'"It is not humanitarian at all because it only serves one segment of the population there. The hostages there do not receive any humanitarian aid.”

They mean the civilians in Gaza held hostage by the Israeli military, right?

Check out the Silo series by Hugh Howey. AppleTV’s show did the first half of book 1 already, but the books are still better. Great writing and a pretty easy read.

Removed by mod

“This county ought to be totally dominated by believers.”

Christian nationalists are so oblivious to how much they sound like the Taliban. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so terrifying.

Musk is an absolute sociopath, but there’s actually a logic to this.

Apparently the US has extremely tight export controls for telecomm tech used for war, and Starlink was concerned that by Ukraine using it in an offensive way it would result in the US or other countries classifying Starlink as military tech, thereby limiting where they can export it. That would be really bad for Starlink, of course, which is why they specified at the beginning that Ukraine should only use it for civilian goals (hospitals, schools, government, etc).

I assume the contract between Starlink and the Pentagon covers that, but I haven’t researched that far.

He’s a poor man’s vision of a rich man, an ignorant man’s vision of a smart man, and a weak man’s vision of a strong man.

Maybe. But it incentivises others to be patient trolls.

It’s really sad that patent law doesn’t require you to actually create the thing you’re patenting.

I mean, I understand the original rationale: building out infrastructure is super expensive, so the monopoly gives the company an assurance they can recoup investment. But then there’s no follow-up! There’s nothing requiring the ISP to evolve, so we end up with the same tech as when the contract was signed 20 years ago. At least wireless (LTE, 5G, etc) is promising for competiton, but buying spectrum from the FCC is also f’ing expensive.

Quick! Give the ISPs a bunch of federal dollars to build out their networks so they can quietly pocket it and do stock buybacks!

So try that. Go a week without smoking and see if you can do it.

I roll the occasional smoke after lunch but it’s less than one a day. That’s how I know I’m not addicted: I go multiple days between having a smoke, I can smoke with friends on the weekend, but then not smoke by myself on weekdays. Try that to know if you’re really not addicted.

Yep, they are only “activist judges” when they do something you don’t like, but conservatives seem to freaking LOVE this court’s tossing of stare decisis (adherence to past decisions so as not to throw lower court decisions into absolute chaos).

We aught to make the pie higher!

That joke is awfully plane

¯_(ツ)_/¯

“why do we fall? … So we can learn to pick ourselves up again”

WavePad is open source but it’s free for non-commercial use and it’s pretty nice. Handles a lot of formats out of the box.

*Edit: Oh, that would be for desktop. Just noticed I was in the Android /c

Love it! I have the original vinyl, too!

Yes, I’m that old :-)

I’m remaining neutral on this joke