The people who think incest porn should be banned are loud and proud in their beliefs. They’ll put up posters, tell their MPs, respond to surveys, and appear in political debates.
The people who support incest porn are a lot less talkative.
As such our windsock government with no strong beliefs does what the survey says is most popular.
The people who think incest porn should be banned are loud and proud in their beliefs. They’ll put up posters, tell their MPs, respond to surveys, and appear in political debates.
The people who support incest porn are a lot less talkative.
I think there is an argument to made the pornography in general is harmful.
But to single out one single type of porn strikes me as... very odd. Maybe politicians can list, explicitly, all the other porn genres they find acceptable or agreeable to them, as a kind of compare and contrast exercise.
> So-called "barely legal" pornography and content depicting sexual relationships between step-relatives are set to be banned amid efforts to regulate intimate image sharing.
> Peers agreed by a majority of one to ban videos and images depicting relationships that would not be allowed in real life.
> They also agreed by 142 votes to 140, majority two, to bring intimate pictures and videos of adults pretending to be children in line with similar images of real children.
Gentoo works and you can build or even cross-build it yourself. The next big problem is going to be, unsurprisingly, Firefox: glean component is exceeding 3GB memory during compilation (the 32bit user address space).
Cars are harsh environments with heat, moisture and vibrations. Automotive electronics are considered heavy duty compared to consumer electronics, but are still rated for about 8,000-10,000 hours of operation.
One way to think about it is that temperatures inside a car left in the Arizona heat can easily reach 160. Inside the engine bay, they can easily reach 200F.
Now, if you leave your consumer electronics inside a car every day during the summer, you can expect a significant proportion to fail. For instance, your lithium batteries in your laptop are going to have a bad time if you operate them over 113 and they will start getting damaged when operated over 100.
But you expect your computer modules to take it, and they have been built in such a way to take it, as well as all the vibrations, moisture, and temperature swings of a car. You can leave your car in the street in the summer, walk back into it after it's been sitting in the sun, and apart from needing a steering wheel cover you can start the car and drive away, with all your modules working. And you can do this for a decade. It's pretty amazing. How many people have gotten the "phone is too hot to operate message" when leaving their phone in the car in the summer, but their infotainment screens continue to work? It's happened to me all the time.
If you drive 2 hours a day on weekdays and one hour on weekends, so 12 hours per week, then that is 6240 hours of operation in a decade, so expect your car electronics modules to start dying around year 13 of use, and by year 16 of use, you are past the point for which these modules have been rated.
The infotainment screens will last 7-10 years.
Sensors in the engine bay will last 5-10 years.
The problem is that people expect their cars to last 20 or 30 years, and they should be able to, but cars weighed down with electronics are going to last only about 10 years. That's a huge problem for people who will get saddled with massive depreciation. If you paid $70K for that car, you are going to lose it all over 10 years, that's $7K depreciation per year (on average) but of course it is front loaded as you will lose 40% of that in the first 3 years.
So the software defined car, is going to radically change the economics of car ownership, and how much automakers can charge for cars, or equivalently it will dramatically shrink the pool of people who can use a car.
Now, you may think "I will escape this and just lease the car", but that is just a financing arrangement does not allow you to escape depreciation, as you pay for the depreciation in your lease cost. You can say "I will escape this and take an uber or taxi" but here, too, the depreciation costs will be passed onto you as a customer. You may think "the automaker only cares about the first buyer" but the first buyer is the one that absorbs the vast majority of the depreciation. There is no escape.
I don't think people have internalized the financial horror that is the software-defined car. The average age of a car on the road is now 14 years. You are talking about transitioning to cars that will only last 10 years. It's going to completely shock both automakers and car buyers.
What will happen to your iphone-defined dash in 10 years, when iPhones use completely new protocols and are not usable with your car anymore? It's one thing when it was just infotainment, and people could install more modern aftermarket units, but when the entire thing is integrated into the dash and controls critical functionality, then this will turn into a nightmare.
Products targeted at developers like to get a foothold in large corporations "by stealth" - let the developers experience what a great product it is first, before they have to do the approval paperwork.
With this IPv4 trick, if your employer or university only provides IPv4 you can use the product anyway.
> To bypass the deadlocked congress, obama used executive orders in new and expansive ways. That ratcheted things up.
While I agree - this has been an issue long before Obama.
Any reasonable country should be able to decide on the legality of abortion through the normal political process - the public deliberates, they elect representatives, the representatives hammer out the fine print and pass legislation.
But in the American system, the legality of abortion is decided at random, based on the deaths of a handful of lawyers born in the 1930s. If that person dies between ages 68-75, 84-87 or 91-95 abortion is illegal, if they die aged 76-83, or 88-91 it's legal.
Why doesn't America deal with political questions using their political process?
> Why doesn't America deal with political questions using their political process?
Since 2022 we do. But it’s through the political process of the States. This has made a lot of people very angry because a bunch of States have got it all wrong, and the exact way they got it wrong depends on your point of view on the subject, but no matter which side of the debate you’re on, some on your side most assuredly want to preempt all the States that got it all wrong with Federal law.
That Congress hasn’t come to a political consensus is the Federal political consensus.
