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The breakfast cereal thing was a commercial. A successful one, apparently.

I honestly couldn’t stop thinking about it. People around here eat plates of pasta in cars and throw them out the window.

Shufflepuck Cafe got easier with the introduction of optical mice, ironically. A large part of the difficulty was your dirty ball mouse not dealing with rapid changes in direction well.

(The Amiga port is really good. It's slightly ironic that the official OS X port is now unplayable, but earlier Amiga and Mac versions still play just fine under emulation.)


America is really now two Americas. The divide between traditional freedoms and neo-authoritarianism is getting wider. But America is so large that even the minority (just) that believes in freedom is still 167 million people. Even if only a small percentage of that number, from either side of the divide, believes in violent activism, things are going to get worse before they get better.

They talk about a K shaped recovery in economics.

It just depends on if you're on the up portion of the K or the down stick. The larger picture might show an increase but if you split the data apart one leg is actually declining while the other is growing.


while an important consideration, I'm sure there are many on the up side of the k-economy that don't believe that persistent surveillance is warranted or ethical.

They will fall in line as property crime increases.

This is the most important comment here. There is a future reckoning to be had between the radical authoritarian fringe and normal Americans who do not want to live in an open air prison. The conflict is completley preventable, and makes a less safe place to live for us all.

America is converting into a radical authoritarian state, yes, but they're not a "fringe". They are, by a small margin, the dominant faction in the US. Popular vote counts prove it.

Unfortunately this country has literacy and education problems, and many voters were plainly ignorant of what they were voting for.

There isn't a radical authoritarian fringe in the US. There are multiple, competing radical authoritarian perspectives in the US, and I wouldn't be surprised if the sum of them constituted a majority.

They disagree on the authority, not the methods, and help the two institutional parties cooperate to destroy civil liberties by accusing their counterparts of abusing ("weaponizing") civil rights to commit crimes, spy for foreign governments, and/or abuse children.


The back and forth between "the Left" and "the Right" seems to actually be about who gets to run the prison instead of whether we should run a nation like one.

The right has become so untenable that the only viable defense of it is a bad faith distraction tactic to pretend that it's comparable to the left.

You're in a bubble. It's not wholly a bad faith distraction tactic, and denying wrongdoing by anyone flying the "left" banner is a scary thought.

So one one hand we have Nazi ideas[1] being platformed by the ruling political party which has barely disguised its support for ethnically cleansing the country of all non-white people[2]. And on the other hand we have radical democratic socialist candidates proposing stabilized rent[3]. What am I missing here?

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/republican-part...

2. https://www.esiweb.org/newsletter/100-million-expulsions-pro...

3. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/06/europe-zohra...


The main cases I've seen against people on the left (non-exclusive) are:

- Lots of them in Epstein files

- Mass importations of unchecked non-citizens

- Trying harder to look cool to Europe vs helping Americans

- Overregulation (things like California Coastal Commission)

- Massive fraud (LA -> SF bullet train, tens of billions for "homelessness" that don't go towards homeless at all, building permits, etc)

- Antifa burning down 3rd party businesses for reasons unknown

- Attempts to squash 1st amendment, particularly on gender

Since you linked sites like the Guardian and Atlantic, I figured the bar was low enough that you can just google any of these points and find an opinionated piece of similar quality.

The bubble I refer to is the fact that seemingly all you see is the bad on one side and good on the other. As easy as you claim one side are Nazis trying to kill off non-whites, the people on the other side claim the left is trying to force movie/music propaganda to eradicate all white people. Both sides have millions of posts from terminally online people wildly claiming outrageous things. Both "sides" have bad people. If you can't agree to that, you are in a bubble or just lying.


> - Attempts to squash 1st amendment, particularly on gender

explain yourself


As your net worth increases, the concern about what you have to lose from a personal safety perspective skyrockets. You start becoming far more paranoid and seeing crime everywhere. Tech CEOs and billionaires will build the dystopian panopticon society 100 times out of 100 because they don't care about other people, they just want to feel safe. If that means mass surveillance for the rest of the world, so be it.

If you don't believe me, just look at the CCP. It already happened there.


Being anti-crime doesn't mean lacking compassion. Crimes have victims, and reducing crime results in fewer of them. Poor people don't want to be victims any more than rich people do.

Building the panopticon does not reduce crime.

Trump won the election with less than 50% of the popular vote. He has never enjoyed an approval rating equal to or higher than 50%.

Verify your claims before spreading them. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/2024

You're implying here, I assume, that anyone who voted R is pro neo-authoritarianism. It is interesting too that you've also implicitly stated that the D's are pro-freedom. Both statements are false on their face and highly influenced by terminally online behavior.

