If it was a joke, I definitely missed it then, I didn’t even have the slightest suspicion that it might be one.

Tbh my experience with chinese goods has been that the “garbage quality stuff that breaks easily” is usually the very cheap stuff made to compete on price and nothing else. In which case, an equivalent thing from anywhere would be the same way. Anything I’ve bought from a Chinese manufacturer at a typical price for it’s product type and from a company with a proper brand that isn’t a random string of letters has been decent enough quality. Granted that’s been electronics and not guns, but still, it’s not like the knowledge of how to make stuff doesn’t exist there somehow.

I’ve been pretty happy with how the instance I use has been run thus far, but it is focused around furries, so it won’t be something most people outside that subculture like I expect. Still, the fandom is big enough that someone in it looking for an instance might look at this thread, so I mention it anyway.

To be fair, potentially addictive or not, I wouldn’t support a ban on social media either. The practical requirements needed to effectively restrict access to information in the modern age (both porn and social media being examples of information) are such that I generally view the cure as worse than the disease, so to speak, and view the least bad option as being to just give up on legal restrictions and just deal with the consequences instead. Addiction is harmful, but most consumers of such information aren’t harmed by it, and restriction inherently requires monitoring and removing internet anonymity to a degree that I find unacceptable.

Does the rule in question even apply to end users? All I had heard of it was that it put some kind of requirement on the website itself to identify people, which a person seeking out a noncompliant or foreign website presumably wouldn’t be the one violating?

Human psychology hasn’t changed during that time, so the same kinds of tricks or weakness that can drive a population into that mode of thinking still work today, if the details around them are adapted for some modern culture. If anything, it might be slightly easier, given those trying to achieve it have historical examples of what is and isn’t effective.

ornithopters arent exactly new

To be fair, while paradox games like Stellaris or the crusader kings games you mentioned, certainly have a lot of replayability (I don’t really care much for CK myself but have over 1000 hours on both Stellaris and EU4), they’re not great examples for where cheaper games by smaller companies offer more than expensive ones from bigger ones. Partly because paradox is fairly sizable and well known these days, but mostly because those games are quite expensive, just split into numerous expansions that come out over time. One can opt out of getting them, sure, but they’re where a lot of the different options that bring the replayability come from.

To be fair, making text hard to read somewhat defeats the entire purpose of text.

Plenty of people suggest Israel should stop occupying Palestine. You wont see much of the others these days, because, well, its a bit late to be advocating the end of an invasion that has already ended.

For how long though? The issue with detecting AI generated stuff, Id imagine, is that a picture contains a finite amount of information, especially a digital one. These things have been improving relatively quickly, and I cant think of any fundamental reason why one could not eventually create images where every pixel is as it would be if that image were real, or at least close enough that detection is not even theoretically possible if you dont have some actual proof that the event depicted couldnt have happened. We may not be there yet, but the closer we get to it, the more prone to error and therefore less useful any detection algorithm must be.

Quite the exaggerated headline from the look of it.

I think drone warfare so far has shown that one of the advantages of drones, for a weapon, is their ability to be produced cheapy, en masse, and with a relatively limited manufacturing infrastructure. Assuming you have the computer parts anyway, which are abundant in today’s society. One of the implications of that, I think, is that in future asymmetric or civil wars and the like, they’re not going to be like fighter jets or tanks, where one side will have them and the other must improvise countermeasures. They’re going to be like guns and explosives, where both sides are going to have access to at least some degree.

Very few advocate for the total elimination of cars, just that they are very, very overrepresented in terms of amount of infrastructure built and city design. The argument isn’t to take cars off the table, but that they shouldn’t be be the default option, and therefore that cities shouldn’t be built assuming that most will have and use one. Because when you build assuming their use, you tend to create a place that requires them, and makes life very difficult for anyone that cannot or will not use one.

I’m in an apartment in a city right now, I really do not notice the neighbors. Apartments are absolutely not as small as cells, unless you’re living somewhere with an extreme land shortage like Hong Kong or something (and even then, the conditions will be more comfortable than a literal prison), or somewhere with some extremely progressive prisons.

For that matter, saying you don’t have much freedom of movement unless you’re walking or biking is a bit like saying you can’t communicate with people unless you talk to them; being able to just leave your front door and walk to places you want to go, to include to stuff like train or bus stations for longer trips (which in turn can reach stuff like airports or car rentals for even longer ones), is freedom of movement.

If anything, having a car as the only good option is much less free, since one is required to acquire a license from the government to use it at all, which they can at any moment revoke and leave you with the choice of resorting to crime, relying on others to move you, or being stuck in one’s own home.

No, it really doesn’t, unless one simply does not know what “prison” means. Improving access to transportation is entirely counter to the point of a prison, given that the primary characteristic of a prison is being hard to leave.

I mean, that isnt really an argument against public transit and bike infrastructure, its just an argument that the way to do it isnt to just tell people to stop driving and expect it to happen, one has to redesign cities to make these options feel like the safe and natural choice.

It isnt like the rest of the world doesnt have rural areas, unless one lives in like singapore or something. Something like 80% of the US population lives in urban areas, and most trips arent trips between cities except perhaps for those that are close to one another anyways. So even if one accepts that rural areas are car centric by nature, that still leaves the vast majority of the population that isnt affected by that. The buildings within cities being spread out over a wide space making transit less efficient is a failure of city design rather than something fundamental and unchangeable about the US, we have a fairly serious housing shortage anyways, if we really wanted to decrease car dependence we could absolutely build up denser housing in urban cores to shift the population over time into areas that allow for more efficient transportation.

Cars also travel along previously laid paths. I mean, technically there are off road ones that dont have to, but unless youre on your own land trying to get from one place to another without following the roads wont go so well.

Eh, I can think of some things that might, its just that incompetence isnt one of them. But like, if Trump suddenly came out as trans or something, that might shake them up a bit.