> Since 2022 we do. But it’s through the political process of the States.
Which is exactly as it should be. There's nothing in the Constitution which gives the federal government power to act on this issue, therefore it should be decided on a state by state basis. Government works best when it is done based on the values and needs of the local population, not one solution for an entire heterogeneous nation.
Exactly! What the Constitution /says/ and how it is interpreted... The Tenth Amendment is written (IMO) incredibly short to underscore its importance AND breadth:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
But I've very seldom heard the phrase "states rights" uttered by anyone who isn't pro-gun and anti-abortion. I doubt they'd feel any freer if their state came down like a ton of politically-angered bricks on unfettered gun ownerships and anti-abortionists.
While the American left has largely ceded the term “states rights” to the American right (and was/is well on the way to ceding the term “Free Speech”) they have their own share of “states rights” issues. Medical and recreational marijuana is a “states rights” issue. “Sanctuary cities” are a “states rights” issues. The fact that the Trump administration can’t (yet) force California schools to drop teaching certain things is a “states rights” issue. California deciding they’re goin to just gerrymander the heck out of everything in response to the current administration is a “states rights” issue. In fact basically every state level opposition to the current administration is a form of a “states rights” issue.
It’s immensely frustrating to me that what should be a huge lesson in the importance of limited government power and diffusion of that power across multiple governmental levels isn’t likely to result in that lesson being learned. I have a real fear that in history Trump will have been an inflection point on the road to an ever more powerful federal government in general and executive branch in particular, rather than a historical anomaly at the high end of that same power dynamic.
Because that requires compromise and Americans are raging absolutists that need immediate results.
In 1791, abolitionists tried to end slavery in the British Empire but couldn't get it passed by the House of Commons. Henry Dundas changed the bill so it would be phased-in. Existing slaves wouldn't be emancipated but their children would be. That bill did pass. Slavery naturally ended over the following decades until the much smaller slave population was bought by the government and freed in 1833.
In the USA, nobody budged until a Civil War happened and then the slaves were freed by force in the 1850s without monetary compensation. But that time, emancipation happened immediately after they got full power, there was no need to give money to racists, and no moral compromises were required.
> But that time, emancipation happened immediately after they got full power, there was no need to give money to racists, and no moral compromises were required.
I really hope you were being sarcastic here... Emancipating the slaves during/after the Civil War was not an orderly, immediate process. And even once all slaves were freed, they continued to live second-class lives due to the laws of the time.
Yes, it's sarcasm. I'm contrasting how Britain made their legal process gradual enough to match reality with the USA's demand that legal processes create reality.
For reference, fully elective abortion legally doesn't exist in most of the UK. It's just that a fetus being dangerous to the mental health of the mother has progressively been interpreted more and more broadly...
In the American system as originally founded, black people were property.
It should be expected that the American system is not eternally bound to the will and scope of vision of the founding fathers, that it can and should evolve over time as the needs and nature of society evolves. Otherwise, it isn't a republic, it's a cult.
It’s more like Americans did decide, that it was illegal and judges decided they could use legal tricks to make it legal (which in turn meant as soon as they didn’t have the majority the opposite could occur.)
There's a long political tradition which doesn't acknowledge that there are political questions. In their world, there's only good policy and bad policy, and making the first is only a question of competence. Conflicts of interests they won't talk about. These people fight a constant battle to take political power away from people (not just regular people, elected representatives as well), and give it to their preferred "experts".
Or a USian who has no idea which lawyers you are referring to obliquely, so as to look "cool" and "knowledgeable", while avoiding communication with the sullied masses?
The thing is, Facebook/Meta wasn't trying to make a product with 80k concurrent users, or even with 800k concurrent users. Facebook has 3 billion MAU, and they literally renamed the entire company to Meta - they were expecting it to be big, hundreds of millions of users.
They hoped it would be a platform for fitness classes, business meetings, college classrooms, shopping, attending concerts [1] and so on.
If the primary appeal of your VR universe is that your avatar can be an anthropomorphic banana, an anime girl, a furry, a giant penis with legs - that's never going to become a 300-million-user platform.
I think what Meta didn't realize (or maybe they did and ignored it) was that they were not pioneering the metaverse. They already existed on the platforms you just mentioned. I've never played Roblox or Second Life but I know kids and teens who live on Roblox and adults who live on Second Life. Those worlds _were_ their metaverses, and there was no reason to jump ship to another platform when they already had a digital life established. And meta just ended up making a shitty version of the metaverse anyway for the reason you mentioned.
It's not that the metaverse never took off — the popularity of Roblox and Second life (and other online social spaces) is proof that the metaverse was in demand. It's that Meta never gave people a reason to join their metaverse.
Note that I'm loosely defining the "metaverse" as any online world where the community is the point and people spend real money to "get ahead" in those worlds. Many MMOs can be metaverses in this sense. I've logged onto Final Fantasy XIV and saw people who logged on just to hang out at their friend's in-game house, not to play the game at all.
I think the biggest problem that you hint as is that "metaverse" is an ill-defined term. When they rebranded, and given that I had been working in the 3d industry for _many_ years, I couldn’t define what the metaverse was.
