I don’t know, there is a certain nostalgia to it. Yes, it was a pain in the ass to use, but there was also the aspect where limitations breed creativity. If your time online is competing with one of the home’s primary means of communication, the landline phone, the internet becomes a limited resource. It wasn’t as easy to just rot on the internet as it is today. You had to be more deliberate with your time, even if that was just being more deliberate in the types of fun sites you were going to visit.

How finely do you cut your steak at a restaurant? I’m imagining you cutting very fine slices and savoring them one by one.

I mean, I have a chaotic solution we might try. Let’s simply…reverse the Budapest Memorandum! Let’s just hand Ukraine a few hundred thermonuclear warheads, with launchers and launch codes and say, “here, go have fun!”

“The president has announced…that we have reversed the Budapest Memorandum…”

:D

I don’t get why companies can’t solve this problem entirely by just flying out applicants for in-person interviews towards the end of the hiring process. Or hell, maybe only even ask the candidate to fly out for a visit after they’ve already accepted the job offer. Just one minimal and relatively cheap step to confirm the remote worker you’re hiring is who they claim to be. For the cost of a flight, a night or two in a hotel, and some meal vouchers, you can verify someone’s identity. Sure, maybe not for freelance work. But for any well paid technical field? This is a trivial expense.

I know that anybody who has consistent access to an internet connection in North Korea is almost certainly working for the benefit of the great leader and they aren’t actually seeing any money or benefit for themselves.

Eh, this doesn’t sound like the job you would give someone in a prison camp. You’re talking about people that you’re allowing to interact and work regularly with foreigners outside the country. That does not sound like the type of position you trust to a political prisoner. That sounds like a position you put someone of high trust. It’s probably a pretty cushy job as the standards of North Korea go. Sure beats scratching at dirt or working in some godawful arms factory. It’s probably the type of job you need some good family connections in the Party in order to get. Sure, the government takes all the direct monetary benefit of the work, but that is just kindof how Communist systems work. I imagine the people working those jobs have some of the highest standards of living available to people that aren’t senior party leadership.

Remember, you are mortal.

It’s not even about needing to exceed the speed of light. Once you cross the event horizon, spacetime around you is so warped that “out” doesn’t exist anymore. Point your ship in any direction and fire up your FTL engine; it doesn’t matter. No matter which way you try and fly your ship, you’ll be getting closer to the center. Once you cross the event horizon, there is literally no way out.

Harris could have promised to kiss Bezos’s feet and anyone remotely antifa should have still voted for her.

You’re beyond saving. You are why Kamala lost the election. Please emigrate to Russia so you can vote for the lesser of two evils there and not pollute our electorate further.

Forget charging ICE agents with terrorism. We need to rendition ICE agents to the countries of their victims. The US justice system cannot be trusted to hold ICE agents accountable for their crimes against humanity. SCOTUS is corrupt and not a legitimate court. So let’s send ICE agents to where they will be held accountable. All those ICE agents that sent innocent Venezuelan citizens to a torture camp in El Salvador? They should all be rounded up and sent to Venezuela to face justice for their crimes against Venezuelan citizens.

We’ll build the homes in the flood zone, but only let beavers live there.

Do we really think that a beaver dam is the same level of safety/long term investment as a $1.2 million dam?

I mean, the dam is self-repairing.

They should have made any bank bailout contingent on nationalization. That was the big mistake.

Is your bank insolvent to the point that it needs emergency federal assistance? Is it so grand that letting your Tower of Babel collapse endangers the entire nation? Do we the taxpayers have a guns to ours heads here, forcing us to give out these bailouts? All to clean up the mess left behind by overpaid, overconfident, completely incompetent bank executives?

If so? Fine. A bailout will be given to protect the customers and the nation, but the existing shareholders are completely wiped out. The feds take ownership of the bank. They divide the accounts and remaining assets of the megabank up amongst a dozen smaller new banks it creates as a replacement for the failed giant. The Federal Reserve provides credit to the new banks as they get started. Eventually, when they stabilize, the government holds IPOs for the new banks and completely divests ownership of them.

THAT is how bank bailouts should work. This way, moral hazard is avoided, the government isn’t fleeced, and market consolidation is reversed all in one go.

Frankly, the answer should be for every site to just cut the UK off entirely. Let them have their own little North Korean style micronet. Maybe when the people of the UK can’t visit anything but a bunch of miserable English websites, they will get off their asses and elect competent leaders. If not, well maybe they’re just not the sort of people we should allow access to the global communications network. Let the barbarians stew in their own barbarism.

Spend two seconds thinking through the logistics of that before you spout such nonsense.

It’s worse than us simply becoming poorer. It’s that these places - sprawling low density suburbs - where never financially sustainable to begin with. They never brought in enough tax revenue to remotely cover the expense of maintaining all their infrastructure. There’s just too few people per square mile to pay for it all at the property tax rates people can afford. We’ve only kept things going this long through a few mechanisms:

1. Letting older suburban infrastructure decay to well past its replacement state.

2. Relying on growth to prop things up. (Build new neighborhoods and require developers to repave streets and replace/upgrade utility infrastructure in an area.)

3. Relying on ever higher levels of debt.

It isn’t financially sustainable. It was never financially sustainable. As long as a town can keep growing, they can keep the Ponzi scheme going for a time. But eventually you hit a wall on that and the whole house of cards collapses.

Oh, so you’re just a bigot. Figured.

What am I making up? This woman almost certainly has athletic advantages far greater than the vast majority of the trans athletes people get so apoplectic about.

Stop making shit up to fit your narrative. It detracta (sic) from the actual issue.

Unfortunately for your genes, attitudes like these will mean they don’t have much chance of spreading.

But it’s paramount that we ban the 5’5" trans girl who has testosterone lower than cis girls from playing volleyball because…reasons.

Or better yet, and more to the point, if they’re just defensive, why aren’t we giving the Gazans and iron dome system to shoot down any Israeli aircraft that cross into their skies? The Gazans have just as much right to armed self defense as the Israelis do.