This is bad for us too. A cratering stock market slows down hiring which depresses wages and makes it harder to find work.

Both systems are purposefully inefficient and byzantine because it increases tax revenue for the state (and bribes for the state government).

The 3 tier system is where alcohol must be sold by the producer to a distributor, by the distributor to a bar/liquor store, and by a bar/liquor store to the consumer. This effectively allows the state to collect tax 3 times on any one serving of alcohol. Unfortunately, it also results in higher prices and less choice for consumers. You can’t just buy liquor on amazon and have it mailed to your home, you (sometimes) can’t just buy from a local distillery, and you have to pay extra for the distributor to do a lot of not very much.

The dealership system allows local government to collect sales tax on resident’s cars and allows local government officials to collect bribes from car dealers whose entire business relies on their competition being illegal. Without dealerships, you could just order a car from a manufacturer to be shipped to your home and you could buy it without cutting a dealer in, but the local government wouldn’t get the sales tax income and your mayor or whatever wouldn’t get to collect as many bribes.

Automatic weapons are regulated and cost more than a new car. Our firearms laws are lax and have many problems, but that isn’t one of them.

I disagree that there is any way to do it. Ultimately, people don’t want you there and are unhappy enough that they’re willing to die rather than cooperate. It is simply too expensive in terms of man hours, lives, and money to keep a population under occupation like that. At the very least, you need to do as the colonial powers did and exploit a local division to deputize some of the locals to rule on your behalf.

Yes, they win most of them. They mostly lose when they try to occupy a foreign country and do counterinsurgency.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States

whoosh

It would be very useful to people who don’t consume multimedia, especially writers and certain types of hobbyists and office workers.

I generally read moderately niche fiction titles and they’re all there, but I am monolingual so everything is in English.

Iirc kindle books come with DRM, which you can break using a calibre plugin.

Honestly downloading books from libgen is so much easier I don’t think I’ve bought a kindle book in 10 years.

The pocketbook is the best I know of on the market right now. I have one (bought it a few months back) and it is exactly what was advertised.

That’s covered in the article. If you are a noncitizen, you just have to provide documentation that you are here legally.

The BBC, AP, and Reuters are a good place to start.

I like Erin in the Morning, Propublica, and Bellingcat as well, but they require additional work to parse sometimes.

checks current social media landscape

Yep, apparently!

In most countries, the barrel or other pressures bearing parts are the regulated piece. We are the weird ones for regulating receivers instead.

Then you’re exactly the same as the people who passed the book ban in the first place.

If your ideas cannot stand up to the existence of other ideas, then they aren’t good ideas.

Eli5: your PC has different access levels a program can run at. This prevents a malicious or badly coded program from completely fucking your computer. Kernel level anti cheat runs at the lowest level access that exists under windows. It can do basically whatever it wants to your PC, and if a backdoor is coded in (happens way more than you’d think), it gives malware basically total access to your PC.

Reddit has an absolutely massive wealth of community knowledge. If you want to find a community for $thing or gain obscure knowledge on $thing, that’s where you go (assuming there isn’t an old forum post from before Reddit killed forums).

Twitter is where a lot of people still are. If you’re the kind of person to care what a particular person says, that’s where you probably want to be.

Instagram is used by young people who have friends on Instagram.

It isn’t a great system, but it is the system that we have today. This is why legislation compelling Meta/Twitter/whothefuckever to act in an ethical manner is important. Social media is to some extent a natural oligopoly, and unless we get extremely, extremely lucky, the fediverse will always be a niche community.

You don’t. You don’t pick your genetics, your family, the accidents that happen in your life, or even (to a certain extent) your environment.

If you want to save money on health insurance, stop letting insurance and healthcare companies fuck all of us for their own profit.

Literally the entire point of insurance is that everyone pays into a pool which is used to subsidize the people with bad luck who will have to claim more than their peers.