To some extent I still cant. The real indicator is when the crypto bros started peddling it, then we all knew it was shite.
Shocking to watch this human imitate us, no shade to anyone neurodivergent either, but obviously it could track he would allegedly[1] OK with his bots sexting literal children—he’s obviously only making an effort to be like us (but he isn’t)
[1]not by me; Mark, you can sue Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Oct ‘25)
> If the primary appeal of your VR universe is that your avatar can be an anthropomorphic banana, an anime girl, a furry, a giant penis with legs - that's never going to become a 300-million-user platform.
I mean the inherent appeal of VR is self-expression; being who you want to be, seeing the worlds you want to see. You won't get 300 million users with corporate slop either. That maybe works once, if ever, VR headsets become an interface suitable for white collar work, which they currently very much aren't, and then it wouldn't be the next Facebook - it'd be the next Microsoft Teams. Which is not really in line with Meta's other offerings, though they certainly wouldn't say no to it I guess. But I think a 500-user survey is all it would take to get a very clear signal that current VR is NOT about to replace Teams.
> The idea that AI enforcement won't be just as corrupt and capricious as any other form of government run extortion is bonkers. [...] Private, unaccountable companies with effectively no oversight
In the specific case this thread is about - that of red light cameras - presumably the camera produces a photograph showing a red light, a vehicle going through it, and the vehicle's license plate. Plus a video, showing the light was orange for the legally required amount of time, and showing the absence of any exceptional circumstances (e.g. ambulances).
As law enforcement goes, that really seems like the least capricious, highest oversight law enforcement I can imagine.
Some cameras only produce a photograph. Some produce a video with the light status showing on it--but there have been cases that's wrong, the camera recording what it was programmed to do which didn't match the real lights.
You need actual video of the scene that can be examined and which is of sufficiently good quality that the identity of the car can be confirmed. Very often it does not exist.
Likewise, speed cameras should record enough that one can do a time/distance calculation to confirm the speed--because the system can be miscalibrated or can be fooled by large, flat surfaces.
Or look what has happened with breathalyzers. Last I heard if a judge grants the discovery request for the source code the case gets dropped. And the whole thing is based on a flawed principle in the first place: the ratio of breath alcohol to blood alcohol varies substantially between people--setting it for average isn't accurate. As a screening test for doing a blood draw, fine, but it should not be allowed anywhere near the courtroom. (Some states get this right, some do not.)
And, yes, ambulances. I forgot about another time I know I ran a red light. Something with lights/sirens was coming up behind, no lane was empty, I was in the only lane with one car. Lots of space at the intersection, I pulled forward and turned hard right, clearing my lane without actually entering the cross path.
> The leap hour will be in 7200 years, around year 9226.
7200 years ago the Neolithic revolution was still in full swing and many of the most famous megaliths like Stonehenge hadn’t even been built yet. The first real state, the Sumerian civilization, hadn’t formed yet in Mesopotamia.
Personally, I’m very comfortable making this someone else’s problems 7200 years from now. If they’re still having basic coordination issues then it’s their own damn problem.
> 7200 years ago the Neolithic revolution was still in full swing
Older folks at Göbekli Tepe grumbled that climate change wasn't real. As far as they were concerned, the Sumer and Indus Valley kids were playing with fire and didn't know squat. The older generation just couldn't understand the crazy architecture over in Egypt and the slangy "new wave" movement at Salisbury Plain. It always seemed that the shiftless youth there just loitered and smoked and invented new expressions to frustrate communication. And everyone could agree that no one liked their so-called music!
I just had a Y10K problem. Customer data was using 9999-12-31 23:59:59 as a placeholder value, and our app crashed converting from the customer's timezone to UTC. I learned that Python datetime can't handle Y10K.
You're missing that the frequency of leap seconds is accelerating over time, because Earth's rotation is slowing down. The leap hour will therefore happen earlier: https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/future2100.svg
Yeah. There’s also the issue that the earth’s rotation is slowing down, so over the long term leap seconds would become more and more frequent. There’s a point when the earth is slow enough that leap seconds need to happen nearly every month, and by that point they are no longer a workable solution to the problem. That is expected to take a few thousand years, comparable to the point where a leap hour would be needed if there were no leap seconds.
Where there fewer hours or were those hours just different length?
Now we have locked in second extremely hard underpinning all of our measurements. But you could consider that you have same number of hours in a day and length of those hours has changed...
A Martian sol (day cycle/rotation) is > 24 hours (by about 40 minutes). Locked in seconds seems to be the easiest for general use mathematically. 24 hours in a day is a bit of a leftover from sundials and 12 being one of the easiest large fractions of a circle and the Earth day was never really a universal anyway, just an accident of where and roughly when we lived. On the other hand, the modern metric second is now defined at exactly 9,192,631,770 periods of Cesium-133 for atomic clocks and other reasons, so a locked second is useful for a lot of reasons.
Yeah, you could just start counting from two and call it the standard counting system, but why would you? The current system works fine and there's no need to change it.
The people who support incest porn are a lot less talkative.
As such our windsock government with no strong beliefs does what the survey says is most popular.
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