Putin is 72. A child born today will be too young to be a worker or a soldier by the time Putin dies. I suppose Putin may want a higher birth rate for ideological reasons but I don’t see how he would derive any practical benefit from it.

IMO the main pro of cloud storage is that the provider’s engineers are much better at doing backups than you are. You won’t lose your data if, like most people, you only have one copy of everything and your hard drive is destroyed.

The main con is that the provider can deny you access without warning. You probably won’t get an explanation or a real chance to appeal the decision.

So far that second thing hasn’t been a common problem for normal users but I would still keep local copies of the data which I can’t easily replace.

I agree that Trump would have very little chance of becoming President if he was jailed before 2024 and kept in jail. I was imagining a “jailed at the last minute” scenario in which Trump’s credibility as the opposition leader imprisoned by a President he accused of being elected illegitimately could have been enough. I presume that before Trump became the front-runner Biden hoped that jailing a former President wouldn’t be necessary to stop him, and after he became the front-runner it was probably too late.

Even jailing Trump early wouldn’t have been risk-free. Republican Congressmen would publicly denounce the act as illegitimate, impeach Biden, and try to pass a law to free Trump. The impeachment and the law would go nowhere, but the controversy (and the likely riots) could sink the Democrats in 2024 against whoever the Republicans did nominate. Then that Republican would be inclined to have Biden prosecuted, which would be bad for more than Biden himself.

(And trying to jail Trump but failing for whatever reason would probably sink the Democrats against Trump.)

One aspect of social media that surprised almost everyone at first was the popularity of outrage. Users seemed to like being outraged. We’re so used to this idea now that we take it for granted, but really it’s pretty strange. Being outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn’t expect people to seek it out. But they do. And above all, they want to share it. I happened to be running a forum from 2007 to 2014, so I can actually quantify how much they want to share it: our users were about three times more likely to upvote something if it outraged them.

Were people actually outraged less frequently before social media? “Viral” outrage was limited to spreading through in-person interactions, but there was still mass media designed to generate outrage.

It would be very nice if being conventionally unattractive also made a person attracted to other conventionally unattractive people.

I wonder what hurts more: the unfulfilled asymmetric entitlement shown in the comic or intellectual honesty of the “I wouldn’t be attracted to me, so I shouldn’t expect most other people to be attracted to me either” sort. Probably the honesty, since many people pick experiencing the entitlement.

So is the goal of damaging the cables simply to lash out at the West (and waste their money) while maintaining plausible deniability? Or does it have some strategic objective?

I didn’t pay a couple of private tickets, over ten years passed, and so far I have been fine, but I’m not a lawyer…

Some of the delays were due to deliberate stalling by his supporters, but I suspect that many of the delays were due to Biden’s and the DOJ’s reluctance to put him on trial and either fail to convict him or convict him but let him go without any substantial punishment. I don’t think they saw sending the guy who half the country wanted as President to jail as an option.

My guess is that this was a mistake (at least from Biden’s partisan point of view) but it’s hard to say that either of these two outcomes would have actually hurt Trump’s chances. After all, he was elected despite the NY state conviction. I expect that many people here will say that Trump should have been jailed. That would have caused a crisis of some sort without necessarily preventing him from being elected, but maybe the risk was worth taking given that he did end up being elected.

He did win the popular vote this time…

Don’t actually do this. You can get your license suspended (or worse) even if you never go back to the town that gave you the ticket.

I’m experiencing the opposite effect. I was used to being on the liberal side of most online debates so I thought of myself as firmly on the left, but here I see so many people far to my own left and I think “Wow, these guys should be nowhere near power.” My political opinions haven’t actually changed much because of that (although some things IRL have made me seriously question some of them) but now I identify more as a centrist (or “classic liberal”) and I think it’s important to keep the Democrats from veering dangerously far to the left like the Republicans have already veered dangerously far to the right.

Also doesn’t this discussion break rule #1 here?

What I’m waiting for is the return of propeller-powered air-superiority fighters with machine guns.

Obligatory this is Arda!

It’s supposed to be attached at the waist to the upper half of her body.

The only source I can find online for the ancient Egyptian image in the upper left is this Reddit post. I don’t know how trustworthy the guy writing it is, but he apparently writes about ancient Egypt a lot. He explains what’s going on in the picture and includes some more ancient pictures of roach combat.

TLDR: Ancient Egyptians were afraid that roaches would eat their mummified bodies and therefore interfere with their afterlife.

I skimmed the Reddit terms of service and I didn’t see anything about bots or damages to Reddit, but if Reddit does ban bots like this then can’t they sue an American company whose publicly announced business model involves breaching a contract? Astral isn’t some guy without any money or a foreign organization beyond the reach of American law…

(Could Astral be criminally liable due to the extremely broad definition of hacking in US law?)

I would be surprised if hostile countries thought that Lemmy was popular enough to bother infiltrating. They probably haven’t heard of Lemmy at all.

I think the explanation is simply that Lemmy’s users are all contrarians, or else they would be using Reddit. Frequently they are of the international leftist sort due to the founder effect.

Nationally, large insurance companies net an average profit of 4.2 percent on insurance transactions. In California, they lose more than 6 percent.

So why do they offer insurance in California at all?

Things are getting more casual - I had a tech industry interview recently and the recruiter told me not to wear a suit jacket or a tie. However, if I were you, I would still wear a long-sleeved shirt (if I could).