Doesn't surprise me; here in Arizona, charter schools greatly out-number state public schools, usually have a majority of white students enrolled, and have access to the same government funding that state public schools have access to.

What started out as a way to offer private education on a state subsidized budget for disabled children like deaf, blind, or autistic, has been over-run by the elite as a way to have a private school without bearing 100% of the cost.

Interesting study and others: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17765230/

Not saying you are wrong, but a few things to note / discuss:

• The study indicates that CYP17 is a "candidate gene"? It isn't fully proven...
• The study indicates the CYP17 gene is valid for FtM but not MtF transitions... which means at best it can only explain half the population of trans right now
• The study I linked was done with under 2000 people in 2007, and a later study in 2015 was done with under 700 people. When you compare that to the estimated 30-70 million transgender potential people, the study is lacking in my statistical opinion...

Further, have you considered that maybe trans-racialism simply is too new and hasn't been studied enough?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transracial_(identity)

Except that there are biological components that are also part of transgenderism that explain why someone with male physiology expresses female thoughts and feelings or vice versa, or other types of internal gender identity.

What biological components are those? Please explain what you mean

I think people need to take a step back from the vitriol and realize the irony in @deadgirlwalking@lemmy.world's statement about wanting to claim being white when they are black.

At the core, trans men / women identify differently from their gene or cellular biologics; this is fundamentally no different than someone black / white claiming to identify differently from their gene or cellular biologics. If you are OK with one, you must and should be OK with the other...

I think the reason why @deadgirlwalking@lemmy.world is having such difficulty with this 'showerthought' is because it hits home for them in a different way.

Don't think about the centuries of slavery and racism @deadgirlwalking@lemmy.world 's ancestors endured, no... think about the racism that PoCs endure today, yet its relatively less socially divisive for men / women to be something else.

I think delivery was wrong, but there is a powerful message in the discussion of this 'showerthought' ...

I love it and own 8, but I'm willing to bet it sold the second least right behind Steam Machine. Steam Link probably sold the most ...

Regardless of why it came into existence, it would be a better Steam Controller successor in every way except that it is ugly; Never say never dude... 😜

I seriously doubt they would maintain the current Steam Controller profile, but I wouldn't say it's impossible.

I'd be perfectly happy if they did just refresh the original Steam Controller, but I doubt they will. I think it sold poorly enough to the point where the second iteration has to be a slam dunk -- and what better way to ensure that than to base it on the ever popular Steam Deck.

Yeah, I don’t know why they’d use that image. It’s so lazy and uncreative. That’s not what it’ll look like.

I don't care what any future Steam Controllers look like as long as it is comfortable and maintains base feature parity with the original.

You seem to think that Valve would never release such an uninspired design, but Valve has already shown images of their Steam Deck prototype iteration with exactly this: the screen of the Steam Deck removed with the left and right sides right up against each other.

Article Image

Valve even went on record in an interview talking about it saying that they did it to iterate faster on the ergonomics and comfort of holding the Steam Deck without wasting the material or manufacturing time to include the screen; therefore, they very well could release something similar as a future Steam Controller knowing that it would have the exact same ergonomics as the Steam Deck

I think there needs to be more government involvement and protection in how data is collected, shared, and consumed; however, I also think people don't realize that their perception of 'privacy' has always had the major benefit of being from the perspective of an individual that largely is unprofitable.

Many celebrities would very likely tell the public that 'privacy' is largely a myth and the reason their perspective is that way is because their lives, activities, and actions are viewed as profitable to someone. A lucrative paycheck from acquiring that salacious photo in a vulnerable position, etc is a big motivator, and if the celebrity gets mad at the paparazzi, there's even more news about how the celebrity lost their shit for all the world to see; however, if the celebrity embraces the media and tries to work with them to conserve what little 'privacy' they have, there is negative news about how the celebrity is fake or too controlling about their image. At the end of the day, these celebrities simply want to have dinner out with family or friends and they can't.

The general public isn't used to the idea that someone cares enough about every nuanced detail of their decisions that it would matter... but it does. Sadly, a celebrity must spend thousands of dollars to secure their privacy, and even then it isn't a guarantee... what hope do we have? In today's society we use debit or credit cards, but all of the transactions are data mined by the banks and privacy is non-existent; however, with cash you have some built-in 'privacy' because at its core it is not easily profitable to track.

And that is the point; Data collection is slowly bridging the gap between a celebrity's reality and normal everyday human perception of 'privacy'.

You also don’t have to do the other quests in empowered, you just kill the boss.

Hmm... I did not know this... Thanks! I will try to endure empowered monoliths more often then

I'm not a physicist, but I'll try to answer your question:

Gravity, pressure (atmospheric), and a vacuum are not the same; nor are they mutually exclusive.

• The Earth's mass and centrifugal forces are said to exert a total of 1 gravity (1g). While the influence of gravity is scientifically never-ending, there is a distance or limit, known as the Hill Sphere where the effects of a celestial body's' gravity dissipates enough that its influence is scientifically negligible. For the planet Earth, the Hill Sphere is about 1.5 billion km or 0.01 astronomical units (AU).

