He's Ronald Reagan, except this time there isn't a Nancy in place to tell the secret service to fill the pool with leaves.

You need to find yourself some Left-Libertarians.

You're usually looking for some type of Georgists or some flavor of small-scale Social/Communist Anarchy. Most of them are way more able to grok the concepts of things like "natural monopolies" or "Tragedy of the Commons" and other fun market failure states. They tend to focus more on the existence of the market itself as a tool for creating competition that drives innovation and efficiency while giving less lip service to the idea that just because you accumulated a bunch of capital from an idea that's its a good idea.

If I scam a bunch of people, I've gathered a bunch of capital, but that doesn't mean I've actually produced anything of value for anyone. If I refined chemicals in my house and dumped all the waste in my neighbor's pool, I'm not actually competing in an even market, because I've burdened my neighbor with the cost of waste remediation while I get to keep all the profit.

Historical legacy. It made sense when they were first rolling out. Someone would take the risk of trying to build up a market for these really expensive new devices and then the factory would swoop in and undercut them and destroy their business after they had done all the initial leg work of creating demand for the vehicles. They wanted protection from this.

Well, cars are now everywhere in the US market and it doesn't take a whole lot of effort anymore to convince someone they need a car, and not just a horse. But the laws protecting "car market development" in the former of dealerships never went away.

Yup, although the downside is that your posting style definitely shows off that you're a Mastodon user.

Your use of the @ tag, the hashtag are all markers of a more Twitter-like user experience, and it makes you post stand out somewhat oddly for those using one of the lemmy instances. Either way, it's really neat to be able to cross between those, since I vastly prefer the Lemmy UX as opposed to Mastodon's, but I can still get a Mastodon's content!

I mean, he's dead, so bit late for that.

Absolutely. America should just be more civilized, like the UK and keep all their police killings done out of sight, and don't you worry! Just because you're 7 times more likely to be killed by police interactions in UK by being brown, it's not racism! They investigated themselves, and it's all fine.

Perhaps American police agencies should start investigating themselves more and the papers should 100% just believe all their findings. That way you can just conveniently ignore it until the next time an American has to point it out to you.

Remember kids! If you just pretend the racism doesn't exist in your country, it doesn't!

"Waaah, our gerrymander failed! This is so unfair, it was supposed to be used to suppress black voters! Not white voters! We want all our white people back, since they failed to properly police the black people like we had hoped!"

Because it allows for proper prioritization of needs, allows for the better exploitation of our surroundings (as tool using animals), and is INCREDIBLY useful for helping us try to "model" other human's behaviors and act as social animals as opposed to just being the regular kind.

Probably the most impact "Why" question probably started occurring before we were even human and it was "Why did they do that?"

Being able to understand the motivations of other beings is absolutely fucking incredibly overpowered both in terms of cooperative action with your fellows AND destructive action against foes/food sources.

As someone who helped to generate those types of answers and then deleted them all.

Fuck Reddit, they didn't pay me for that work and then they dicked me over in chase of a half penny. Sorry the rest of the world doesn't get to use my work for free, but Reddit broke the agreement. I post content, they provide a good user experience. They failed their end, I rescinded mine.

Yeah, but if you don't have any assets in the EU for them to seize, and if you're not present in the bloc yourself it doesn't matter for shit. They have no jurisdiction or ability to enforce unless you really, really want to operate inside of their market at scale.

Well, the upside and the downside of GDPR is that if you're not a member of the EU, you can basically just tell them to go fuck themselves because they have little to no actual power to impact you since you're not within their jurisdiction.

No, it's just a matter of who they accept as legitimate "authority".

If the Dumbass-in-Chief, their ministers, and their news had all told them to wear masks, they absolutely would have, but every single one of their primary authority sources were pulling in different directions and they don't accept any "liberal" sources as legitimate authority. You can see it at a much smaller scale by looking at Church congregation sizes where some ministries focused on trying to protect their elderly and infirm members and those who didn't.

Conservatives who had pastors who told them to wear masks were a LOT more likely to do so than ones who were getting mixed messaging.

I've already had several non-tech people say something along the lines of "What the heck is this X thing on my phone?"

I gotta wonder how many other people are just impulse uninstalling something they don't recognize off their phone as well, since ol' Musky boi did this with basically zero user notice as well.

