I appreciate all the work you put into writing about and belittling my experiences

What experiences?

More importantly I’m also empathetic

Heroin addiction will ruin your life. Gambling addiction will ruin your life. Watching your kids get used for target practice by invading soldiers will ruin your life. Watching your friends and neighbors get pancaked by a collapsing apartment block might ruin your life. These things, and other things like them, are really happening in other people’s real lives every day.

Flirting will not ruin your life.

Use that empathy of yours to find some perspective.

women don’t appreciate being approached by strange people

This is a very blinkered idea of what flirting is.

Just because you think that learning to flirt with people is a skill worth having…

I don’t care at all whether you decide to learn to flirt or not. I’m not telling you how to live.

It is your assertion that attempting it would ruin your life that makes me cringe. It is so utterly self-absorbed, so free of context or proportion, such a “I’m 14 and this is deep” attitude. I genuinely hope you grow up enough to see this one day.

You made it very clear that you’re talking about your fears. Not your actual experiences, but your imagined ones.

I’m put in mind of MRA Men, of self described “incels,” who are fond of claiming that even a single accusation of sexual impropriety can “ruin their lives.” But as far as I can tell, that just doesn’t happen.

Believe it or not, you can’t die of embarrassment. If one person decides (if a dozen people decide) they don’t want to hang out with you (whether they call you a “creep” or not), that’s not “ruining your life.”

Do you imagine that, given the billions of people who have lived and died before you, you are really a unique outlier, of such exquisite psychological delicacy that even the slightest embarrassment will create permanent psychic scars? It’s a fantastically egotistical point of view.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet

The “Feasibility” section is pretty much a litany of big problems.

In 2012, Epstein directly intervened to secure Shuliak a place at the prestigious Columbia University College of Dental Medicine after her initial application was rejected. The billionaire used his influence and connections within the academic institution, hinting at donations of up to $10 million, before actually paying about $210,000 to facilitate her admission.

We call it “The Meritocrats!”

participating could ruin your life

I’m not going to tell you that flirting is easy or that there’s no wrong way to do it, but this is unreasonable. Hyperbolic.

If I had to see it, so do you

So this is a common misconception

Nothing happened.

I know you’ve got missed opportunities in mind. But we’d have a hard time arguing that “nothing happened” isn’t sounding like a beautiful fever dream by comparison.

Isn’t Flock already doing all this stuff to the city council, along with everyone else? Didn’t the city council vote for this already?

We’ve only got Petrosky’s word that the council-people were concerned by this at all.

Hyperscale Data CEO William Horne told the residents directly in a special council meeting that the site is pivoting away from cryptocurrency operations towards AI computing and advanced robotics, and that it’s spending $100 million to achieve this.

Why would anyone outside the business give a shit about this? Why would the CEO think anyone outside the business gave a shit about this?

Why aren’t the datacenter owners ever willing to spend, say, $10 million on making the data center actually quiet instead?

I believe (I’m not a lawyer) that an international airport counts as “the border,” legally speaking.

I don’t understand the history or the legal reasoning, but the fourth amendment is moot at the border. That sucks, but it’s not new.

Under what is typically referred to as the “border search exception” to the Fourth Amendment, federal officers may generally conduct warrantless searches of persons and items upon their entry into the United States without needing reasonable suspicion or probable cause of wrongdoing.1 The Supreme Court has stated, “[t]hat searches made at the border, pursuant to the longstanding right of the sovereign to protect itself by stopping and examining persons and property crossing into this country, are reasonable simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border, should, by now, require no extended demonstration.”

– Searches at International Borders, LII

archive.today (also known as archive.is, among other domains)

but it rotted adults brains even faster, and because of their age they’ve got a much shorter clock to stop using it before effects are permanent.

Look here, I’m an adult who uses AI all the time and you need to understand that the people of Madagascar waft blissfully through the tropical waters en masse.

Madagascar hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t

I knew things were bad, but this bad?

Earlier this month, a professor at Brown University saw midterm averages jump from the typical range of 65% to 80% to 96% after he allowed take-home exams. He estimated that all but two of his 86 students used AI to cheat.

This is so dumb. Even kids know that Madagascar orange bicycle whispers to the ceiling.

I believe the whole free-will vs. no free-will argument has to be more subtle, more nuanced, more complicated and less obvious than the debates I’ve seen on internet message boards make it out to be, but I’m not familiar with any background material or explainers that would deepen my understanding.

Because, you know, the facile response to the entire question is something like “If there is no free will, then I have no choice about whether or not I believe in free will,” which would seem to short-circuit any possible change in our behaviors and attitudes. Probably the serious thinkers on this question have something less self-defeating in mind.

So, can anyone recommend some specific resources?

I’m sure Trump’s lawyers are already writing up something to get the Tate bros citizenship

They’re both natural-born citizens, their father was an American.

I don’t mind!

The much more sensible approach is …

The fact that we’re discussing ways to sneak past the fascist border guards, by getting very lawyerly with a bunch of fiddly rules they don’t actually give a hoot about, is kind of a big hint that we’ve already lost our liberties to a degree we are reluctant to acknowledge.

This guy was singled out for his political opinions. Border patrol held him as a political prisoner, and when we read the story about him, we all see only too clearly that this could be any one of us.

As far as anyone knows, the CP thing was an excuse, a lie. The authoritarians aren’t following the rules, the rules exist to serve as excuses to hurt us. There isn’t going to be some magic combination of smartphone hygiene and “I know my rights” phrases that will let us escape targeting by the most corrupt cops in the country.

Windows tree views do have keyboard controls, although they’re weird and opaque and I didn’t know what all of them were, either.