The main benefit I remember from jumping to Discord from IRC back in the day was the ability to easily see past messages. That said, I’m not sure if that’s a problem anymore on IRC since I haven’t used it in ages. Even then, I don’t think it would be too terribly difficult to whip up a self-hostable fediverse competitor to Discord. It would essentially be IRC++.

It’s probably more of a critical mass issue, though not near the level of Reddit vs Lemmy or Twitter vs Bluesky vs Mastodon. Every Discord server is essentially a walled garden. A Discord server doesn’t hold much advantage over a Slack server, GroupMe, Teams, or IRC. For that reason, it would be a lot easier to move individual communities over.

We already have started to see this with the way social media companies bend their algorithms to match the whims of their political benefactors, both in the West and East. The process of manufacturing consent Chomsky wrote about has only become more refined over time as social media companies developed more and more ways to manipulate people and abandoned any pretext of impartiality.

This coming massacre brought to you by taxpayers like you! Thank you!

Dr West is already running independent, so I doubt it makes much of a difference. How many potential RFK voters would have voted for Biden over Trump or West?

Just start your car. It’s cheaper

Double post, but focusing more on the real computer. Do you have access to a library? Sometimes they have computers people can use. You might be able to load a program to rip onto a USB stick and run it portably (that is, without installing it onto the computer.) Not ideal, but if it’s Windows I think Windows Media Player can rip CDs natively.

In that case, bring in the CDs and the MP3 player, rip the CDs, then load them all at the library. There might even be CDs at the library you can check out as well.

Find the cheapest MP3 player possible, maybe one of those built like a USB stick that can plug into a computer.

Here’s one. There might be better options out there. The idea here is no wifi, no Bluetooth, etc. You could presumably load MP3s onto it just like you could a flash drive. Unlike the flash drive, it can play it back.

As far as ripping CDs, I use EAC. It supports ripping compressed to MP3, among other things. The linked player can play FLAC as well. I imagine most can, but the larger files size of FLAC might become an issue. Other programs exist, of course. It can be done!

No, I’m not Raid. I’m my own original game, Rage. People really need to get their facts straight…

This war brought to you by Rage: Shadow Legends.

OpenTTD. Sure, I had used android, but it was the first thing I consciously knew was open source and enjoyed.

As an investment, a home is risky. For one, you’re only going to have one most likely, so you’re not diversified. While property values do trend up, there’s a myriad of things that could potentially happen to reduce your property value as well. Not to mention, while the land underneath the home increases in value, the value of the home itself (on top of the land) decreases as the house ages.

On top of that, you’re paying maintenance, insurance, and property tax. While yes, it’s better than renting, it’s not necessarily a good investment compared to other investments you can make. On average, you’re going to have a better return on the stock market than a home. True, that’s also risky, but it’s easier to diversify and there’s more money to be made.

Finally, you’re usually leveraged pretty deep on a home. If you default for whatever reason, you’ll be left with nothing. If the bank somehow fails to recover its investment after selling the home (say, because you owed more than it was worth), they can sue you for the difference.

That said, it’s not a bad idea to buy a home. You can always live in it, if nothing else. You might want to buy one just because you want it, which is valid. Lots of people do well on homes. You just need to realize that it’s not as safe or good of an investment as it might seem.

I’ve got a 1000w motor on mine. Is it a motor bike in disguise? Yeah, maybe, since it has a throttle control. Where I live, though, there’s no regulations specific to ebikes. I obey traffic laws and stay off of sidewalks and have a drivers license, so as far as I’m concerned it’s fine. It does go about 25-30 mph, but in my mind it’s a commuter vehicle. I’m not riding on bike trails that share pedestrians and have low speed limits.

If necessary, I could modify it to make it a class three e-bike. The governor, currently off, cuts it to 750w and I could change it from a throttle control to a pedal assist with parts that were part of the kit but are still sitting in the box.

It’s in a legal gray area, as my state’s definition of what constitutes a “motorized bicycle” was written with gasoline engines in mind. There’s lots of unlicensed, uninsured 49cc scooters running around that fall into the same gray area, so it fits right in.

E-bikes are great. I’ve got one I built from a kit. That said, you don’t want kids riding more powerful e-bikes than they can handle. If you wouldn’t let your kid loose with a gas-powered dirt bike that can go 30+ mph, you shouldn’t let them loose with an equivalent e-bike.

I’m against licensing e-bikes or requiring insurance. While they can potentially be dangerous to the rider if misused, danger to other people or property is pretty minimal. The risk isn’t enough to justify requiring liability insurance, like with cars. Licensing will only discourage ridership.

That said, there should be an age requirement for certain classes. In lieu of that, parents are just going to have to exercise common sense. The kids will do what they want, rules be damned.

Probably to spread peace, love, and brotherhood to Islamic Extremists, or something like that.

At the end of the day, all our three-letter and military agencies should be accountable to the civilian government, even if we do have some crackpots running around. They should say what they know, whether it’s what we want to hear or not.

Telegraph does like their doom reader fluff pieces.

I’ll probably toss him a protest vote in the primary. He’s a crackpot and doomed to fail, but instead of an open primary the Dems are circling the wagon around Biden. They’ll shuffle him across the line and we’ll have another 4 years of lackluster neoliberal leadership as our country continues to decline. We may or may not end up with President Harris depending on how Biden fares physically. They’ll push her again in '28 despite her probably continued unpopularity, where she’ll go up against Reacto-tron, the robo-mecha leader of the Republican Party who will win in a landslide on the platform of extinguishing all life on Earth, because neoliberals are just that terrible.

That’s only a problem because of our current economic system. The AI isn’t the problem, the society that fails to adapt is.

The whole operation does have an air of incompetence around it. Either coup or don’t coup, don’t half-ass it. The guy seems like a loose cannon, and I’m surprised that they’re essentially going to let him go. Maybe they’re just happy to have him out of the way.

I’d argue that’s how you know the CIA wasn’t involved. They’re better at coups than this.

It should exist, but be far shorter. The original copyright law in the US was for 14 years, and I’d say that’s about right. We can argue about the exact length, but that’s a good starting point. In the modern age, that’s ample time to profit off of a work, and apparently it was back then, too.

If your movie, for example, hasn’t made you any money in the first fourteen years, it’s not going to make you anything. The vast majority of people aren’t going to see a new movie come out and think “Cool, I’m going to wait fourteen years and watch it for free.” A few might, but not a significant amount.

So the downside, lost revenue for creators (or more realistically, the companies employing the creators) is minimal. The upside? Huge amounts of content becomes available for use. From an economic perspective, this will boost productivity far beyond the lost revenue, leading to a net gain. Those clinging to immortal copyrights will hurt, but the economy on the whole will benefit.

There’s also the moral argument. Free Mickey, man!