One of the biggest problems with human societies is that parents, by necessity, have their brains broken and, due to modern values/life, are under constant strain. Being a parent means (generally) the kid is priority 1, then there’s everything else. This is a necessary irrationality, but if this means you have to do the occasional genocide or violate someone else’s civil rights to ‘keep our kids safe’ then, by god, those people are just going to have to suck it up and die. Sometimes, if you have the time, you can talk some people around and remind them, one day their kids are going to have to live in society as one of those 'someone else’s and won’t always be their precious little baby, but almost no one has the time and energy for a more nuanced thought than ‘save the babies!’ much less if they also have to work 48 hours, commute 10 hours, and parent their kid(s) for 167 hours each week.

‘Your call is not important to us. Please hang up, and don’t try again.’

I’d reinforce point one with consideration of cost/benefits. Purchase, install, maintenance, replacement, and compliance with legal requirements are all going to have a cost. Most people don’t feel like they’re getting their money’s worth out of having an HOA in the first place, much less want to pay more for essentially no benefit. Since the primary benefit of security cameras (if not being professionally monitored) is deterrence, maybe you could get the benefit without the invasion or cost with some dummy cams. <10% of the cost for 99% of the benefit.

Automate

Not a complex thread either

Flow beginning>audio volume?(proceed: when changed, audio stream: alarm)>audio volume set(100%)>back up to audio volume?

Not rooted means you’d have to start automate after a reboot but otherwise no effort.

Asking a question and answering it in the next sentence… is there a word for that?

Don’t forget the third thing ads tell you: ‘Our product is, at best, no better than our competitors’, and quite possibly much worse, otherwise we wouldn’t have to spend so much on controlling our reputation.’

Or Tubular

Battling anything is built of two parts, making it immoral, and making it illegal. Making it illegal makes it easier to argue that it’s immoral, because many people take cues for their morality from legality, but if you want to keep it illegal you have to maintain the cultural belief in its immorality. Each reinforces the other.

Trump has a lot that seems might be wrong with him, but schizophrenia never really seemed to be on the list. Narcissism, dementia, psycho-/socio-pathy, compulsive lying, and possibly more, but I’ve never gotten the feeling he displayed the hyperpatternicity I associate with schizophrenia.

Maybe it has the right balance of enough coverage to expose the horrors that always occur among people and enough of your attention to let you see it. The rest of the world is probably equally or more horrific, but not noted by the coverage you see.

The thing about compelling lies is not that they are new, just that they are easier to expand. The most common effect of compelling lies is their ability to get well-intentioned people to support malign causes and give their money to fraudsters. So, expect that to expand, kind of like it already has been.

The big question for me is what the response will be. Will we make lying illegal? Will we become a world of ever more paranoid isolationists, returning to clans, families, households, as the largest social group you can trust? Will most people even have the intelligence to see what is happenning and respond? Or will most people be turned into info-puppets, controlled into behaviours by manipulation of their information diet to an unprecedented degree? I don’t know.

The trick is, snake oil salesmen exist because there are customers. You might be smart enough to spot them coming, but many, many, many people are not. Being dismissive of scamming as an issue because you can spot them is like being dismissive of drownings because you know how to swim. It ignores the harm to your world done by having others around you destroyed, sometimes because they are cocky and hubristic, sometimes just because they were caught in a weak moment, just a bit too tired to notice the difference between rn and m in an email address.

Every time I see James Gunn mentioned, I can only think of Charles.

Great, just in time for the number of shipments of imports needing to be distributed across the US to plummet…

This just in: Actor does promotional stunt to promote their movie, tune in next time to hear about how a certainpolitician has shockingly told people to vote for them

A ways back, I saw an article about how the French were rioting because their retirement age was being increased from 62 to 64. I remarked that it was interesting to see the French rioting against a change that wouldn’t even quite bring them to parity with the US but Americans can’t be bothered to riot for almost anything. A Frenchman said they didn’t want to even be more like the US in any way.

This law is absolutely the now-classic American attitude that kids can watch violent movies all day, but if they’rEXC exposed to one female nipple, you gotta shut it all down. Is France turning into America now, following Britain down the red, white, and blue path?