I’m 42 and uncircumcised, born and raised in America. My entire life the total sum of what it’s amounted to from locker rooms to relationships is pretty close to “huh, ok then”. I can’t promise it will be the same for your son but it’s been a total non-issue in my life.

In absolute terms you’re right that Democrats aren’t the left but we’re not in an absolute situation, we’re in a relative situation. Until someone comes up with a plan to actually get sufficient support for a new party or ranked choice voting we’re going to remain in this situation where Democrats are the only real option to the “left” of Republicans.

I completely agree about Mamdani, first good thing to happen to the Democratic party in a long time! Which is why it’s so telling to see how mad they are about it.

On a related note, thank you for the reasonable and well thought out response. All the best to you my friend.

I can’t speak for everyone but for me personally I’m less angry about the whole “both sides are the same” argument than I am about the total lack of a plan over what to do about it. I agree with what you just said but it gets really old hearing it from people who seemingly think that simply saying the line is enough to actually effect change. Absent of a plan it really feels more like a conspiracy to divide the left than a path towards real change.

I remember a lot of similar arguments about how ubiquitous Flash was when mobile devices were first taking off. Not saying it will be easy or even likely not saying it will never happen is a bit of an assumption.

There’s actually a company called Helion which is trying to skip the steam turbine step completely with fusion energy. Although generally speaking you’re correct, they’re kind of the exception that proves the rule.

I find the plastic floss picks work really well because they are flatter than regular tooth picks. It has to be the type where the back part is a pick as that’s the part that I use.

As a bystander I just want to applaud you for that awesome display of control and de-escalation. It’s too easy to get carried away online and forget that we’re all people, way to be better!

For the record I’m also a Vivaldi user mainly because Chromium browsers make work easier for me but I refuse to use Chrome. However, as soon as Firefox fully supports sidebar tabs without an extension or CSS modifications I’m going to try to completely jump aboard.

I’m not sure it would cover open source software since it seems to be more concerned with data than the actual code. If that open source software is being used by a company controlled by a foreign adversary then that would probably apply but if it’s open source software created by a foreign adversary but being used by a US company I don’t think that would.

The actual wording of the bill seems pretty vague so I could be wrong and they might be able to apply it just to software but that would kind of to against the entire option B that they’re currently giving ByteDance where they can keep Tik Tok running by selling it to an American company.

This did little to convince me that timezones are an unnecessary construct. Pretty much every point made was done from the perspective of someone who had already decided their opinion rather than objectively weighing the pros and cons.

This is in the US so your experience obviously may differ but we recently bought a house that needed a completely new roof. We actually had to back out of the deal once because the seller refused to pay any portion of the roof. It took the house sitting on the market for another 3 months before they finally agreed to cover just half the cost of a new roof and at that point we were tired of looking and just wanted a house so we accepted the offer. Our new roof looks great and we’re happy with the house but paying for half of a roof was an expensive add-on to the purchase for sure.

It’s rigid airship!

Fair enough. Maybe one day these companies will stop being total dicks about tying basic functionality to proprietary apps and OSs and we can all finally just choose the stuff we want to choose. Will probably never happen but I can dream.

Google has no ability to offer iMessage compatibility as it’s locked down by Apple. Allegedly Apple devs had a version of iMessage ready to launch on Android and the Apple execs decided to kill it because they felt that keeping iMessage exclusive to Apple would keep users locked in, which clearly they were right about. I’m not interested in a discussion over which phone is better than the other but I don’t care for the false narrative that Google is the one keeping iMessage off of Android.

They do, but barely. It’s just a couple of minor in game items/skins and some out of game music/art. Still leaps and bounds better than locking entire missions or characters behind deluxe edition nonsense.