Some people are tropical rainforests, others are arid wastelands.

A contender for the least surprising leak ever

The “new” one looks 1970s or so, from before widespread adoption of CAD systems that could do curved surfaces easily.

Given that the Republicans just voted to allow Trump to unilaterally wage war in Venezuela, I have my doubts.

In early-20th-century America, they called these interurbans. You could get (slowly) from New York to the Midwest using only a chain of them.

Surely that’s when humanity has forgotten how to be selfish and the state withers away, leaving a utopia of fully actualised workers for whom work and play are indistinguishable, both being ways of joyously participating in society.

Godwin’s Law was an artefact of a time when we knew that Nazis were as extinct as Vikings and Mongol hordesmen, and comparing someone to one was dramatic hyperbole. It, of course, no longer applies.

Also, in the age of online communications, when information can be limitlessly copied, it’s impossible for authoritarians to destroy information they disapprove of. It is possible, however, for them to make it difficult to find by flooding the world with vast quantities of plausible-looking alternatives to it, making it hard to identify what is real. Before LLMs, doing this at the sort of scale that would have been effective was prohibitively laborious.

Ariana was a brand name used by a Chinese manufacturer of cheap luggage of the sort you’d find in neighbourhoods with working-class immigrant populations. I once had a backpack of theirs which was the maximum airline carry-on size, which is to say, muy grande.

Isn’t that Donald Trump’s phone background?

Antelope and lion have “fundamental disagreement” about lunch.

Was the video made in Australia or New Zealand by any chance? There are two Microbees (Z80-based computers from New Zealand, virtually unheard of in the northern hemisphere) in the photo,

The flapper sounds both more fun and more space-efficient

He’s probably all for it. More persecution of Jews abroad = more emigration to Israel = more IDF troops and settlers for newly conquered lands. Everyone’s a winner!

I’m sure they just wanted them to wish them all a happy Hanukkah. Right?

Isn’t she some kind of right-wing influencer? The crazy was probably a plus.

America! Fuck yeah!

Pros for Saab: Sweden has neither the means nor the intention to threaten Canada

I can vouch for Mythic Beasts

Intelligence can’t keep the entire population under surveillance and run precrime on people who are otherwise not suspects. For one, the idea that anyone could suddenly become a suspect because an algorithm determines from their credit card record, instant messaging keywords and/or fitness tracker readings that they may be suspicious is incompatible with a liberal society. Secondly, it wouldn’t work: terrorism is so rare that even an accurate algorithm would get mostly false positives.

Making it harder to get and keep guns does work. Civilians don’t need military-grade assault rifles in general, farmers don’t need an entire arsenal of firearms, and sporting shooters can keep their firearms in a secure locker at an accredited club facility, as they do in other countries.