Good to know… That’s reassuring, thanks

Who signed it?? I keep seeing this, without shaming the org that gave in

Yeah, and a county could say “you can’t do business in our county anymore” and block them

A country can ban dildos, but they don’t get to tell a foreign factory they can’t make dildos. If an importer orders dildos anyways, that’s between the importer and customs. Which in this case the importer is the ISP

Because they don’t work as phones, at least not for practical use

No one has cracked it yet, some projects seem to be getting close, but the radio in a phone is a very complicated and poorly documented black box

Well, considering how fucked things are right now…

1. I gather up the publicly active billionaires and bring them into stage with me before starting a speech on inequality, really digging into the fact that they probably don’t feel safe in public anymore, then I announce that “these industry leaders have volunteered to help fix this, and will be staying in Washington until we have a plan”. During the speech, I’d kick out their entourage and after I’d trade out their phones for ones that can only make calls

2. I’d keep guards everywhere and make pointed implicit threats, but leave that wiggle room for civility. I’d use this distraction to keep other parties from interfering as I sic the FTC, SEC, and FCC on trust busting basically the entire economy. I’d have the NSA help behind the scenes to speed up this process, hell I’d expand the judiciary just for this purpose, to push it through as fast as possible

3. I’d deploy the national guard everywhere to basically open soup kitchens and shelters. I’d probably send in large portions of the military as well - we have the resources and logistics to feed everyone for an extended period of time, so I’d use it to mitigate the short term damage

4. I’d call on other world leaders for aid. I’d make a big speech about collapsing empires and the dangers of the coming dark age. I’d call for a new age of cooperation and solidarity as equals, of breaking the cycle by playing another game. I’d ask for medicine and aid workers from around the world to help us through our trying time, then I’d parade out the billionaires to let them announce their plans to use their wealth to create jobs (and make sure they talk about how they want a world where they can feel safe, no matter how forced). Not all of them would make an appearance, but they’d all pop up later

5. From there I’d try to stabilize this whole mess legislatively. I’d overturn citizens united by making it expressly illegal with huge penalties, come up with a transition plan to nationalize healthcare, I’d create a program to buy food from independent farmers at cost to keep the soup kitchens open, I’d expand the supreme Court and put restrictions on them, and as things settle I’d make a big deal about restricting certain powers I used to get all of this through

It would be a huge mess. Like a total shit show. The plan is to basically turn the economy off and on again without loss of life

But I’d make sure people had food, housing, and hope for the future. They’d be terrified day 1, they’d be terrified as they lose their jobs and the stock market disappears, but then they’d have people going door to door arranging free food deliveries and healthcare. The power would stay on. The Internet would still be up. The evictions wouldn’t come… And

I’d make a show of limiting my own power, and it would be largely true… But we really have to rework a lot of things, and I’d get the public buy in to do that by becoming a firm lifeline for them. I’d move much more slowly from then on

So that’s my 100 day plan. Flip the table, burn the boats, then hold things together by giving people what they need until they can reorganize bottom up

I think I’d be reelected, I think I’d have to firmly reject a third term

Oh God… You disgust me, and I really like pineapple pizza

I’d say this is par for the course. Technology has made it much more public and more rapid fire

Also the complexity of modern society resists change. We have layers of procedure, checks and balances, even logistical realities that slow or disperse the kind of blunt demands being made at the top

So there’s a lot of stupid but effective things they could do back then, where today the same things are stupid and pointless

Cut the problem into tiny pieces, then group it back together with nice clean connections

Code in nice straight lines. Like good cable management - behaviors should flow from cause to effect, and as much as possible should flow through the main channels

Decide how you organize things, and stick to it. When you see code you don’t remember writing, you should be able to say “if I were me, how would I do this?” and immediately know the correct answer

And if you agree to their new terms of service (there’s only an accept button when you open the site), you agree it’s not discord’s fault!

Such innovation.