• Shortly after the Earth formed, there was no atmosphere and different types of gasses like Nitrogen, etc were being expelled by tons of volcanic activity; much like Venus. Due to the Earth's gravitational force, these gasses didn't just dissipate into space; over approximately 3 billion years, these gasses built up and interacted with other gasses / processes that an atmosphere formed. Earth's atmosphere today is made up of 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen, 0.9% Argon, and 0.1% others. This mixture of gasses, compacted by the Earth's gravitational force, exerts 360 degrees of 6.9 Kpa at sea-level. At 498.9 km above sea-level, the atmospheric pressure becomes zero

• A vacuum is technically space devoid of matter; therefore, there are varying levels of vacuum. Space is said to be 99.999% vacuum because the amount of matter in Space is infinitesimal compared to the size of the Universe.

 

A hard vacuum (99.999%) on Earth can be constructed by pumping / sucking out the matter from a container, but while the internal contents of the vacuum would now have zero atmospheric pressure, the vacuum and contents or lack of still exists on Earth and is still experiencing 1 gravity. If you puncture the vacuum at sea-level, the 360 degree atmospheric pressure of 6.9 Kpa would force air into the vacuum.

In other words, a hard vacuum doesn't negate gravity; if it did, gravity in Space wouldn't be possible and NASA wouldn't need the vomit comet to simulate micro-gravity. Therefore, when they say they can produce enough thrust in a hard vacuum to overcome 1 gravity, they quite literally are saying that within the vacuum on Earth, they can make an object weightless / move.

Note: Someone else already posted essentially what I did in a much more concise manner... but I already typed all that... so... gonna leave it up for now

Well, Empowered monoliths are level 100 and 50 corruption which is actually not a cake-walk and that doesn't really speed-up the time to reach the boss; I'm not sure I understand how moving to empowered would help?

Not saying its true, because I am skeptical, but a few things I found interesting:

• The lead engineer is former NASA
• They claim to have been working on this for more than 25 years
• Already patented: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11511891B2/en
• Produces 1g thrust but requires hard-vacuum (this means the practical use right now is meant for space not on Earth)
• They claim the tech goes back to Asymmetrical Capacitors which is old tech, but this exploits it in a new or different way
• They claim the team members that have worked on this included others from NASA, Blue Origin, and the USAF; of course this doesn't mean the USAF, NASA, or Blue Origin are invested officially, but some definite heavy hitting organizations...

Children are still humans, and you should respect them as such

Absolutely; however, children aren't adults and until the child is an adult, the parent is the legal custodian for that child. Part of that duty is to protect the child from negative outside influences and / or themselves if need be. When it comes to my child, while they are not an adult, nothing is off the table of consideration in order to protect them.

The last thing kids need is their father to snoop around in their web traffic and erode any kind of privacy

Respectfully, we disagree. The last thing a child needs is to be scooped up in a web of lies by an online predator and kidnapped, raped, humiliated, or worse... killed.

You seem to think I would refuse my child any privacy, but that isn't the case. I will protect my children the best way I can from any harm, and that starts by being aware and setting limits for them that not only protects them but also protects their privacy. If those limits get violated, then I have cause for concern and would need to re-evaluate those limits... and in that situation, yes, I would snoop on their web traffic.

I'm a firm believer that the middle road is usually the best stance to take in most situations until you're given valid reason to act. I doubt anything I have said thus far has swayed your opinion; therefore, I think we will just have to respectfully agree to disagree. :)

Disclaimer: I know the article is for the UK, but I'm in the US, so my reply will be US focused

There's always more than one side to every issue...

• Social media is the devil and Parents before 2000 didn't have to worry much, or did they, about their kids being on the internet 24/7

First, you needed a computer, a pretty expensive, bulky item, and then you needed the internet, mostly tied to a fixed landline that interrupted the main form of personal communication up until around the mid 90s. Even in the late 90s, internet options that wouldn't interrupt the landline service usually had big draw-backs (usually price or shared bandwidth, etc). The point is that while the internet and social media existed back then (newsgroups, BBS, IRC, etc), their availability was limited by external factors.

Before the age of 15, my parents wouldn't allow us to have our own computers, we were limited to a few hours per day of screen time, and less than 1 hour per day on the internet. In addition, the 1 hour of internet had to be on our father's computer which was in public view. These rules didn't stop us from doing bad stuff, but it definitely limited things.

After the age of 16, we were able to have our own computers, but internet access was still limited to 1 hour per day. Fortunately for me, I had an older brother that was 18 and leaving home, so before he left, I asked him to create an account with the ISP and I'd pay the bill). At this point, I was 16 with unlimited internet, the only problem was it still interrupted the main house land line, but that changed a year or so later with DSL.

Even when the technology and availability was semi-difficult to work around, I still got into a ton of online arguments with random, unknown people about stupid stuff, formed online friendships and "relationships", sexted, even got into arguments with other jealous dudes trying to steal my online girl, etc.

