Not having a right to privacy doesn’t mean we should record everyone’s every move if they aren’t locked in their windowless basement. Which they would have to be since its legally OK to have cameras pointing at your neighbors bedroom window or backyard, or to fly a recording drone over their house.

Additionally I think we should have a right to privacy in public. Why does your right to have your own surveillance fiefdom in your building extend to the street where I’m just trying to go for a jog? It interferes with my peace of mind, and it makes neighbors appear more like police than people I should be able to rely on.

I’m also exceptionally skeptical cameras have any impact on crime. I know police rarely investigate or solve property crime, and unless they prevent the crime from happening outright (doubt), or the camera owner has a full time live human monitoring to respond to an immediate action (businesses), it serves no purpose but to give the owner a false sense of security and to peep on your neighbors.

Getting broken into can be a very traumatic and violating experience, and in a better world we would try to help both the person who is driven to robbery and the person who’s space was violated. In the one we live in, people slap cameras and floodlights everywhere, mental health care is nonexistent, and we punish such that the cycle of poverty and crime continues. Thus nothing is solved and the world gets worse.

Police cameras and municipal cameras are even worse in these ways, now it isn’t the guy next door, its the state and all the money and power it holds doing a peep into your bedroom and a follow down the street. They don’t trust you, they don’t want you here, and you had better watch yourself. That message isn’t for everyone of course, but if you’re already marginalized in a community, it sure reads like the message is for you.

If we do install cameras, like red light cameras or speed cameras which have proven to do something, we need to be extraordinarily careful about where we place them and how we use them. And they should only be there until the underlying problem is solved, not placed as a solution themselves.

I’m not sure that’s how that shakes out, you can’t exactly extinguish open source projects, they may go dormant but they are still there, and there would be the last open source proton build to start from too.

It would also annoy the very people who are most likely to make their own compatibility tools and inconvenience themselves to spite bad business practice. Maybe in some future world where everyone is on Linux/proton, the people who just blindly use windows today because they always have would just keep using the now proprietary proton, but that’s far from the way it is today.

Honestly I just use what is easiest to get working, used to do every game manually, then used Lutris, now I use Steam, probably will use something else that’s easier in the future, especially if/when my library disappears. Til then I’ll support the company that made it much easier to leave Microsoft behind. Nice bonus: valve is one of the least bad large companies in the US at time of writing, so it feels less awful to give them money.

Because shifting schedules by an hour randomly in the middle of the year twice is physically damaging and bad for your health, that impacts you. And maybe it’s not so bad for you, you work shifting hours, no biggie. Try to imagine that you had that regular schedule and suddenly it changed, it did bother you, perhaps make decisions based on that.

If you can’t imagine anyone else having thoughts, feelings, or emotions different from yours, consider that when you’re crossing the street the day after daylight savings time, you’re being passed by people who didn’t get enough sleep and maybe they’re like you, but they might not be, and that could directly impact you too.

It’s such a simple small change to a weird tradition that has no more purpose in our modern world than the “moonlight lamps” of the US or the penny farthing. They may be historically important or interesting, but that doesn’t mean you should be forced to use them. Change can be scary but it’s gonna be ok, daylight savings time will inevitably end up the way of the funny big wheeled bike, it’s just a matter of when and how. You can always choose to wake up early all year round.

I like your approach in that they don’t all just flow to the same 2 distros and there are multiple options at the end of most lines. It’s also quite readable. I do think there’s even more room to just try stuff out though, distros are not particularly rigid, certainly not when you’re first trying them out and you don’t know the differences.

I happily use MXLinux to game on new(not so new now I suppose) hardware, run a media box, and on a couple work/school laptops for example. It’s just what I tried and felt cozy with after I got angry with windows and mint. I’m sure other distros are technically better for my uses but nothing I’ve tried has really been so much better to justify the switch.

The different desktop environments. Really basically described as the interface, XFCE is a very lightweight one, whereas mint is MATE, and mint cinnamon is… cinnamon which are each different from each other (I don’t know I’ve never used them for long enough to find out)

Well we’ve recently entered the race to the bottom category, we’ll see how that one goes

More seriously, the US did lead the way in various ways for a while for the time. Just gotta ignore the racism and colonialism. Unfortunately many innovations turned out to be the limit of American imagination and any attempt to continue to improve and grow is now met with hostility.

It’s probably at least somewhat a product of years of corporate and conservative interests marketing a return to an imagined golden age for economic and political gain. No room for new things in the fantasy of the '50s, just easy money, grass suburbs, giant cars, and unconcerned white people as far as the eye can see.

