Safety and freedom is incompatible with direct political control. Respect for truth is a false value if what truth is is to be put to a vote or changed to match the whims of whoever is in power.
The decline of technic sets is such a shame. There's so little support for anything but representative models of specific cars, despite the platform being able to support a ton of mechanical creativity.
The disappearance of real metal Meccano is really crazy. I know metal is expensive, but also bulk processing of it has never been cheaper or faster.
It's also a shame because it's really good for mechanical rapid prototyping and you can bend and cut it in a pinch and it stays put. But buying vintage Meccano to abuse like that is expensive and feels like a war crime.
My son inherited (well, we're co-owning it I guess) my Lego, and that includes two sets of Technic aimed at educational use (1030 and 1032) which come with a stack of instructions for fairly simple mechanical models to build — each demonstrating basic mechanical principles like gear reduction and pulleys. Those sets used the 4.5V motors which have all broken down, but we also have the 1990 Technic Control Centre fully working and use those instead. That Control Centre is a simple controller used with 9V motors. It is brilliant for explaining the basic principles of computerised automation.
No app. No Bluetooth. Just wires and a simple controller built to be used and understood by children.
The whole idea about any superhero media is a special dude going on a violent spree because the authorities (in their eyes) can't do their job properly. The whole concept is anti-government and society as a whole.
Not at all. They have their roots in the projection of a defined moral trajectory that the superhero is charged to lift society along and the disagreement they have with the state is that it can't do that enough, not that it's going in the wrong direction. Modern superhero stories have completely inverted and fucked with and abandoned this narrative but the original stories were absolutely supportive of the state, fundamentally modernist.
You aren't renting walking distance to a butcher baker and candlestick maker for less than $3K for a studio. That's an aspirational lifestyle for a few neighborhoods.
In all these discussions it would be really nice to have actual addresses and locations because the dream is obviously desirable but I just don’t know how often it occurs in actuality.
I only speak for myself here, but: While it would almost certainly be very easy for a sufficiently-motivated person to track me down and knock on my front door, I don't like broadcasting the details of where I am.
I might occasionally mention something like "some small city in Ohio [of many hundreds]" when that seems pertinent to the context, but that's about the extent of what anyone will ever get out of me on a public forum.
Y'all generally seem to be rather swell here, but this is a very public place that gets crawled approximately-instantly by search engines, and the world doesn't need to know what block I live on or the name of the bodega on the corner that I might feel like writing about.
Yeah I don’t need people to dox themselves, but even just generic “look at this apartment building, it’s built on top of a supermarket” (iirc I found that in downtown San Diego) would help.
And if it’s common and something people look for, it should be findable relatively easily.
A family member lucked into a studio in Brooklyn for 1500.
A rent-stabilized studio from a slumlord who is regularly fined for violations, on the ground floor of an interior shaft, right inside the exterior door where people come and go all hours.
But she’s very happy about it and her friends are jealous.
Deeply hate this. Just add a small fee. It's just a couple bucks. What are you, cheap?
Open Source Software underwrites everything. It makes the largest human endeavors work. It makes silly ephemeral games little notes apps and digital art run. Turning maintainers into a kind of digital landlord that charges a fee is both insultingly low bore and enough to squeeze the life out of computing as a hobby.
The article does go into this and gives lip service to the idea that a secure third party could expose age without exposing identity. Ultimately, there's still the problem that even if point of verification can be done in a zero trust way, you are still entrusting very sensitive information to a third party which is subject to data breach.
If you do it right the only sensitive information exposed to the age gated site is that your age is above their threshold.
The party that actually has to at some point verify who you really are of course has your sensitive information, and there is no obvious way to work around that. However, there is a way to make it so that it doesn't matter.
That is by making them be a party that already has that information. Probably the simplest would be to make it be the same government agency that issues your physical identity documents like passports or drivers licenses. If we don't want it to be a government agency or we want to have competition banks would be a possibility.
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