain so much power they can outright buy presidential elections and accelerate the trend toward fascism. Lots of people have seen this coming, but we can only vote so hard.

Heh, I came by my abortive (due to disability) cybersecurity career honest - I never really did much hacking, but I built and maintained networks for years and sorta just picked it up. Course it helps that I’d had a couple friends for years before I got into it who had been in the business a long time (one was the network security head for a Tier 2 ISP that covered most of the American Southwest, and the other was on the penetration-testing red team at a US government national laboratory) and liked to talk shop.

Assuming you’re a good shot and can hit a moving target. More than a couple-three rounds per hog and you start getting into marginal territory.

Oh I know, I was being sarcastic, doing the typical redneck ‘lol we shootin’ ‘em fer fun, what’s the problem?!’ type thing.

Hogs are big business here in Texas, where you can pay a couple thousand bucks to shoot them with a machine gun from a helicopter all day, so… what’s the problem? :P

I keep hearing that it’s possible to do this on lemme, but I’m new and haven’t figured out how yet.

I mean maga has always had a strong religious component built into its core, as has the conservative party in general since like the 80s, so this isn’t new.