In 2024 Puerto Rico held a referendum on precisely this question, and the majority (58%) chose statehood while only 11% chose independence. It’s not a perfect measure (retaining the current status quo wasn’t an option, only 63% of voters turned out) but it shows a pretty clear preference IMO.

What’s nuts to me is that neither major American party has gone for it. The House passed a bill in 2022 which would have admitted PR as a state but it went nowhere - but damn that’s two whole Senate seats that could go to either party if they came out as strongly pro-PR. Same thing for DC.

Play carnival game

Guess the box!

Only one box isn’t empty

Open it

Tissue paper

“Better luck next time!”

3 for sure. Depending on how teleporting into other objects works, and how fast you can spam it, you could get some serious work done with a power like that.

Greenland being given incentives to tap into their minerals to feed the materials necessary for the project.

Greenland gets closer to independence

Colonial provinces supplying strategic resources to their European occupier has rarely made them more independent.

This is a default family in the Sims.

New update for those of you following this story

We have established contact with the previously-AWOL owner, and after much discussion, we have determined that while there was an error in the auto-payment initially, the renewal funds were transferred manually to Sav and the auction continues despite that. We are currently appealing to Sav support with our domain credentials. We are also looking into whether an ICANN-compliant grace period was implemented prior to the rescinding and auctioning of the domain.

This almost certainly won’t kill the Hexbear community, and frankly I don’t think there’s any way they will choose to pony up the auction money. This community has moved from reddit to discord to the fediverse and they’ll probably just be on their backup/original domain chapo.chat for a month or two before switching over to whatever the admins decide to switch to, and then it will be business as usual under a new name.

Still there’s a lesson here about setting up a durable online community - don’t let someone control the domain registration with their personal account, you’re just asking for something like this to happen. If they don’t have one already the admins should set up some kind of organization that can “own” the new domain, donations, etc so that this can’t happen again.

Yeah but on the other hand it’ll hardly be the first time this community has moved. Looking at the frontpage of chapo.chat the userbase doesn’t seem particularly bothered by the possibility.

Most companies that have open source products make their money in providing support for it to other companies, so theoretically OpenAI could do that (in fact top level AI developers are pretty rare so they could charge way more than other companies do for consulting) but that wouldn’t be a hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars business plan because it’s much too sensible.

True but only for terminally online liberals. I still haven’t heard anyone in real life ever use that word.

Look at pictures of people in their 30s back in the 70s, and compare them to people in their 30s today. It’s a massive difference, I hypothesize that it’s the leaded gasoline and secondhand smoke that makes it although I’m not aware of any science to back that up.