The rural population isn’t the issue, it’s suburbia which is where the majority of the US population lives.

It’s not dense enough for public transportation to be viable and it’s zoned in a way that makes pedestrian traffic a non starter.

Suburbia causes a lot of problems. I understand why it exists - owning a house with a yard is nice. I personally wouldn’t want to give that up to live in an urban environment if I didn’t have to

Working long solo sessions of people leaving me the fuck alone tends to be correlated with me getting projects done.

No joke, 50th anniversary of the first F16 flight is coming up very soon.

Granted the guts of that plane have been upgraded over and over, but still.

Eh, I’m here to relax and have fun.

Not be told I’m a piece of shit who deserves to be executed because I had the audacity to be born every ten minutes.

Why does everyone keep saying child poverty?

Like, do children in other countries have some sort of massive wealth I’m not aware of?

I’m not giving up mobile deposit.

Leave my house? Duck that.

Do I need sources for the failed invasion of Kyiv?

Everyone knows about it.

Florida here checking in.

Our government is hard at work on this.

Check out this pending bill up for vote during the next session: https://m.flsenate.gov/session/bill/2024/599/billtext/filed/pdf https://m.flsenate.gov/session/bill/2024/599/billtext/filed/pdf

Essentially it makes it illegal to be transgender and have a job in government or government adjacent.

Here is an excert: It is the policy of the state that a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait and that it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex. This section does not apply to individuals born with a genetically or biochemically verifiable disorder of sex development, including, but not limited to, XX disorder of sex development; XY disorder of sex development; sex chromosome disorder of sex development; XX or XY sex reversal; and ovotesticular disorder.

An employee or a contractor may not be required, as a condition of employment, to refer to another person using that person’s preferred personal title or pronouns if such personal title or pronouns do not correspond to that person’s sex.
An employee or a contractor may not provide to an employer his or her preferred personal title or pronouns if such preferred personal title or pronouns do not correspond to his or her sex.
An employee or a contractor may not be asked by an employer to provide his or her preferred personal title or pronouns or be penalized or subjected to adverse personnel action for not providing his or her preferred personal title or pronouns.

It continues on about not being able to fire people for thinking being gay is a sin and so on, but I don’t want this to be a novel.

alot of ppl on fedi are privacy-oriented and focused

I’m aware. I’m just reminding you that most outside the fediverse aren’t.

Not everyone cares so much about that.

Someone knowing things about me in general is not a big deal.

Yeah. This is the one that came to my mind.

Dude straight up ended his career. His band members left, label dropped him and his colabs said they wouldn’t work with him anymore.

Turns out he was a lieutenant in the oath keepers and the FBI grabbed him. Last I heard he made a plea deal and got put into the witness protection program.

He is the band and it can’t exist without him. Even if he could continue, he’d have to rebuild it from the ground up.

It’s a shame, I really Loved Demons and Wizards, the iced earth / blind guardian colab group.

… Based on some song lyrics I feel I should have seen this coming when looking back though.

Anytime you are doing any kind of military or police action within a civilian area there is always the risk of unintended civilian harm.

If police and military forces took this doctorine that any amount of risk is too much then they simply would be unable to operate.

There has to be a certain amount of acceptable civilian risk and that should be proportional to the threat you are attempting to stop.

Just to clarify, I’m not advocating that Israel is taking acceptable risks. But I am advocating that those risks will always exist with ANY police or military action and the primary debate is over where the red line of acceptable/unacceptable is.

All nations are built and maintained by violence, either directly or by threat of it.

It’s a core component of sovereignty. To be able to call your government sovereign you must have the capacity to resist both external and internal actors from being able to overthrow you.

You must also be willing and able to use violence against those under your rule who disobey your laws (i.e, arresting a murderer).

Yes, they are doing a genocide.

I’m not sure what other options are available at this point though.

Hamas is extremist to the point where they would be doing a genocide as well if they were in the position to do so.

People say separate the Hamas from the people, but that’s really hard when the members of Hamas are of the people and have the support of a good percentage of them.

If Israel invades on foot and Hamas is threatened they can simply fade back into the population and wait to try again. And the general population will support them in doing so.

The creation of the state of Israel was a mistake and the rise of Hamas is the direct result of decades of apartheid practiced against the Palestinians by the Israeli state.

… But as the issue stands today, I can’t blame Israel in taking extreme action to end the conflict that’s dragged on for nearly a century now.

There is no reasonable path to peace. A two state solution would end with the states at war anyway as both states have extreamists who want to genocide the other in government positions.

And there is no where that would accept the Gaza population as refugees even if you could get them to leave.

So what’s left?

prohibition doesn’t work

My first gut response was ‘We should outlaw murder, I bet that’d stop murder from happening!’.

But as hilarious as it is, lets ignore the hyperbole.

The fact is that laws never stop all the activity they are intended to prevent. If they did we wouldn’t need a court system.

No, the question is does the law do more good than bad for society?

Smoking causes 480,000 extra deaths yearly according to the CDC.

And smoking related illness costs around $300 billion annually in the US.

As we both agree, outlawing the sale will not prevent 100% of usage. But it will almost certainly prevent some usage.

And I agree that a black market will form and that black market will cause some societal damage.

So the question is, will the affects of the black market created by prohibition do more damage to society than the reduction in existing societal damage that we should see from prohibition?

Considering the above statistics, it may be worth the gamble.

I’ll note that you have nothing to refute with.

There is no oxymoron.

Smoking is harming oneself.

Selling is harming another.

They are not equivalent.

I would argue that society should reserve the right to punish individuals who harm others for their personal benefit.

And I would argue that selling a physically addictive substance that directly causes harm with no benefit to the user for personal profit is causing harm.

So while I don’t support arresting people for smoking, I 100% so support arresting people for selling.

Of these I’ve watched 8 completely:

• Battlestar Galactica.
• Parks and Rec.
• 30 Rock.
• Chernobyl.
• Game of Thrones.
• Deadwood.
• Halt and Catch Fire.
• Bojack Horseman

6 others I’ve started and gave up on part way through:

• The Last Airbender.
• Atlanta.
• Better Call Saul.
• Breaking Bad.
• Veep.
• Reservation Dogs.

Of the rest, half of them I’ve never even heard of.

I guess I don’t have good taste in TV?

Hermit reporting for duty, sir!