An excellent argument to be made when arguing about the

STop Unrelated Crap Killing budgets act.

STUCK(b) Act. See? Even has a cool acronym.

And if they take a few dozen sessions deliberating over it while the government keeps funding and running on previous bills, that’s OK. That’s the point. There should not be an easy path to leverage government’s ability function to force a vote in your favor, bypassing traditional debate, compromise, and processes.

Y’all need to get a word in with your representatives that what’s needed is legislation preventing budget bills from containing anything other than budgets.

That would solve this problem real quick. It’s been sounding stupider and stupider using the budget meeting to force unpopular agendas down throats or else the government is held hostage.

I think it would fit the bill if budgeting was held up over allocations, one side wants more border spending, one side wants more educational spending, etc, that would make sense but “allow us to attach this whole other unrelated law to declare the sky is actually green(which also contains a tag along that I get to be emperor), or nobody gets paid” is just ridiculous.

Tomorrow? Oh, so you already forgot the announcement from last month? Well, I mean I guess we have a lot of our own stuff going on right now…

/s?

Yup. Or anything held against them is now just fakery.

Like this gem from the news today.

Sometimes it feels technology may doom us all in the end. We’ve got a rough patch in society starting now, now that liars and cheats can be more convincingly backed up, and honest folk hidden behind credible doubt that they are the liars.

AI isn’t just on the path to make convincing lies, it’s on the path to ensuring that all truth can be doubted as well. At which point, there is no such thing as truth until we learn yet a new way to tell the difference.

“They don’t need to convince us what they are saying, the lies, are true. Just that there is no truth, and you cannot believe anything you are told.”

Worse than that, the slot they left is also locked out for a year. Although you can return to your previous spot freely, so break up and make up is fine.

I get why, if it were too flexible publishers would fear sales loss and opt out en masse but still feels rather long.

One thing I can think of is an overzealous corporate security solution blocking or holding back your email purely for having an attachment, or because it misunderstands/presumes the cipher-looking text file to be an attempt to bypass filtering.

Other than that might be curious questions from curious receivers of the key/file they may not understand, and will not be expecting. (“What’s this for? Is this part of the contract documents? Oh well, I’ll forward it to the client anyway”)

Other than that it’s a public key, go for it. Hard (for me anyway) to decide to post them to public keychains when the bot-nets read them for spam, so this might be the next best thing?

What happens next? A wave of even worse disregard for things.

After all, if we can bring back the mammoth, who cares if we off <insert species here>, they’ll just bring it back next rotation. /s

It’s not really because it fell over. It’s because it wasn’t supposed to fall over. Consumable launch materials don’t contend with this because failure to return is a success. This is a failure. This must be learned from and fought against/prevented going forward.

Something I like to consider, how different is your salary today compared to one from then? Do you, technically, make 4x as much now vs an 80s wage, in line with the 4x cost increase?

Naturally, it’s still not going to be a great answer either, but I’ve learned to take things with a grain of salt and instead of comparing dollar costs from then and now, get a wage from the same time and convert it all to working hours.

Example, my gramps liked to talk about 10 cent cheeseburgers at a time when they were a dollar. He also used to make about a dollar an hour compared to my $8/hr at the time. Yes, that means it’s not equal inflation between wage and cost(that’s the real problem), but at the same time they are both up and cheeseburgers were not as drastically more expensive than they used to be.

Unless you want to rope quality into this then it’s just depressing…

What I’m saying is, dollar for dollar, everyone gets hooked on seeing a platter meal so much cheaper than today and despairs. They forget the guy buying it also made near ten times less than you do at the time.

TL;DR: My understanding: While not equal and unfortunately drifting apart, costs and wages both inflate. Weren’t wages almost as low as that food price at the time?

Thanks!

Nah, the point would be to use it as a dumb phone, but as you point out it’s still Android, a “Smart” OS compacted into a “Dumb” shell, not a purpose built dumb phone OS. My concern would be the (lack of) optimization or bloat of said OS causing poor performance that results in a bad experience navigating even the dumb functions. The tablet I mentioned for example(RCA), you could make a sandwich between basic app launches…

Either way, enjoy the experience!

What make and model of cheap “dumb” phone did you choose? And how’s it running so far?

I might one day try something similar, but my experience with cheap hasn’t been good, and if it can barely turn on like a certain cheap tablet I once had, the experiment would end quickly.

Regarding 2, it feels to me as time wears on there are fewer and fewer online spaces in general. I fear it won’t be long before the internet is just a handful of “competing” social media companies and that one outlier group running the “Fediverse” that the propaganda says is the “Dark Web”.

Everything ends someday. It might be something we thought we’d move past with the digital age but, even digital requires resource input to keep going and that means it can and will end.

This does not surprise me at all. What were they supposed to do? Flash is dead, which broke most of the games on a site like this anyway. And kids, even young ones, go straight to Fortnite level video gaming these days, not flash sites.

It’s sad for those of us who grew up on this kind of thing, but like many other relics of the past the world moves on to something new. The Internet Archive and Flashpoint Archive will museum whatever functions without a server connection and the rest is lost to history, revered in our memories.

It’s just the nature of things. Like how a mere handful of social media websites today replace an internet once flooded with personal websites and small communities. I’m sure the next Cartoon Network sponsored game will just be a Fortnite event or Metaverse room.