But that doesn’t say which one OP will be at, either!

If you think selling weapons is a maximalist policy, you are very naive.

And the more control you have over the work the more screen time you get. My family has a lot of contractors, and my dad left that to work trades for the government. Before my dad died he spent most of his day on his computer, even though it was his least favorite part, but he was the head of his department. My contractor uncles all spend hours a day on screens, calls, orders, book keeping, meetings, drafting, reading specifications, reading contracts, etc., now that they are the head of businesses that have younger people doing most of the physical work.

those scintillating, jeweled, scuttling crabs are good though.

You mean, John Menard?

I mean, I can only estimate it’s size from the person standing next to it. From there I can use that estimate to get the volume of the cube, then the weight, then look up the cost by weight right now and apply the average.

So it would be somewhere around 1mm by weight.

That cube would be in the neighborhood of 1 million dollars of tungsten

The two major hospitals, relatively near me, use a combination of tubes, and robots, to dispense medications. One is working on completely robotic food service, and has completely robotic floor cleaning/polishing. Both, also, have robots that do the basic landscaping maintenance, like mowing/edging. There is more, it is interesting to walk around and see all these infrastructure systems work. Feels, at least partially, like the promised future of sci-fi.

But, it told me it lived under my bed?!

Yeah, I have been on antibiotics that wiped out most of my gut bacteria. It was easy to upset my stomach for a few months, then I was fine.

Except you brought up the release of classified documents, not discussing something that happened out in the open, in front of the media. Tiananmen Square is not like Snowden leaking documents. What is more comparable is the Kent State massacre. However, that was immediately everywhere, and no one went to prison for reporting it. Where as you can still go to prison over publicly discussing Tiananmen today.

Is it bad that that whistle blowers, working government intelligence, are treated as criminals? Yes, yes it is. The fact that this is the whataboutism you jump to, for discussing Tiananmen Square, rather than Kent State, is telling though. You can’t match the reaction to the similar crime. You have to select a completely different government crime to have a similar reaction. Now tell me, how does China treat people who whistle blow government secrets?

So it can in China?

I still see Snowden in the news, and see the information of his documents discussed in mainstream media. Even if it was forgotten, people arern’t being swept away by the feds for talking about online, and on tv.

That is not the same as as the subject at hand, I have already addressed this, multiple times, down further. A more apt comparison would have been Kent State. Which was something that was immediately put on the news.

I said I worry we will get to that point, not hat we are already there.

I am VERY aware of what can happen in concerns to violent revolt. I grew up with a father who consulted NATO countries on how to maintain infrastructure to supply aircraft engine rooms in foreign, and forward operating bases. I probably know more than 99.9% of the people on this network exactly how dire a fight with the US military could be like.

I didn’t say it was. Protesting has been getting no where. We were burning shit down, and holding police stations hostage, for police reform. Here we are, a few years later, and we have more cops, less accountability, more money per cop spent, few to no structural changes for dealing with mental health issues, and homelessness, less security for the fourth amendment, less transparency, a backlash to the first amendment, etc. Our protests against genocide do nothing, but get people beaten, and put in jail.

It is not easier to fight than it is to protest, but if protest is pointless, as all other avenues for change are becoming, the options left are fighting, or supplication. Hopefully people will start actually taking voting seriously. Big election, vote for the lesser evil. Local election, vote for change. It is how the minority GOP is able to hold this death grip on the government, if you need proof it works. If we can’t organize to get more of the majority of people who don’t vote, to do so, we will have no diplomatic venues left. If those who do vote don’t start taking the movements of the right far more seriously, the right will kill our power to affect change through the vote If we do affect critical change, and it brings out a government stifling of voting power, we will be similarly fucked. Once we have shown all diplomatic efforts to be ineffective, it is fight, or submit.

Yes, that is the unfortunate state of reality. I am worried we a getting to that impasse where all diplomatic avenues for change have been shut down. This leaves violence as the option at hand.

if you have nothing to say on the subject, don’t say anything. This goes both ways. If someone is talking about, say, Kent state, and admonishing the US, and all you have is we may have shot a couple college kids, but in China they ran a bunch over with tanks, just fucking move on, and don’t comment. These additions aren’t valuable.

Or, maybe, bring up the point you make here? Like discuss the specific concept of the english speaking world spreading that as a meme at this point. That would be way more valuable a contribution than, yet another, whataboutism.

You are welcome. They did those ads from like the mid 80s until the late 90s or early 2000s.

Yes we had 3 more years where numerous other variants of things like pop-up/under ads, ads that ran malicious java script, infinitely self-replicating pop-ups, ads that instantly played music at full volume, ads that kept opening themselves again as you closed them, and so on.

Basically, the time when ads were not super intrusive, on the web, was a fleeting time, in its infancy. Didn’t even make it 6 years before ad blockers were required to safely use the web.