H is the funniest. You’d get to pay people in rocks. That will lead to so much interesting slang

It depends on how you define yourself

I am me. Not my memories, not my body, not my knowledge, not even my mind

At the very center of my being, there’s a driving spark. My most fundamental self. It’s the desire for understanding in a very specific flavor, and the form of it is reaching out to touch something with your fingertips. It’s like a fractal that has endless meaning the closer you look at it, it contains many understandings of the truth of the nature of things and how things fit together. And within those truths is everything that I am

That’s me. I am not the animal I inhabit, I act through the animal. I freely share my understandings with the animal, and so the animal can see clearly and know truth to find new understandings in all things.

One day the animal will die, and everything but the understandings will be burnt away, because the animal is afraid of being left behind.

I’ll have understandings of people, but memories are a physical thing. I’ll have understandings of how the world works, but knowledge is in my mind. I’ll have understandings of beauty and emotion and the full spectrum of the human experience, but my nature is not human

So it all depends, who are you? Are you a person who acts a certain way? Are you your relationship with others? Are you your memories, skills, and experiences? Are you your physical body?

Have you awakened your spark? Have you looked deep inside yourself to learn from it and add to it? Is it you, or is it something that whispers to you? Are you the combination of the spark and the animal?

Or do you walk another path? Are you your blood? Your legacy? Will you die when your name is last spoken? Will you live on for the rest of time through the ripples you made on the world?

It’s a question you have to decide for yourself. I think maybe the most important question

But that doesn’t have the truth of understandings, so I guess it’s just my opinion

I did not know that, that is a fun fact

That’s what the class is for. To make you care

I’m not saying it’ll work, but that’s why every country does this

You have to have a shared cultural identity to be Egyptian

It’s not useful, hell it’ll be mostly half-truths and plenty of outright lies, but it’s a way to build cultural identity in a top down stort of way

No… Do you think Mexicans are ashamed of Chihuahuas? Or sombreros? Putting the two together? They love that, it’s their culture and they love to share it. That’s not even a generalization, it’s part of their culture

Or do you think they’d be offended by a joke about ICE doing nonsensical deportations?

No they don’t. They like an authoritarian strong man on the throne telling them how to live their lives

They don’t like it when you point out they’re describing a dictatorship

It’s kind of it’s own category. I mean, they’re basically forced to worship the supreme leader, but I don’t think that’s a defining aspect

It’s more a totalitarian state. Everything from what job you’ll do for the rest of your life to how you cheer is given to you by the government.

It has the trappings of religion, but do people really believe that? The way they talk about it is like “the state tells us Kim was born in a flash of light on the top of a mountain”, they don’t engage with the talking points, they repeat them exactly

Because it hurts to be accused of something unfairly, even if it’s just an implication.

It will help if you try to make it a choice. In a way, this is something that will protect your child - the tiniest sliver of doubt could taint your child’s relationship with their father. And that seed has already been planted

Even if they back down, I think you should insist on it.

Honest people don’t tell you they’re honest, they show. If you want, you could politely insist they read the test results themselves, to make sure there’s absolutely no doubt that would taint their relationship with their grandchild

It would turn this around on them, it’s the third path solution. They’re going to try to brush over the unpleasantness when the results come in, if you make them linger on it for just a moment they’ll feel shame without hurting the relationship

If you do that or not should probably depend on how supportive they are during the pregnancy, but I’d personally like having that option in my back pocket

Because it’s not a pixel, so I can’t run graphene out of the box, and having my phone working is a key component of my job

Pixel is running something close… But as for what their adding? All kinds of stuff, from camera features to launchers to subtle tweaks

But the reason no one is running stock android is the reason the Linux phone project is so difficult… The drivers

Your phone is basically running two sets of firmware. One controls the radio, coordinates with cell towers, handles data both as an Internet connection and a set of old cell protocols we still use sometimes (like phone calls and public alerts), plus hardware backdoors.

And then there’s Android, which has some degree of control over that mess, but it has to be custom fit to each black box or you get bugs, because they’re all different

The only way to run stock android is through an emulator, and even then most developers just use the pixel builds