Yeah when I start ranting about the government’s cheese caves under Missouri people think I’ve finally cracked, but they’re real. It started as a program to help farmers during the great depression, but by now it’s just socializing the dairy industry and keeping prices artificially high. I don’t think they sold it to fund the program though, they distributed it through food security programs.

There’s gotta be better foods for the government to stockpile and distribute to the hungry than cheese though, it’s tasty, but it’s not great for you and it’s not filling many nutritional gaps. Not to mention lots of people can’t even eat it without getting sick

This or sit down to read a chapter before bed, look up and it’s 6 hours later and I have to pee and I haven’t touched my glass of water and my alarm goes off in 4 hours

Never in between

This man helped me kill the lawn inside myself, and now I’ve killed my lawn and I’m on my way to kill my parents’ (lawn) too. I might have even accidentally learned some botany along the way

A really great channel

My suggestion, since I’ve done something similar. (Depending on what is there now) I’d recommend killing the weeds by laying down layers of cardboard and mulch on top (after cutting them down). Some plants are too pernicious for that and require digging up taproots or targeted herbicide, but the majority of the stuff under it will die and be nutrients for what you plan on planting there. As the cardboard, mulch, and old plants rot, you’ll have exceptional soil for pretty nearly free (depending on the cost of the mulch and your time). As a neat bonus you’ll get all kinds of interesting fungus to look at too.

Lots of people in a pretty small area in relatively dense cities that currently drive or fly between the cities (technically called strong city pairings). There’s also a pretty enormous tourism industry in Florida that captures much of the Midwestern US/anyone not going to California or Hawaii for their beach or disney vacation. Florida is also flat which makes for very cheap high speed rail. Note how the map goes out of its way to avoid the mountains out West.

That being said, I’m not sure this map is one of the ones made with serious city pairing calculations. I’m skeptical that Quincy, IL has a really strong draw for high speed rail, for example, and that long gap between Portland and Sacramento/San Francisco, while beautiful and filled with cool places, is way too sparsely populated to justify 6hrs on high speed rail. I think it’s a sort of meme map that’s been going around for years, though I wish it were real.

That could be the heater for the self defrost, if this refrigerator has that feature. It would be connected to a thermostat to prevent overheating, and would be under or against the cold plate.

Symptoms vary not just by male and female, but from person to person, background to background, childhood to childhood, and they change with age. Autism covers a huge range of symptoms, and in reality anyone can have any of them even if they don’t match the typical archetype.

You’ll also find a lot of folks who weren’t diagnosed as a child, and then choose not to be diagnosed as an adult (it’s hard to get an adult diagnosis, and it’s expensive depending on where you live). More often than not these people will be able to live life without being noticed as autistic, but depending on where you look for info, they may not be included.

Seconding what the people I replied to said, talk to autistic people, every one will have a different opinion and outlook because they (we if you count self diagnosis) are all different people.

Personally, I recommend looking into the Autistic Rights Movement. It challenges the notion that autism is a disability and places an emphasis on autistic people doing the scientific research and helping each other.

The apps are bullshit but the slower cycles take less water and energy, which is definitely a positive.

Idk why the speed is a big deal to folks, it’s not like you have to sit there and babysit it, just hit play and go do something else

I use transit for transit (it’s in the name) but it also gives fantastic bike directions and transit+bike if I’m not feeling a particularly long ride. I may have had to mess with the settings but it almost always shows biking as an option.

Otherwise I use OsmAnd, but since I almost exclusively get around by bike and bus I am usually looking places up to manually plan routes, not using navigation.

Speed cameras are really good at stopping speeding in their direct area, whether or not someone speeding likes them. Their downfall is they usually are installed by private companies who manage them, and the contracts are paid for by tickets. Since the cameras do such a good job stopping the speeding, the city stops getting ticket money and starts having to pay the companies out of pocket. We’ve been using police to do traffic stops for longer and it hasn’t really worked the same way. (And cops cost waaaaaaay more).

One study from New York

But a quick search found many studies from all over the world.

I bet that person speeding through the construction zone learned a valuable lesson about risking their and other people’s lives for 30 seconds faster arrival times. Also I cant imagine being so distracted while driving that I would miss a traffic camera and the signs that almost always proceed it ten times. Plus the flow of traffic would likely be slowing as more observant drivers saw the camera, which you’d have to ignore and presumably pass aggressively whilst shouting angrily about other people being bad drivers.

