Reporters are just common workers like you and me, except, they have a ridiculously dangerous job that was so important that it was considered by Thomas Jefferson as the “fourth estate.” The idea behind “democracy dies in darkness” was one born from class struggle, and I think we should see the removal of that slogan in that context.

I chose not to have kids not because I didn’t ask to be born, but because I am fully aware that I do not have what it takes to be a good parent. I have major issues with sensory overload, and little kids are basically little perfect generators for unpredictable noise and smells.

If I had conceived a kid accidentally, of course I’d spend every last ounce of energy I had in me making sure that they had a lovely childhood. But IMO, being able to recognize this simple fact is what separates me from my own parents, and them not being able to recognize that simple fact is what robbed me of having a childhood at all.

One thing that I never see discussed when global population decline is brought up is that maybe we don’t need 7 billion humans on Earth, each competing for increasingly fewer resources? Our population could be declining because we have reached the limit of what resources our global economic system can provide.

I have seen the polemics take the shape that humanity needs to be this large or else we will go extinct somehow, but I can’t be the only one who understands that if we grow to the point where we exhaust all available resources, our species is doomed. Conservation as a concept is an inherently selfish one — it’s ostensibly about biodiversity for the sake of the Earth, but really, it’s moreso about maintaining the kind of environment that humans find most comfortable. Humans can survive in the desert but not when it’s 145 °F during the day.

I want to believe you’re right, but in a world where AI can fully replace human labor, that will likely also apply to the areas of mass surveillance and military suppression.

Imo, one of the scariest and most frustrating developments in robotics in the past 50 years is the ability to process billions of text and voice conversations, all at once, 24/7. Things really take a different tone when all of a sudden the US Government can find it feasible to listen to all of us, every time.

I swear to God, I feel like the global rise in far-right parties has less to do with any kind of global cabal, and more to do with the fact that Boomers everywhere are powered by nostalgia. Seems like Boomers everywhere will stop at nothing to bring back the world of their parents that they never experienced.

Just look at how much of Russia’s foreign policy is basically “damn, remember when we were the USSR?”

“Well, wants to send me and people like me to a concentration camp, but I do hate gay people sooooooooooooooooooo”

I have been living in Philly for a decade now, and in that time, I am not sure I have seen a single new house go up for less than $500k. Everything in the $50k-$300k range has been either an ugly condo or old track housing from the post-WW2 period.

This entire line of thought comes from the fact that we have parents who are actively in our lives every damn day saying that nobody deserves to earn over $7.50 / hr because they only earned like $2-$3 / hr in the 70s. They are an active detriment that is preventing any means of progress.

They will not entertain information about buying power, inflation, or ballooning revenues / puckering salaries. This is a sore spot with millennials for this reason. We are not the ones bringing this up, our parents, who did enjoy life 50 years ago, are.

You can pretend that this is about having a toilet indoors all you’d like, they had access to pensions back then.

I am a designer, but I once did a project with a very very major and recognizable tech corporation that, no joke, implemented an 8 character limit on passwords for storage reasons.

This company made in the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year, and they were penny-pinching on literal bytes of data.

I can’t say who it is, but their name begins with ‘M’ and ends in ‘cAfee.’

One of my favorite memories of how much Something Awful’s sysadmins were absolutely amateur hour back in the early 2000s was the “lappy” to “laptop” debacle. Apparently Lowtax found the term “lappy” so annoying that he ordered his system administrator to do a find/replace for every instance of “lappy,” replacing them with “laptop.”

Unfortunately this included usernames and passwords, as well as anything that just managed to have the letters “lappy” in that order anywhere in the word. So, there was one user named ‘Clappy’ who woke up one day to find his name changed to ‘Claptop.’ Apparently this is also how people discovered that they were storing password unsalted in plain text in a fucking MySQL database, which if you’re old enough, you probably already remember that the combination of MySQL and PHPmyAdmin were like Swiss cheese when it comes to site defense. :p