Voroxpete

Having a dog boosts everyone's mental health. Unfortunately, having a dog is only possible for people with the right living conditions, free time and disposable income. Like so much in our society, the things that make us healthier, happier people are unavailable to the people that need them most.

Oh, perfect. Thank you.

Honestly, I think this is just one where you try it for yourself. The compose file is about 4 lines long, I had the whole thing up and running in about 30 seconds (OK, 45; I forgot a port was already in use and had to redeploy).

So far my one big complaint would be that the self-hosted version replicates the entire website, including all of the "Why choose Bento PDF" and "Try now" and so on. It'd be nice to just have the tools right there when I load it up. Other than that, well, it looks cool, I'll know more once I actually try out the available options.

"There are only two genders! It's basic biology!!!"

Advanced biology has entered the chat

We Do Not Preorder

Seriously, don't reward this kind of anti-consumer bullshit.

The only acceptable justification I can see is if it's an indie dev who has really, truly earned the trust of their players and proven that they will work tirelessly to deliver the product people want. And even then I'd be very, very unlikely to. I'm crazy excited for both of Owlcats upcoming games and I still haven't pre-ordered them, for example.

Pre-orders encourage bad, buggy, incomplete or deceptively marketed releases by juicing day one numbers without any need for the dev / publisher to actually release a worthy product.

"A Wealth Tax Floated in California Has Billionaires Pretending They're Thinking of Leaving."

There. Fixed the headline.

Direct any questions to The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight by Cristobal Young, an actual comprehensive scientific study on the issue. You can guess from the title what the data showed.

The AI investor pitch is one of existential risk. "This industry will eventually erase every other. Every investment you have will be made worthless by this one technology."

The way the average investor sees it, when you have a pitch like that, it becomes irrational not to invest. If you're even 10% sure they're right, you have to hedge.

If we're coming at this from a perspective of fighting climate change, I don't think plastic straws are really the hill to die on.

The reality of any political battle is that you always have to ask "What is the thing that will create the most net impact?" But net impact includes "Not making my cause toxic to the average person."

The public, in general, are very amenable to changes like getting rid of disposable plastic bags and plastic packaging, and those can have as much impact or more than getting rid of plastic straws. Those are also changes that don't create significant negative impacts for people with disabilities.

And that's before you even get to the industrial scale changes that would have far more impact. If you look at, say, plastic waste in the ocean, about half of it is fishing nets. Changing fishing industry practices would be a lot more of an impactful approach.

Banning plastic straws is like putting out the grease fire on the stove while the whole house is burning down around you. Yes, technically it's a thing we should do, but it is not even remotely the first thing we should do. And the people advocating for it are often doing so as a way of pretending to do something meaningful while ignoring the far bigger industry level changes we could be making that would have a far bigger impact.

As a political issue, plastic straws have become entirely toxic, and given how small a piece of the puzzle they are, there really is no benefit to dying on this largely worthless hill when our efforts could be better spent elsewhere.

"Hitler loved my joke about gassing the Jews" isn't exactly proving your point, Dave.

MAGA won't collapse as a unified front. No collapse is ever unified, that's why it's a collapse. The fact that you're seeing some of them bending over backwards to defend Epstein doesn't prove that the damage isn't happening. That split is the damage. There's a tonne of infighting happening in the MAGA world right now. Ben Shapiro and Nick Fuentes are basically at war. Tucker Carlson has managed to turn the Heritage Foundation into the red wedding. Lauren Boebert and MTG - major MAGA figureheads - both openly defied Trump over the Epstein files, and MTG is retiring from Congress before the mid terms. If you're only looking at one or two faces you're not seeing the full picture.

See, the thing is, I'm not talking about their stupidity.

That's why the Epstein stuff is sticking in a way nothing else is; because it doesn't ask them to be smart. In fact, it plays right into their stupidity. That's the difference.

Everything else has bounced off them because it was easier to excuse it. Excusing the tariffs is easier than learning how trade really works. Excusing tax cuts is easier than understanding how the economy really works. Excusing his foreign policy blunders is easier than trying to understand the value of soft power. Ignorance is simpler. Ignorance is easier.

But the Epstein stuff? That sticks because they don't have the ability to be ignorant about it. This is something they know. Secret cabals of pedophile elites kidnapping children to sexually abuse them on a private island? My brother in Christ, they write fanfiction about that shit. They are the self proclaimed experts on that stuff. With everything else they can just say "Well I don't understand this, but I'm 100% confident that Trump does, because obviously the billionaire is a genius." But then they watch as Democrats are out there screaming for the release of the Epstein files while Republicans are dragging their heels and it does a number on them. Because they know how this is supposed to work; Democrats are all evil child rapists and Trump is the saviour sent to stop them. So why is Trump running cover for the pedophile cabal?

In short, I'm not claiming that MAGA are suddenly getting smart. I'm claiming that the Epstein cover up is exactly the right kind of stupid.

I have watched the first one, and at the end of the day it is an extremely competently made movie. That's something that can't be ignored. The plot is cliche as hell, and it's basically doing all the worst parts of the Dances with Wolves white saviour bullshit, but at the end of the day James Cameron is an absolutely phenomenal director, especially when it comes to action, and that does a lot of work for it.

It's the kind of movie where the things that bother you tend to bother you later, because you do get caught up in the spectacle of it all. Cameron does spectacle very well, and there's an art to that.