This is amazing. Thank you!

I guess so that the police can know whether to say “stop resisting ma’am” or “stop resisting sir” when they pull the driver from the vehicle and start beating them?

They could pass a law making it clear that there is no emergency power that would allow the President to interfere with elections.

The President would veto the law.

Congress could then overturn the veto

I listen to a military podcast and they seem surprised that the US threatening to invade another NATO country was such a big deal for Europeans. 🙈

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s we started to be able to use WiFi on laptops and connect to the Internet with some mobility.

Almost everyone had the fantasy of working from the beach or their garden in the sun.

It turns out that sitting down trying to read a screen in direct sunlight for hours sucks ass, which everyone who tried it discovered before moving back indoors.

In my neighborhood the grocery stores stopped requiring a coin to get them during COVID-19 lockdowns. They kept it that way, and people put the carts back in the parking lot (although most people walk to the shops).

Fun fact: Bill Clinton, George Bush Jr., and Trump were all born in the same year.

For me it’s the opposite.

My preference is itch.io, then GOG, then Steam.

Well that’s disappointing to hear. Although it makes me glad that I am too cheap to buy one. 😅

I mean, there are Purism phones. Super expensive, but they keep selling out so I guess they are reasonable.

I am a seasoned traveller and that would scare me.

I can think of two. Are there more?

Letting supply and demand set prices does not mean you have to then use profits to concentrate capital, right?

Or it’s another tool to divide the working class.

You have more in common with normal people from other generations than you do with the wealthy!

Keep in mind that the book is very old, published in 1931. DNA hadn’t been mapped, information technology was limited, and so on.

In the book, people are born in factories. Working class people are born in from split cells, as quintuples if I remember correctly. Your role in life is largely determined by your genes - workers don’t have the psychology for anything but labor.

In spite of that, it’s not an especially oppressive society. There is a “perfect” drug, soma, which is sort of like a non-addictive, non-physically harmful heroin that can be delivered by gas. When there is unrest, security forces come in and get everyone high until they chill the fuck out.

Sex is open and easy, but always completely voluntary by everyone involved. When people are turned down they are sometimes surprised but never upset or aggressive.

Entertainment is presented as vacuous, but the people seem to enjoy it. There are movies, TV, and so on. Sports are engineered to require people take trains out of town to stadiums, and require deliberately-complicated equipment to play, in order to create demand for production.

So… is that a dystopia? There is no discussion of environmental damage, but overall it seems sustainable, not predicated on infinite growth. People are stuck in the role they were born to, but it seems like there are no artificial barriers to advancement… just that not everyone can be good at everything.

Definitely. A world where people are happy and healthy and live basically fulfilling lives. There are a few fanatics who opt out, and they’re unhappy. Go figure.

I don’t find Brave New World to be especially dystopian. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Or ask your work to give you a phone?

My company insists on spyware for my phone, so I insist they give me a phone for work stuff. I leave it off in a drawer at home when I’m not on call.

If you’re relying on Cloudflare are you even self-hosting?

Can you link to a source for this?

I’m not aware of any historical examples or even theoretical models for this approach.