I literally had this happen with my desktop last night, and it’s entirely down to Windows actively choosing to go into sleep mode or not. No activity on the computer, click on sleep, the monitors go off and I started to walk away except I noticed that my keyboard and mouse were still on (the first things to turn off when Windows goes to sleep for me) and the fans were still running. Wiggled the mouse and it had only turned the monitors off. I tried it 2 or 3 more times and Windows kept doing the same thing - putting the monitors to sleep and nothing else. I eventually just straight up shut it down with the power button.

I always love the duality of comments on this topic. America’s military is a Schrodinger’s Military at this point, both terrifying and completely non-existent basically depending on what time of day the conversation happens at.

Canadians can’t help because the military is so powerful (completely obvious and understandable) but also, like somebody up above said, “Americans are feckless sheep” for not shooting up the White House yet.

Everybody’s a hero until it’s their life on the line.

Unfortunately for the US, the rich have spent the decades since the Civil Rights Movement convincing the general populace that their rights were won by holding a snarky sign on a street corner and not by burning down entire city districts after the murder of MLK by the government (which his family proved in court, by the way. Unfortunately, no criminal court would hear the case so it was only in a civil court, but the judge was convinced well enough to find the government guilty).

Years of protesting and nothing solid was accomplished. Within a week of billions of dollars in damage to property and big business, the Civil Rights laws were drafted, voted on, and signed into law.

Unions are the peaceful alternative for negotiations that workers and their bosses agreed upon instead of dragging them out of the factory into the street and beating them to death.

More people need to remember this history.

Even MLK credited the success of his work during the Civil Rights Movement to the Black Panthers being willing to do what he could not, and the Million Man March on Washington - seen today as an example of successful peaceful protest - was a threat to every white American in a seat of power. If he could mobilize a million people to shut down the capital of the federal government peacefully, imagine what else they could do.

Everybody thinks “it could never happen here” right up until it does. We said the same exact thing learning about Nazi Germany in school. Keep an eye out, because I’d say Canada is probably about 10 years behind the US.

Your conservative party has been eyeballing the Republicans as role models for decades, and you had plenty of Trump supporters marching not too long ago. I’ve been watching the Canadian war on science since the conservative administration from 20-25 years ago shut down a decade-long study on the effects of UBI halfway through and sealed the documents because they didn’t like the results that showed that there were noticeable drops in employment in only two groups - pregnant women and students - and that other effects included improved grade scores and graduation rates, increased college enrollment, and a general improvement in the local economy.

So why haven’t you marched down here yourself and taken up the good fight? Or are you just an armchair general making excuses for not protecting freedom and democracy in the world because you’re too chickenshit to actually put your money where your mouth is?

Guess what, everybody’s a hero until it’s their life on the line, and then the truth comes out: the average person is too scared to give up their homes, their food, and their lives. A cornered animal will bite, but if you leave it even one avenue of escape 9 out of 10 times it will bolt.

I was literally just about to post this:

Multiple forms of life evolve to fill an extent niche.

No no no, you’ve got it backwards. It’s .ml users who’d get mad at you for comparing China and the US. “It’s a false equivalency!”

Like I had happen to me just the other day when I compared the US regime’s invasion to the invasion of Ukraine and the lack of any real response from world leaders.

Netanyahu actually would’ve been another good comparison.

My comment wasn’t a “Russia = bad” deflection, but a comment about world leaders’ response to the invasion of Ukraine and what I expect their response to the continuing aggression of the Trump regime to be: strongly worded letters and not much else.

Also, let’s get our facts straight on the genocide in Palestine. The US hasn’t put any boots on the ground yet, despite Trump’s promises from earlier in the year. As of the time that I’m writing this, the US is enabling the genocide but not an active participant. That could change tomorrow or may have already changed, but we don’t need to make things up about the government when there’s already so many evils to point at. They’re already war criminals, we wouldn’t want them to get off on account of making false accusations.

I haven’t watched the Simpsons in over a decade so I don’t get the reference, but my point was the similarity between the world’s response to the invasion of Ukraine and the likely response to continuing US aggression.

A lot of strongly worded letters and not much else is what I expect.

What’s it going to take to truly stop Russia?

Don’t forget about the Sword of Damocles that is the lack of social safety nets. Also, political ignorance is a feature, not a bug in our political system. A quarter of the American population would kill the rest because they think the regime is “hurting the right kind of people” and not anybody that they care about. This also includes the minorities who will soon learn that being “one of the good ones” just means that they go to the showers later rather than sooner.

At least in Massachusetts, they’ve been pushing back making it mandatory since it rolled out. Every time it gets close to the deadline for when it’s supposed to go into effect, they push it back another couple of years.

