Cape Canaveral is directly east of Orlando, with a bunch of vacation resort spots hugging the shore. The Florida coastline isn’t exactly lightly developed.

Getting all my aerospace technology on Temu.

I’m not saying that the persecution against Falung Gong is fake, actually I believe is true, violence against minorities is another Wednesday for the CCP

The Falun Gong was originally an ally of the CCP as recently as 1993. They had a falling out when some of their chief leadership got caught in a string of financial scandals and abuse allegations. Attempts by the state to begin prosecuting church leaders triggered an outcry from the membership, which prompted more arrests and more efforts hide the organizations money, and finally a wholesale exodus from the country by its most devoted members.

Falun Gong leadership arrived in the US and immediately began churning out anti-China spin, with the help of the Epoch Times - an originally Chinese-only paper primarily distributed in Chinese ex-pat communities by church refugees. If you get into the history of the Epoch Times, you should very quickly discover that it is not a reliable source of information.

Which isn’t to say China’s been great wrt religious freedom or free association. But the modern incarnation of Falun Gong has more in common with Scientology than, say, Mormonism or Baháʼí. You’re going to fall down some really QAnon-themed rabbit holes if you take everything their community is saying at face value.

These projects tend to bring a bunch of economic development along with it. Would be like Floridians rejecting Cape Canaveral or Texans trying to shut down SpaceX. Locals might not be thrilled, but developers and business leaders are ready for the rest of you to take the risk.

Europe has an enormous surveillance state, increasingly modeled (and managed) by Israeli surveillance systems used in Palestine.

Germany, France, the UK, and Spain already have some of the most advanced facial recognition imagine in the world deployed in their surveillance networks.

And the EU just expanded their legal use

Maybe you’re safer from an American tech company. But not from the local police.

The worst that my country wants to do with my data is attempt to sell me shit I don’t want.

Facial recognition technology and the growing power of artificial intelligence

In some other countries, drawing parallels with certain emperors and certain A.A.Milne characters could cost me my freedom and possibly my life.

Of course. Always in other countries. Never in mine.

Its weird, but the game felt like it was going to be adding maps and combat zones with relative frequency. But I agree, the game got stale fairly quickly. It was fun, but not meaningfully more fun than Counterstrike or DOTA

I’m convinced Americans have the same level of propagandist ignorance as North Koreans.

Given the budgets they have to work with, I imagine Americans have it much worse off. An hour on Facebook deluges you with more advertisement than any given NKer probably sees in a weak.

Nonsense. The only problem my country has is the problem created by the evil foreigners who threaten my liberty and security from the other side of the border. We need to be protected from those evil outsiders. Therefore, I will endorse and participate in an even more invasive degree of surveillance and a more draconian degree of policing.

That’s the only way to keep the foreign bodies from infecting me and taking over. And the idea of the foreigners having any amount of power over me is significantly more frightening than the prospect of a domestic administration having unlimited authority to protect me.

Do you realize we are allowed to discuss and criticize things around the world whether or not America is guilty of something similar right?

It becomes tiresome to read “Foreign Country is doing the EVIL THING! Rally around the burn pit and lets talk about how intrinsically bad their are!” when they learned this shit by watching every other western country do it first. Just feels like another edition of American Exceptionalism and hysterical far-right xenophobia.

The CCP are actively engaging in genocide

It always gets me to see how Americans treated Afghanistan for 23 years, only to find religion when they see China doing the same Radical Islamic Extremism crack downs the Ted Cruz masterbates to in the middle of the night.

Literally right on the other side of the border! Practically the same dudes. And we outright applauded China for helping us with the genocide under Bush, when we were applauding Russia for the same shit in Chechnya no less.

But now we’re out of there, and in between kicking off massive famines and looting their Treasury, we’ve decided to care about Uyghurs now.

But it is still night and day in terms of horror.

More black and white.

It’s not called The China Man’s Burden, ffs. Who do they even think they are?

Anyway, back to explaining to Houthis why we don’t have health care by blowing up another elementary school in Yemen.

At some point, its just tiring to see folks slam their fists in their palms and declare whole-heartedly “I will NEVER visit China for ANY REASON!” when half our country is broke as shit and our planes occasionally just have the doors fall off mid-flight.

As if you were booking a vacation to Macau ten minutes ago, but now you’ve suddenly changed your mind. Come the fuck on, dude.