Shoot, not to beat this point too much (too late), but it’s also a construction zone which typically has tons of speed signs plastered everywhere… maybe they deserved the 10 tickets in two weeks and they’re just mad because if we relied on cops they would have gotten away with it.

I’m not sure I’m totally on board. The Midwestern united states used as an example in the article have current populations of deer. Our killing of the native predators have allowed their population to explode, and In more forested ecosystems at least, those excessive populations actually cause more risk of destructive fire as they prefer to eat native plants and tree shoots as opposed to invasive shrubs. This leaves a dense layer of bushes and no adolescent tree canopy, and as the old trees die, no fire resistant tree is there to take it’s place leaving a clearing of flammable understory.

That being said, the lack of roaming herds of bison trampling as they go also has an enormous impact and if we could pull fences and interstates to restore their habitat, it would almost certainly help our environment.

In Portugal, as well, many of the mentioned abandoned farms were eucalyptus, and many of the eucalyptus farms were cork oak before that. Cork oak is remarkable for it’s ability to withstand fire, that’s what the cork is for! Eucalyptus on the other hand is remarkable for burning so fast and hot, growing incredibly quickly, and spreading on it’s own. While again, grazing animals are absolutely missing and would help, they aren’t going to be able to fix this on their own. We are going to have to do a ton of manual labor.

Honestly, it sounds like the author would likely agree with all this, but I think it’s important to emphasize that in rewilding, we need to restore more than the obvious species. The wolves, beavers, and bears may be much more impactful than the deer or elk, and removing our infrastructure to make room for what should be there may be more impactful still.

Very localized application to specific plants, ideally ones that are virtually impossible to mechanically remove and that threaten to smother local species.

An example would be Holly in the Pacific Northwest US, it spreads freely, outcompetes local species, and if you try to cut it down it spreads out underground like a hydra. Apart from getting machine digging to excavate the whole deep root, a measured amount of pesticide injected into the root crown is about the the only way to deal with it once it is established.

If this question refers to mechanized agriculture there are systems with cameras that recognize weeds in fields and specifically target them with a spray of poison.

If it’s a grass lawn, the best way is to internally adjust the image of a grass lawn from a golf course to a field at a school, church, or park near you where it’s mostly clover and dandelions. Then you don’t need to spray anything. Maybe then plant cool native plants and wow your friends with an impenetrable fortress of 10ft tall joe py weed filled with bees and butterflies but whatever you’ve got regionally.

That very much depends on when and where you look in history. Many people didn’t live that way at all and still lived in large communities and built things with the only coercion being the ties of community for hundreds to thousands of years.

Being a serf was apparently a lot less work and less miserable than you might think from pop culture. They worked for another, yes, but they also were looked after in return, and they didn’t have to work the whole year. They also could just leave if they wanted to find a new place to live, which was a lot easier then than it is now. It wasn’t the false choice of today where you work or starve.

Slavery, also, depended on the culture. In some cultures slaves were typically people who were captured or traded in compensation for a killing. But rather than be forced labor, they were treated as a sort of trial family member, and once the debt was seen as paid they would often be fully adopted as part of the community.

I recommend a book by David Graeber and David Wengrow called The Dawn of Everything, if you’re interested in this sort of thing. It challenges the foundations of what we assume history was like using historical evidence, then reimagines foggy parts and builds an at least as probable image of the past in it’s place.

Washington State also has exclusively mail in voting as you describled, though I think there’s a few polling places to help if you’ve got problems on voting day or want to register. Along with what you mentioned, turnout is also pretty high in these states (just under 79% in WA in 2024) compared to ones without a universal mailed ballot and info packet, and at least in Washington, 80% of eligible people are registered to get their ballot to begin with.

To be fair, these could have nothing to do with each other, people in the PNW are fairly politically opinionated and perhaps they’re just more likely to vote.

From what I recall, Washington has one of the most secure voting systems in the country, mostly from keeping the voter registry up to date by automatically registering and updating vote information whenever anyone interacts with the state, especially the licensing office. Obviously it has nothing to do with the manner of voting, the conservatives just think mail in voting hurts their chances of winning.

It’s absurd to imagine forcing entire states to suddenly start voting in person again, and I can’t imagine the states going along with it. Which leads me to wonder what happens when the federal government throws out the results from an entire state. Do they just choose the senators and electors? Obviously it’s all illegal but that hasn’t stopped them yet. Perhaps the odd way we do elections for president wouldn’t really be impacted, since states don’t even need to do an election, just send the electors.