I mean, as the law is written there’s zero requirement for the entered age to be verified, only to associate an age bracket with the OS user account and to provide that info to programs as they require it. Now, I do wonder if a California-compliant OS would require service accounts to have an entered date of birth and what kind of fun that could potentially lead to of you enter the date of account creation as the birthdate but the full ramifications remain to be seen

Italians in general weren’t even considered ‘white’ untill… the 70s?

Why does this just make me think of those tweets from when Luigi was arrested

we’re finally on the verge of learning once and for all if Italians are White

And once he received terrorism charges

The final answer on “what are Italians” is apparently “middle eastern”

Yeah it could be like carnivorous plants on earth, where they can get a decent amount of nutrients from the soil and through photosynthesis but they still need to eat flies and whatnot to get fully enough nutrients.

Although given the thousand year digestion it would make more sense if they digestion is a form of reproduction or life extension than if it’s for nutrient gain

there is no such thing as objective media of any kind anymore

All media has bias. Always has. Literally even just in the choice of what to report on, what to investigate, how and what gets written about. Best thing anyone can do is realize this, and reject the billionaires narratives and write their own shit. Make zines and hand them out! Make political shitposts on the internet! Make radical stickers and graphiti. Reject the manufactured narrative and write your own and share it to normalize it!

I mean this is generally a sign of growth by the content creator, shifting from whatever “personalized” ads the ad network decides to show, to having their own relationships with advertisers and doing their own ads. Honestly its a good thing because it means that the people making the content also have full control over who they sell ad space to and how that ad space is used, and if viable platforms other than Youtube existed, they would be able to to run their videos profitably without excessive user tracking

I mean choosing to believe things won’t get any better is just pessimistic thinking, plus its counter-productive because if you don’t believe in a better tomorrow how can you make today the first/next step towards a better tomorrow?

The best time to plan a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is now. Why not be hopeful about the future and lay the groundwork to make some small improvement to your corner of the earth?

Holy crap I’ve never seen any of this before but now I’ve watched the entire first season and need to watch the rest

I’ve never quite understood this, because the birth rate is highest at the lowest income level. So, the people who are least able to afford child care have the most kids.

The child tax credit makes a huge difference. It’s something like $6k per kid per year when they’re under the age of 8 I think it was? When you’re only making around 40-50k per year, an extra 8-10k each tax season is a huge opportunity to improve your finances. I knew one family that had 3 or 4 kids, probably made about 40k per year, they’d stop paying their electricity bill during the winter because the utility can’t legally disconnect you from your heating source in the winter then pay off the debt each tax season.

Additionally many of our social safety net programs are based on family income, with the income threshold increasing as family size increases, so a family making 50k a year with 1 kid might not qualify for food assistance, but a family making 50k a year with 3 kids probably will. Medicaid also will cover fulltime childcare in many states, further negating the financial hurdles of having kids, and once the kids are old enough you can have the older kids babysit the younger ones further reducing costs (of course parentification is very pervasive in this way!) there’s a lot of hurdles that this funding can bypass (then of course put parents in a tight spot that they have to figure out when a new technicality is added to kick them off of these benefits)

Green estimated that food makes up just 5% to 7% of household spending, but put housing at 35% to 45%, childcare at 20% to 40%, and health care at 15% to 25%.

Yeah that tracks. For my family we spend about $500/month on groceries, around 35% of our income on housing (call it about $1600/mo including utilities), and until our vehicle was paid off around 25% of our income went to that.

We got lucky in that we had a family member willing to babysit for us while I went back to college then when they started getting too toxic I snagged a job making just enough for my wife to be a stay at home mom. We absolutely could not have afforded kids if it weren’t for either of those factors didn’t work out. We’d probably still have my wife and I working opposing shifts and both being just sleep deprived enough to be biting each other’s heads off and possibly divorced by now (we had the opposing shifts thing going when we got married, and when she had a week off for her wedding, we both started getting good sleep again and stopped fighting and I had a second honeymoon phase as I was like “oh yeah I remember why I fell in love with you again!”)

The argument could be made that kids conceived right now will be the next richest generation as we have to be rapidly approaching the breaking point with the current second gilded age

Hey man, I’m sorry that I did put you in that position with my comments! I thought you were exaggerating about the social anxiety (I’ve known several people who do) and that it was like myself where the best thing to do is to push past it, be awkward and do whatever it is anyways to build the skills to be less awkward later

I hope my comments are worth saving and coming back to later! I’ve had my own thoughts and ideas for running events in my community but I have my own challenges I should work on before undertaking such a project. But I did dump a basic framework for creating an event based on my experience volunteering at a few nonprofits and helping them run events so maybe there’s something there?

So American elections are fucking weird. Every state holds its own elections and can set their own laws and processes for how elections are held. This is part of why Iowa has caucuses, some states require party registration where you can only vote within your registered party, who can vote absentee and how etc.

