The end of real representative democracy began when the courts allowed the "corporations are people / money is speech" arguments. Once that happened, government began to represent only the interests of billionaires and their lobbyists.

It's taking decades to play out, but it's going to end badly.

The Yamaha YM3812 sound chip was the backbone of computer sound & music generation for almost a decade.

Rubber bullets are supposed to be skipped off the pavement in front of the people you're shooting at. This reduces their impact and is supposed to make the bullets "less lethal." These cops didn't do that. Her maiming was the result of a deliberately aimed shot from a rifle.

The guy who literally embodies all of the Seven Deadly Sins "loves" the Ten Commandments.

It's not the BB gun that got the kid killed. He literally put the gun on the ground and had his hands up.

It's because the "security guard" is a stupid, trigger-happy moron.

It helps to establish a routine for going to bed. For example, set a nightly reminder on your phone 15-30 minutes before bedtime that it's time to wind things down. Don't have anything caffeinated after 5 pm or so.

Republicans and Democrats have been moving steadily to the right for the last 40 years. So now, Democrats are where the Republicans were in the 1980s: boring, middle of the road corporatists, friends of banks, insurance and pharmaceutical companies. And the right has moved all the way into an insane asylum. We haven't had a real progressive president since Jimmy Carter and that was 50 years ago.

I'm hoping it's not just an emulator with spam.

I like how the vehicles match the drivers: the mice driving the cheese mobile, the dog driving the hot dog mobile. etc.

I love the Richard Scarey books. My favorite was. "What Do People Do All Day."

The book would should things like how electricity is made or how to build a house. It would show all the plumbing, heating and electric, with little arrows to show which way things went. It taught me how to look beneath the surface of things and wonder how and why things worked.

I also recommend NewPipe for Android. It lets you download in multiple formats and shows comments in a mobile format (you can get it through the F-Droid store or from github.)

Youtube isn't some one of a kind miracle. There's at least a dozen already-established streaming platforms that would take its place. There are thousands of websites that have no problems hosting gigs and gigs of porn, so it's not as difficult as people think.

Both parties have been moving steadily to the right for the last 40 years. So now, the Democrats are where the Republicans were in the 1980s: boring corporatists and friends of banks, pharmaceutical and insurance companies.

And the Republicans have moved all the way into an insane asylum.

Feudal serfdom aka Company Towns. Conservatives would LOVE for us to return to that. You get paid in company Disney bucks that can only be used at the company store. You'll live in company dorms, go to company schools and when you die, you'll be buried in the company graveyard.

Slavery never went away in this country. It just became more profitable.

"Early Stages?" You've got AI mining your data. The Lions have already come and gone. The hyenas and other scavengers are picking over the scraps, now.

Yeah, subby. We get it. "Both sides are bad." But one side is boring corporatists who don't give a crap and the other side is 100% concentrated evil fascists, authoritarians and religious nutjobs. And while that's a choice between the lesser of two evils, it's not a difficult one.

The very first lesson you will learn from your very first job is that companies have no loyalty to anything but the bottom line. The days of guaranteed lifetime employment at a company disappeared decades ago.

It's not about the gays vs straights or blacks vs whites or the Romulans vs The Federation. It's about the billionaires vs everybody else. It's a class war. It aways has been. And life is never going to improve for most of us until we figure out where the REAL source of our pain comes from. Like George Carlin once said:

"That's the way the ruling class works in any society. They keep the lower and middle classes fighting with each other so that they . . . the rich . . . can run off with all the f*cking money."

This is going to be a great year for indie games. (Currently playing, "Techtonica.")