Ben Carson comes to mind. Right wing freak who was formerly the director of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins.

Sounds to me like a rationalization for what I suggested. I’m not saying they don’t believe it but, in my experience, the main predictor of what people believe is what they want to believe. People decide how they want to live, then construct a belief system to justify it.

I’ll check it out, but it seems pretty straightforward to me. When a social class sits outside the rules the rest of society is expected to live by, they get entitled and they get bored. Since they aren’t entirely immune to public opinion, they also become easy targets for blackmail as they push towards more and more “exclusive” forms of “entertainment”.

There has been lot of information released indicating Epstein’s child trafficking ring was barely impacted by his absence. He had lots of conspirators, most of whom are probably still at it, nevermind all of the Mossad, KGB, and CIA cooperation.

That’s not correct. What you need for long distance is high voltage, and it’s easier/cheaper to step up/down AC voltage than DC. If conversion costs were eliminated, DC is actually more efficient.

If you get to even longer distances of over 300+ miles, DC’s efficiency becomes worth the additional cost of conversion. There are many HVDC interregional connections.

I think it’s some form of Stockholm syndrome that people bound up in that ecosystem just love being pounded in the ass by Microsoft.

The existence of cameras and the linking of those cameras to a central monitoring system are two very different things. Ring cameras are part of that system. Most business and even traffic cameras are not.

As I said, I’m pretty confident I can get anywhere in my small city without being identified, except through tracking of my path that would only be possible because of ring cameras.

I choose to carry my phone in my pocket, and I can choose not to carry it. I can even choose to have someone else carry it north while I go south.

I can go anywhere in my city on foot or a bike and be entirely untracked by anything, except those damn doorbell cameras. At most I might be picked up by a traffic camera or two, but I can do any number of things to not be recognized, but not if they can follow my movements back to my house. Those cameras fill the last gaps of untracked freedom of movement.

You don’t get it. It’s not about just one camera. They have the whole network and can run facial recognition and licence plate readers (that go well beyond just reading plates) across all of it. They don’t just know that you left your house, they can track everywhere you go. Some courts have made that illegal for cops to do, so they just outsourced it.

Your camera is just a small piece, but it’s a piece you control. Nobody should be throwing that shit up to the cloud. It’s incredibly damaging to any kind of civil resistance movement. Stalin could only have dreamed of the kind of mass surveillance that Americans are just freely providing to our oligarchy. It’s fucking dumb.

That ring camera is still absolutely a privacy threat, if not to you, than to your neighbors. Ring is partnering with flock on mass surveillance with facial recognition. That camera belongs to ICE just as much as it belongs to you, if not more since they can have AI “watch” it 24x7.

Earth is pretty much just a big one. Jury is still out on our ability to maintain it.

Well, it’s seizing it for the capital class. Doesn’t that count?

But there are an estimated 100-400 billion stars in the Milky Way, some of which are hundreds of solar masses, not to mention the Accretion disks of black holes all kicking out radiation. That’s gotta add up to something, even with the inverse-square law fall off. The galactic core has unfathomable levels of radiation and puts out its own galactic wind, and some stars have observable bow shocks with it.

Every planet is a star which wasn’t big enough. Some are just more challenged than others.

I solved that for most of them by going AMD with my last upgrade. No more binary drivers solved most of my issues. All that’s left is really the anti-cheat kernel garbage. For that I just decided fuck it. I found it easier to stomach changing some gaming preferences than the Microsoft ecosystem.

I finally went 100% Linux and I’m never going back.

I dunno about soda, but washing down Oreos with Guinness is fucking amazing.

Science is a subdiscipline of philosophy.

I may let him.

Newton had massive social adjustment issues and deep religious convictions. I’m not so sure he would react well to the modern world.