I mean, presumably if I’m standing outside my car with a key, I just unlock the door and open it. Can’t do that with a dead tesla.

I think Selaco beat him to the punch there. I am by no means a game designer but it’s seriously impressive what they did with the gzdoom engine. I have a hard time imaging anything that could top it within the same engine.

Thing is, this already happens, it’s just currently more in the billionaire’s favor because instead of tax it’s a “donation”. You’re proposing the same system that already exists with lobbyists and Super PACs, just more enforced. No one is going to bite that bait when they can just pay Scheister and Swindel, Attorneys at Law, to cut a private deal with the CEOs and senators of their choice, be completely unbeholden to public opinion about it, and not be required to do it again next tax season if it’s not profitable to do so.

Besides, I’ve had quite enough of rich assholes deciding that this year they’re going to donate $80m to exterminate the gays / to shut down solar startups / to arm all the cops with rocket launchers. In every situation, given the choice, they will always invest their money into whatever is most immediately profitable to them, morals or longevity be damned. This would cause our already easily-purchased politicians to be even more easily purchased and with semi public approval, as Elongated Muskrat now has a legal right to billionaire hero-worship? No thanks.

The special billionaire tax isn’t an awful idea. The perks attached to it are most definitely an awful, no good, very bad idea. If something like this did get implemented it would be an absolute requirement that the investor have no say in where these taxes are spent. They may advise in certain directions, but final say should be up to a jury of some sort.

That’s plan B, we can’t lead with that. But believe me, it is on the table.

You may have discovered the secret of how to return to monke.

There are few problems in the world that a good dremel can’t fix

This might be one of them though

Infinite possibilities does not mean all possibilities. It is possible - even probable, in most cases - to have an infinite set which does not contain all possible members.

As an example, the set of all even numbers and the set of all whole numbers are both infinite sets with completely different contents. Even accounting for the fact that the set of all whole numbers contains the entire set of all even numbers, the two will still differ by a factor of 50%.

I think that Vsauce explains this concept a little better than I can as I am not a mathematician, I merely watch their content on the internet.

But regardless I’m at the hospital for them to remove a teacup from my ass. I am not leaving this hospital until the teacup comes out of the asshole in question. They’re going to be working closely in that area anyway, I would think checking for contusions would be standard practice. It’s not like the relative insertion speed of this teacup is going to break my elbow as well, any injuries are going to be generally in the same zip code.

And if this attitude spreads, which arguably it should, the service will simply be shut down. Unfortunately I think this may end up being a great loss for humanity as a whole if that happens. Elsewhere in this thread I compared it to the Library of Alexandria for its sheer content of 20-odd years worth of nearly all of humanity’s culture, news, and technical information.

I don’t know what to do with this. The dragon must be slain but the hoard must be preserved, and I’m not sure how we accomplish that. The contents of YouTube should be backed up and made available to a public data store outside of Google’s grasp, ideally as a public utility probably maintained by tax money, and youtube can remain as a front-end to that service. But actually getting that done in the modern day seems… we’ll say, slim. For one thing the total youtube data package is about a fucktillion gigabytes and the only people able to host it are the ones who already have it. For another, Google will argue in court that videos uploaded to their service are their property, and they’ll win that argument.

So we can start again anew, but we must mourn what we lose, because it may be significant. Like it or not, YouTube is a significant percentage of the recorded data output of the human race. Just pray, once we kill the beast, that you never have to replace any parts on a car model year 2004-2018 - because you won’t find good repair manuals anywhere and all the good tutorials are buried in the belly of YouTube.

Unfortunately it is such a repository of information that it’s nearly unavoidable anymore. It’s a reference tool. Need to fix your car? YouTube knows how. Need to write a piece of code with a tool you’re unfamiliar with? A random Indian man has posted a YouTube video explaining how. Need to find a hidden item in a video game? YouTube. There are many and varied reasons I’d pull up a YouTube video outside of the intended purpose of “watching YouTube” for entertainment. Many of these things can, technically, be conveyed through different media but often poorly and with a much lower rate of understanding. The sheer volume of knowledge and culture lost if Google ever takes down YouTube’s servers will be akin to the burning of the Library of Alexandria and that is not a joke. I don’t want to “watch YouTube” anymore for the most part but it is inescapable to me for several purposes as a reference material.

We’re about to have a great big shattering of the internet and I’m all for it. Collating the pieces will be a pain in the ass for a couple years but some handful of nerds out there blessed by the spirit of Ritchie will create a tool for it, and what’s left of our world will be a better place for it.

Every person I know who has flown in the last six months has inquired about the manufacturer of their plane before boarding

Signal also does jack all unless both parties are using Signal. In this case, might be fine. Need to talk to anyone else in your life? It’s back to iMessage.

I love Signal and will probably never get rid of it but the use case for it has shrunk tremendously since they removed the ability to message non-signal users.

95% of their customers are businesses, who no, they don’t understand that. But their IT department does.

Only a true AdMech would consider his backup file to be an STC. I’m laughing, but also, respect. Praise the Omnissiah.

Where is hbomberguy when the world needs him

Disagree. Currency allowed the flourishing of civilization. You can’t effectively trade between cultures or at long distances on the barter system.

What we’ve done with currency since then, yeah, maybe we’re on the same side there. But currency, created as an abstract for value, was a great invention. Civilization as we know it would not have been possible without it.

Though, now that I mention that… maybe civilization “as we know it” isn’t so hot after all.

Don’t you love when you end up talking yourself out of your own argument?

Seriously, this is a valid point. Introverts, please at least try to have more than a single friend. It’s hard, I know, I’m one of you. But I’ve also been someone else’s only friend and sometimes you just can’t be there when they need you. It doesn’t mean they love you any less but each person is the main character of their own story, not yours, and sometimes you can’t be the focus of today’s chapter. Having more than one person you can lean on will be better for you and better for each of those friends and it’ll help you keep friends longer.

While I definitely agree with this and encourage it, most often this happens at work. I got shit to do, I don’t have the time to debate politics with a random customer. Sometimes I’d love to, and some rare times I actually get to have a good long conversation with someone like that, but 99% of the time I really want you to just shut up so I can keep it moving. No matter how much I want to tell someone that Game of Thrones was a genuinely good show for 80% of its runtime, or that Joe Biden isn’t the literal devil.

1. Friends
2. Friends with different versions
3. Friends with different versions who own link cables

I was like three steps removed from being able to evolve my Kadabra. I think I met one kid ever who had a link cable.