Republicans have been pushing hard in the last 20 years or so to push voter ID laws as a method of voter disenfranchisement. Voter ID laws require every voter to have a valid state or federal ID with their current address. Since there’s no universal ID provided by the federal government this is typically handled by the DMV (even for IDs which are not drivers licenses) which republicans have also been slashing funding for, so if you moved at the end of your 12 month lease, you now can’t vote until you visit your local DMV on one of the 2 weekdays a month that they’re open, pay processing fees for the privilege of updating your ID just so you can vote in an election where most of the candidates are running unopposed and you can’t get any info on anyone in the nonpartisan local elections because the only local newspaper is paywalled and didn’t bother to do any election coverage anyways once you’ve either paid up or found a way to bypass the paywall

Since elections are held by the states they’ve had to perform this push on a state by state basis, but they’ve had big donors behind them pushing at the local level and upwards for quite a while. It’s a wonderful confluence of factors which have brought us to this point but it’s not hard at all to see where the wealthy have put their fingers on the scales to gain more control

Don’t forget Will Smith was a Rapper and DJ first, ended up deep in a financial hole because he didn’t save any money for taxes following his musical success, took the role on Fresh Prince to try to keep the lights on and then Fresh Prince ended up being super successful and leading him to his second and even more successful career in acting

I think part of it is that in hindsight it’s a super fucking trans-coded film. I bet the Wachowskis didn’t realize it until later either. Honestly I love it and I think it adds another whole layer to everything.

I still appreciate that he actually acted out the AI clips of him eating spaghetti

Edit: found it on Instagram and I could watch the clip in a private tab successfully, didn’t see any better hosts on a quick search though

I recently rewatched it and it was a good romp for sure. I never read the comics but apparently it was super unlike the comics it was based on which was part of its problem. Generally pissing off your core audience of fans in an adaptation is bad for the outcome of the movie

I suppose I could see Inception as being a very risky film based on the script, to be completely fair

I suspect its more about creating extra paperwork hurdles to voting. More paperwork means it takes more time investment to be able to vote at all, thereby disenfranchising voters with less free time and Republicans have already done the math on that and enacted voter ID laws in many states because the math works out for them

Any of the ideas I’d said above wouldn’t be solo operations. Sure they could be but finding a friend to be your business partner or creating a small organization to manage and run things both helps manage risk but also helps fill in the gaps in your own skillset.

The easy option is just to talk to the local library about running a film festival, get it scheduled in the community room and put on the library events calendar and just bring a laptop and a projector if the library doesn’t have one and watch some public domain films. This can grow into a larger indie film festival in time and in the short term you can get your feet wet and have some fun doing something meaningful in your community

Now if you wanted to go all out and do it for real with an actual budget (still only talking single digit thousands at the most though! I know folks who spend that much annually on their private hobbies, and if you play your cards right you can probably break even pretty easily) and really try to make something of the whole thing, this would be my gameplan if I were to try to set one up in my town:

1. Enlist some friends/trusted family members to help run it, create some loose organization amongst your enlisted folks to help delegate tasks and share the responsibilities and costs, create a regular meeting/working session schedule and break out into task forces as needed
2. Look around your local community and identify potentially suitable event spaces. Is there a local art gallery or community center you can rent out? Maybe an indoor/outdoor space at a park you can rent out from the city? What’s the cost to rent it out for an evening? How many people would be allowed in the space at once and what would it take to setup a projector, some speakers and a laptop?
3. If you find a suitable enough space and have reached this stage, strongly consider officially registering your organization (a non-profit would probably be lowest-risk since businesses and governments love donating to non-profits and it makes it much easier to rely on volunteer labor and donated hardware and licenses further reducing risk) this is also the stage where you should have ideally identified your budget and general gameplan for running this thing
4. Consult your local government and any local colleges for assistance. See if you can get any film, culture, English or even just liberal arts instructors on board with helping boost your event. Your city government may have resources they can offer as well, since boasting an indie film festival is usually a good thing for any city. This is one instance where living in/basing your operation in a smaller town is a big benefit because the local government will likely be excited to help however they can to build more local culture and draw to the town.
5. Schedule it! Book your reservation of the event space
6. Advertising! Post fliers, ensure its mentioned in the local paper and local news (if they exist) make sure its listed on the events schedules that would be relevant. Get any local/regional colleges aware of the event so that students might come attend. Contact the senior centers and make sure you’re on their event calendars so you get some bored retirees to attend too
7. Get your equipment in order. If you went the non-profit route contact local AV/IT companies for donations of equipment/time. Many of these companies will donate both in exchange for plastering their company name on event as a sponsor. Also get your food vendor(s) in order. See if there’s a good spot for a food truck to setup shop and contact some local food trucks to gauge interest. This is also the stage to line up your tuxedo rental so you can look the part when you give your opening/closing speech about how proud you are to have seen this event come together
8. Run the event! This is probably the hardest part because everything you thought would be fine will go wrong, while the parts you thought would catastrophically fail go perfectly, but ultimately its fine because its a brand new indie film festival and nobody expects it to have the polish of Sundance or the Grammys.
9. Do it again the next year! Or even in 6 months! Once you’ve held a couple of festivals you’ll start collecting some regular attendees, made some extremely important contacts, and you’ll have started to establish a reputation. Maybe this is just a cool thing you do now, or maybe it grows into an actual big thing! (if it does and my comment inspired you, please let me know though! I’d love to know if my random brain dumps on weird corners of the internet actually impact people in meaningful ways!)

Its very cyberpunk for sure! I think it was Cyberpunk Edgerunners where in the background of many street scenes there’s folks just zonked out on the street with little fap machines going nuts on their junk while the world passes them by, completely oblivious to everything