It's almost 100% because they were in violation of at least some of the content policies found here

It's just that the Fediverse now has enough global attention being paid to it that they're probably actually cracking down on enforcement. Probably something under the "Insults" or "Racism" content policy, since those are the most vague and poorly defined and highly likely to be "obvious" primarily to the country who is operating them, Mali.

No, I meant it in a completely serious way. The explosion might be been powerful enough to lift the decking of the bridge straight up and sheared a lot of connection points in the girder and headers, but depending oh how much force was directed perpendicularly, it might have just caused it to slam down on top of the caps and pillars and just sit there with a really bad weight distribution.

In terms of functionality, that sort of damage is better compared to maybe a cracked windshield, as an analogy? You can keep trucking along and maybe everything will be fine, but the overall structural integrity of the windshield is now in a much riskier state. Any further strikes could cause further destabilization radiating outward from the flaw or worse, the continued use could be causing the material to continually weaken as stress points are flexed over and over and over and over. Similar to how if you bend a stiff piece of metal back and forth, it gets looser and eventually snaps.

The photos Russia themselves published show levels of damage that would take, at minimum, days to weeks to fix back to perfect assuming you're running everything as an emergency 24/7 rush job, and realistically more likely months since you're not likely to have a super dense civilian engineering firm able to just instantly slide into place. The more likely case is that Ukraine caused damage that drastically weakened that section of the bridge, but didn't hit it in such a way as to do much more reduce the weight load that can go over or it alternatively drastically shorten the lifespan of the bridge without major repair. That seems pretty consistent with what you'd expect out of a drone bomb blowing up under the bridge, rather than something coming in and hitting it from the side, like a missile or something impacting from the top down.

Russia is leaning on the thought that the patch job will hold longer than the state of hostilities and that they can do more long term repairs once things have cooled off some. But for now, supplies NEED to be run over that bridge, so fast patch and reduced weight and lifetime is the cost they pay.

NC is a "Free City" in terms of it's status within the structure of NUSA. Essentially, a territory they claim is theirs, but which they don't actually have the means to exercise control over. So it just functions more or less autonomously.

But it essentially functions as a Japanese Treaty Port in terms of military influence and is the point where East Asian and NUSA criminal and corporate organizations use to bring goods cheaply into and out of the NUSA market with both international and domestic corporations using Night City as a corporate tax haven and tariff-free port of entry. Smuggling is king as everyone seeks to skim their share off the goods as they move inland, each government agency or smuggler serving as competing "taxes" for entry into markets.

NUSA has largely reunited in 2070, but NC is still one of the last holdouts, backed as it is with all the might of Arasaka and the threat of igniting a new Corporate War if NUSA were to try to annex it and actually attempt to assert influence over the city.

As someone who tried to use Tidal for nearly a year because it paid better rates, it's literally just 2 things: Artist Discovery and Algorithm Degradation towards a mass consumer mean.

Spotify actually feeds me tons of great indie artists I've never heard before. Tidal was a constant struggle to purge mass produced giant record label pop from constantly infiltrating every single station and it almost never gave me some little artist who maybe has 5k listens total. I get those literally every single day from Spotify though.

Bridges are actually pretty difficult to take out if you can't get in to hit specific weak points and if you're willing to just keep running the risk of crossing over damaged bridges and maybe lose everything on it.

It's exacerbated by the Black Sea being a relatively gentle body of water, so even if you pop the top, it might slam back down in such a way that's it's still usable and because there isn't as much perpendicular pressure from the sea or wind, it's easier for it to just kinda settle there and just slowly degrade away rather than collapse into utter non-functionality all at once.

Mate, you're talking out your ass. Neodynium is a rare metal, yes. But we're not going through neodymium deposits fishing out magnets like they're some sort of gemstone.

That shit gets mined, melted, alloyed with other minerals, smelted into shape then run through magnetic field generators to induce a magnetic charge in them, as just a very rough overall view of the process.

The biggest issue is that making them is INCREDIBLY material inefficient. Making one really good quality magnet requires an absolute fucking shit ton of processing, all of which reduces yield and increases waste product generation every step of the way.

......we can literally just manufacturer super powerful magnets. What the hell are you talking about?