It doesn’t matter if it is the UK asking if we want the left or right hand this time or the CCP

Unfortunately, there’s this baseline understanding of liberal western democracies providing security while eastern fascist dictatorships of the proletariat are looking for people to punish arbitrarily. The tolerance for British mass surveillance (some of the worst in the world) is sky high, simply because they’re doing it the white way.

Love to live in a country where my data is always secure and my government would never try to harvest my data in bulk. Liberty! Whiskey! Sexy! USA! USA!

Don’t forget Blinky, the three eyed fish.

https://hero.fandom.com/wiki/Blinky_(The_Simpsons)

I just dont see any reason to ever invest into it nowadays, when renewables and batteries have gotten so good.

Renewables and batteries have their own problems.

Producing and processing cobalt and lithium under current conditions will mean engaging in large-scale deforestation in some of the last unmolested corners of the planet, producing enormous amounts of toxic waste as part of the refinement process, and then getting these big bricks of lithium (not to mention cadmium, mercury, and lead) that we need to dispose of at the battery’s end of lifecycle.

Renewables - particularly hydropower, one of the most dense and efficient forms of renewable energy - can deform natural waterways and collapse local ecologies. Solar plants have an enormous geographic footprint. These big wind turbines still need to be produced, maintained, and disposed of with different kinds of plastics, alloys, and battery components.

Which isn’t even to say these are bad ideas. But everything we do requires an eye towards the long-term lifecycle of the generators and efficient recycling/disposal at their end.

Nuclear power isn’t any different. If we don’t operate plants with the intention of producing fissile materials, they run a lot cleaner. We can even power grids off of thorium. Molten salt reactors do an excellent job of maximizing the return on release of energy, while minimizing the risk of a meltdown. Our fifth generation nuclear engines can use this technology and the only thing holding us back is ramping it up.

Unlike modern batteries, nuclear power doesn’t require anywhere near the same amount of cobalt, lithium, nickel and manganese. Uranium is surprisingly cheap and abundant, with seawater yielding a pound of enrichable uranium at the cost of $100-$200 (which then yields electricity under $.10/kwh).

We can definitely do renewables in a destructive and unsustainable way, recklessly mining and deforesting the plant to churn out single-use batteries. And we can do nuclear power in a responsible and efficient way, recycling fuel and containing the relatively low volume of highly toxic waste.

But all of that is a consequence of economic policy. Its much less a consequence of choosing which fuel source to use.

I would rather see more investment on better renewable tech then relaying on biohazard.

Modern nuclear energy produces significantly less waste and involves more fuel recycling than the historical predecessors. But these reactors are more expensive to build and run, which means smaller profit margins and longer profit tails.

Solar and Wind are popular in large part because you can build them up and profit off them quickly in a high-priced electricity market (making Texas’s insanely expensive ERCOT system a popular location for new green development, paradoxically). But nuclear power provides a cheap and clean base load that we’re only able to get from coal and natural gas, atm. If you really want to get off fossil fuels entirely, nuclear is the next logical step.

One of the saddest bits of the show was when they kinda just gave up talking about socio-economic issues and made the whole show revolve around Homer being a big dumb-dumb.

Some of the harshest criticism they had around nuclear power revolved around its privatization and profitization. A bunch of those early episodes amounted to people asking for reasonable and beneficial changes to how the plant was run, then having to fight tooth and nail with the company boss for even moderate reform.

Patreon alone is not enough for most creators to make a living

I’ve seen a number of content creators argue otherwise. From the “Hello from the Magic Tavern” sketch comedy group to the “Scenes from the Multiverse” Cartoonist to the various musicians cranking out indie tunes on Bandcamp, the refrain I consistently here is that direct patronage offers significantly better returns than ad-supported payments on bigger media platforms.

Indie creators generally have an easier time of securing monthly subscriptions because they’re more boutique and have closer connections to the audience. And you don’t need an enormous audience to bring in a reliable income. While YouTubers need to get into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers to see any kind of productive ROI, Patreon artists can justify the expense of their work on an audience in the hundreds. They can go entirely indie with an audience in the thousands.

Most creators can’t afford to go fully indie, but the margins are so much better relative to the audience size with direct payments. Even just $2/viewer/episode pays vastly more than what a streaming service offers.

I’m a big fan of Patreon.