It’s down 8% ($27) as of right now.

You’re making an awful lot of assumptions about me and how I live my life. That’s fine, but I’m not all that interested in being a sounding board for your frustrations with my country.

I have the means and the desire to do what you’re suggesting but when it comes down to it my desire to protect my family outweighs my desire to protect my country. At least for now that seems the wiser choice for me personally, and I suspect that is true for a lot of others as well.

The problem is that there’s no clear line to delineate what that decision should hinge on. If you asked me 10 years ago where the line is I probably would have said somewhere well behind us now. Still, I know what will happen to me and my family if I’m the one to act first and that familial preservation instinct is difficult to overcome. Choosing to be first through the breach, so to speak, is a heavy burden to bear.

I think that dilemma is what prevents most who are predisposed to act from choosing to act, more so than a lack of knowledge about the situation.

While there are certainly flaws in the American system of government, this is not the result of one man simply being above the law. There are plenty of existing ways to stop this from happening but half of the government is actively supporting his efforts. There is no system of government that can survive when the people who are charged with enforcing the rules collectively decide not to enforce them. At that point the specifics don’t matter.

Well, that’s not going to happen if everyone stays hidden until it’s safe to come out

What are you scared of? There’s more of us than there are of them. Hiding in the shadows, too afraid to act is how they win. Be loud and deliberate in voicing your opposition. If they’re coming for you anyway you may as well face it head on.

I don’t have time to read this currently but I will try to later. In the meantime, does anyone know how they are coercing access to these devices? I’ve done a fair amount of international travel and no one has ever asked about any of my devices, much less attempted to gain access to them. It’s my understanding that if you refuse them there’s no legal reason they could refuse you entry.

Obviously, legality is of less concern to this administration but these people should have legal recourse, at least until the facade of civility is completely cast aside.

I have no idea where that data comes from and that’s exactly the point I’m making. It doesn’t match my personal experience at all.

I build the infrastructure that these data centers need to connect to the internet. Our projected power consumption is at least tripling from last year which was itself double the year before, and that’s only the power draw for the fiber optic infrastructure connecting these data centers together. They’re also building a ridiculous amount of computing power in those data centers which is another massive increase in power consumption.

There are some kind-of green efforts in progress to mitigate a bit of the environmental impacts of that increase in demand but most of what I have seen personally is just more draw from the local utility company. I have serious doubts about any data that indicates that tripling power consumption is not a major environmental problem.

Not if you pirate their software

Sure that works great, now since that infrastructure doesn’t exist just go get it built. I’m sure massive government spending that benefits the general public more than corporations will be very easy to secure.

I’d like to call your optimism inspiring but from where I sit it looks more like delusion. Don’t get me wrong I would love a huge public transit buildout in the US, I just don’t see any realistic path to making it a reality in the current political and economic climate. I also don’t see that changing within a decade or more at minimum.

It does matter that the US is one big country, but even if it didn’t you still made my point for me. The other things you listed are just as large obstacles as the size of the country itself and there is no easy solution to those other problems but you just blew past them as if naming them would make them go away. The fact that you identified them correctly doesn’t mean you have any realistic chance of overcoming them.

Definitely but there’s practical limitations to implementing large scale public transit in the US even if the desire to build it existed, which I would argue it doesn’t at a large enough scale to make it happen.

Autonomous vehicles are the only achievable solution to distracted driving. Individuals can be nice but people as a whole are lazy and selfish pieces of shit. You’ll never get anywhere close to even 90% doing the right thing just by relying on people’s good intentions.

I don’t know. I feel like you need to be predisposed to a product category in order for an advertisement to have any impact on you. I don’t give a shit about most of the products I see advertised. They’re gathering all this data on me but still end up using it in stupid ways. So much so that even the stuff I am interested in gets presented to me in a worse fashion than it probably would with random ads.

For example, I built a new pc about a year ago and to this day I get tons of targeted ads trying to sell me GPUs and other PC parts. Like, cool, you figured out something I was interested in buying at one point but that interest evaporated the moment I made that purchase. Every ad I’ve seen since then has been a waste of everyone’s time and yet they keep showing them to me.