I would suggest you go look at polls. Dems have been polling in the dirt among their own party since they decided to usurp Bernie in 2016 and embrace the rich, Repubs have been polling in the dirt since Trump took office last year.

Absolutely no one is happy about the state of America. You can argue semantics, but it's pointless navel gazing at the larger national issue. No one, of any political affiliation, believes the government can govern. It's probably the single uniting factor across all political stripes. No one is happy. No one believes America has gotten measurably better in the last 10-15 years, and everyone is suffering in one way or another. The flock/authoritarian bent is simply the last gasps of a neoliberal government that has realized there's no easy way out of the last 40 years of anti-citizen policies.


Yeah, it doesn't seem productive to paint this as a partisan issue

Your assumptions are probably reflective of my downvotes, but I choose my words carefully.

Downvotes are a good sign you made someone think about their own internal biases and they didn't like it. So they lash out in the only way the know how. Pathetic and weak.

No one said the Democrats are pro-freedom. Both parties are authoritarian. One is just less effective.

I wish weather apps would tell you what models they're using, and the source of their data.

That's why I subscribe to Windy, you can see what model they're using, and pick between a variety of them.


This is the same archive site that uses its captcha page to hijack your browser to DDOS people the site owner doesn't like.

I'm disappointed people continue to use it, especially in unnecessary situations like this - the article is not paywalled.


https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/0LYM6OmqXD

This led me down a bit of a rabbit hole but, yikes


Related discussion on front page currently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47092006

That's indeed disappointing; I edited out the link. Thanks for the heads-up.

This was the appeal.

No it wasn't, it was a motion to set aside the verdict, made before the trial judge.

The appeal will go to the 11th circuit.


No it wasn't. This was the trial judge deciding to not reduce it. $43 million in compensatory damages is unusually high for a wrongful death.

$43 millon does not seem spectacularly high compensation for killing someone at the age of 22.

When my spouse worked in the area of determining "the value of an individual" (economically, not morally), it was computed as present value lifetime earnings: the cumulative income of the individual, converted back to its current value (using some sort of inflation model). IIRC, the PVLE averaged out to about $1-10M.

You shouldn't be down voted. Regardless of the moral or technical issues involved, there are established formulas used to calculate damages in wrongful death civil suits. Your range is generally correct although certain factors can push it higher. (Punitive damages are a separate issue.)

There are not "established formulas" or, to the extent that they are, the coefficients and exponents are not determined. The parties always argue about the discount rates and whatnot.

Sure, no argument there, I was just referring to research like this: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/82d0550k

"""Results. At a discount rate of 3 percent, males and females aged 20-24 have the highest PVLE — $1,517,045 and $1,085,188 respectively. Lifetime earnings for men are higher than for women. Higher discount rates yield lower values at all ages."""


I generally don't complain about being downvoted, but it is always puzzling when I post a neutral fact without any judgement.

If only Stanford University had asked you first!

If only you had read the article.

>There may also be consequences to dialling up the immune system beyond its normal state – raising questions of immune disorders.

> Jonathan Ball, professor of molecular virology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, said the work was undeniably "exciting" but cautioned "we have to ensure that keeping the body on 'high alert' doesn't lead to friendly fire, where a hyper-ready immune system accidentally triggers unwelcome side effects".

> The research team in the US does not think the immune system should be permanently dialled up and think such a vaccine should be used to compliment rather than replace current vaccines.


They are behind a paywall for Americans now.

This is the same archive site that uses its captcha page to hijack your browser to DDOS people the site owner doesn't like.

I'm disappointed people continue to use it.


Feel free to create an alternative. Keep in mind it's completely illegal and you will get the book thrown at you if you are caught. You will also end up using your captcha page to DDOS people who are trying to unmask you.

A surprisingly large percentage of products on Amazon are now companies that sell only a small number of very specific things and have a name like KUFLPOW.

Yup, they are called Chinese-all-caps. Or that’s at least how I call them. Get bad reviews? Generate a new CAC name and start over. Rinse and repeat. Same product made by one factory in China sold by 100s of CAC Amazon entities.

The complete failure of the brand initiative cannot be overstated.

Yeah, that is baffling to me, the complete not giving a shit attitude. I couldn't do that, I'd start marketing and nurturing my MGKGUPXYZ brand and try to make customers happy. Which is probably why I'd fail in that marketplace right away.

Tesla cars can't even self drive properly on Earth.

Mind you, Mars doesn't have road signs so it's likely easier to pass as a threshold.

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