All of this is to say though that while my social media experience during my teen years wasn't nearly as bad as what kids are subjected to today, my parents were right that they had reasons to be worried, and I'm sure the rules they did enforce along with the hoops I had to jump through with the tech kept me from making some pretty unfathomable mistakes which is kind of ridiculous considering everything else I did that I'm not admitting to ;-)

Today parents shove a smart phone into their child's hand to stop them from crying or to keep them busy, but many don't realize the power of influence the phone, social media, or they have over their child.

I really hate to say this, but a parent should not be a friend. My parents didn't do everything they could, but I'd give them a solid B rating (85 grade) on trying to minimize any bad influence from the internet given the tech that was reasonably priced and at their fingertips. However, today, parents just straight don't have any excuse.

There are $50 routers that have pretty extensive, standard parental tech on-board. They can limit the access to the internet per day and for certain hours, log all websites visited, deny access to certain websites, etc. There are more tech savvy options too, logging all traffic, Remote viewing, etc.

Android and Apple phones can block all incoming / outgoing, calls / SMS except for those on an approved contact list, You can deny access to certain apps, even force the phone / app to go into a limp mode when a certain "on-screen-time" is met, etc

Parents today have so much available to them to prevent their children from being "mind-controlled" by social media; however, the most important aspect is awareness or resolve to do something about it. A parents' job, until the child becomes mature enough or legally an adult, is to always present, support, and or sometimes enforce the overall best, healthiest decision.

While I won't deny that some stuff on social media has gotten out of control, I mostly think parents today are to blame and the government needs to stay out of it except if they want to enforce a higher minimum age limit for social media or try and penalize the companies for obvious negligence on not properly making the efforts to keep younger children off the platforms.

I don't have an account -- I refuse to support Epic or their Game Store even if they do give away free games. Tim Sweeney is a douche for making it seem that Valve is crooked when he's just a whiny, sore loser that waited 15 years too late to enter the PC digital store business and is pissed he has to settle as the real-deal King Kong's bitch.

No worries, just wanted to make sure the lines weren't being crossed; especially when people are spending money.

I'm a firm believer in competition is good for everyone, but I also won't deny that the 4090 is a beast of a card. It's totally not worth the money, but it certainly earned its recognition

the 7900 to the 4090.

Not really; the 7900 XTX is more in competition with Nvidia's 4080. The 7900 XTX can hold its own against Nvidia's 4090 in a few tests, but 1:1, Nvidia's 4090 does not have a rival.

There are also XT versions which is AMD’s version of the Ti line.

Again, no... the XTX versions are AMD's high-end offering with the XTs being the mid-tier offering.

This dude needs to be cited for some tickets since he clearly violates several laws in the video:

• Reckless driving when he pulls out of the Tesla parking lot onto the highway and floors it. The speed limit is 55MPH and he was doing 57 or 58 when the critical failure happened and he let off the gas, so he probably would have gone way over the speed limit if it weren't for the vehicle actually having a critical failure (we see indication of this intention below).

• Excessive speeding; video clearly shows the truck at 107MPH on the freeway on a public road after they "reset" the critical failure

• Distracted driving: Non-hands-free access of his phone while driving and admitting to almost side-swiping other vehicles due to distractions / unfamiliarity of the vehicle... but lets be honest, he is goofing around more than he should if he doesn't know how to drive the vehicle safely yet.

In addition to that... it sucks to pay $82k for a vehicle that breaks so quickly; I'll never buy a Tesla. I have nothing against drive-by-wire, but I don't trust Tesla / Elon Musk

I could be totally wrong, IANAL, but I think this has more to do with how Apple restricts access of features or services to third-parties than anything else...

For example, Apple offers Apple Pay on the iPhone. They claim it is highly secure due to hardware end-to-end encryption and that not even Apple has access to the data. Because of these beliefs and others, Apple doesn't allow any other Pay or wallet application on the iPhone or app store. Other companies like Google, Visa, MasterCard, etc have tried to submit Pay / wallet applications to the iPhone app store, but Apple denies them because it claims access to the NFC hardware APIs would reduce security.

In this example, Apple stands to gain everything as the sole digital Pay / Wallet proprietor on the iPhone just based off of a "wink, wink, nod, nod" type of response. Yes, while Apple's response could be accurate, letting third-parties have access to the hardware NFC APIs would reduce security, Apple is making that decision from a monopolistic point of view.

It would be different if Apple didn't have a digital Pay / Wallet system or if Apple allowed the companies to have the application on the iPhone / app store but maybe it had to go through a more thorough security approval process.

Now take for example how Apple operated back in 2008 / 2009 when it released GPS Navigation support on the iPhone. They partnered with Garmin (Garmin had access to the Assisted / GPS APIs); however, Garmin wasn't the only third-party able to submit a GPS Navigation application. In the end, Apple eventually created their own Maps with Turn-by-turn navigation and I think we all know how shit that was for a long time, but imagine if they had gone Apple Maps from the get-go and blocked third parties forcing people to use their tech only...

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