Reminds me of the boyfriend of an old coworker. Before he turned his life around, he was an addict that the cartels used a few times to run drugs across the border. The way that worked was that they’d dress him up in some nice clothes, a pair of sunglasses, and throw him in a beautiful convertible with the top down and a load of drugs in the trunk. Border patrol would never bother to stop or check a rich white guy coming back from a 3 day weekend in Mexico, and he’d drop the car off at a gas station a few miles past the border.

Agreed, and I vaguely remembered something along these lines from my time cooking them, but I also know how many that I was cooking in a day as just a small scale operation at a local fish market cooking and shucking for lobster meat and cooking for the occasional customer to take home with them (I think the most we did in a day was close to one metric ton), and how unfeasible it is to do on a large scale.

I was doing 50 lbs at a time per pot, with 2 large stovetop pots at a time. That’s 25+ lobsters per pot, averaging probably about 60 lobsters per hour that I was cooking by myself. Imagining trying to do that at an industrial scale sounds like the kind of thing that would effectively kill lobster meat as anything other than an expensive specialty item.

And although maybe it should kill mass market lobster meat (why in the hell does McDonald’s sell lobster rolls in the first place???), I also have a visceral gut reaction to the idea of effectively making a food the exclusive domain of the rich. Especially when my boss at that job would make a big stink about people buying fish with Social Security money like poor people don’t deserve to eat anything other than rice and beans.

I feel like chilling them is even worse. They usually live in cold waters, and chilling them in cold air (like a fridge) will just mostly make them suffocate for a while before you boil them alive. They can live a long time out of the water in a cold environment/on ice (think 24 to 48 hours long, not 2 or 3) because it just slows down their biological processes since they’re cold blooded. They’re just going to warm up again as they’re boiling, and it will probably take longer to start boiling as they have to come back up from a lower temperature.

Even the shock method seems kinda useless. It would need to knock them out for about 20 minutes to ensure that they’re unconscious until they’re dead.

The most humane thing to do would be to kill them somehow in one moment, like with a concussive force or stabbing through the brain stem, but that then runs into the issue of how quickly dead lobsters go bad (also the issue of presentation - people don’t want a crushed lobster staring at them from their plate). It’s actually illegal in plenty of places to sell dead lobsters (or even cook them!) due to this, so they would have to be killed on site just before being cooked, which is a tall order when 1lb of lobster meat requires about 5lbs of lobster to make (roughly about a 20% yield on lobsters) and it takes about 5 years for a lobster to reach 1lb in size (and then about 2 years for every pound after that).

All of this said, it’s all still probably more humane than that one company I used to work with back when I was in this kind of industry that was experimenting with getting raw lobster meat out of lobsters by tossing them into a pressure vessel.

To put it quite simply, Americans don’t know how to protest anymore.

Our communities have been gutted and any support structures destroyed, and we’ve been fed lie after lie for decades about the “proper” way to protest. The only people who can afford to protest are those who have already lost everything and college kids, and they face constant harassment from the progressives for not protesting out of sight where they can be easily ignored and violence from the conservatives and cops with no repercussions.

Everybody else has just enough left to be afraid to do anything that would risk losing it, and they have to spend all their energy trying to keep their head above the water anyway, so they don’t have the time or energy to put towards swimming for dry land. Plus a good portion of the population is busy trying to push everyone else’s heads underwater and drown them. It’s the same reason why the Nazis managed to embroil the entire world in a war and commit one of the worst genocides to date while only making up maybe 25% of the German populace at their largest. I think they maxed out around 15%.

Nothing will happen until a certain threshold of the population has nothing left to lose.

You underestimate the ability of the American populace (Republicans) to handwave away and justify any action so long as it’s their team who’s guilty. It won’t be long until they’re arguing about the distinction between pedos and “minor attracted people” and ephebophilia.

“Something something piracy is a service issue.”

-Gandhi, probably

I somehow managed to delete my long-winded reply while I was typing it, so I’m gonna try to condense it down into something semi coherent.

In short, it’s not the anonymity that I’m arguing for (though I think there’s a very important debate to be had about the erosion of privacy through removing anonymity on the net), but the strengths of social platforms on the internet that are being abused by bots and AI slop. I think that a blanket ban is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We need to regulate the bad actors somehow and moderate the amount of social media that kids use, but to effectively ban kids from being able to interact with people outside of their local communities is a bad precedent.

The big strength of the internet (and why it’s so important in empowering oppressed groups like the queer community) is in the ability to connect people and rapidly spread information regardless of distance. They want to take over TikTok because it’s been credited as a major platform in dispelling the Israeli funded myths about the genocide of the Palestinians. Protests of college students broke out on campuses all over the US over colleges getting funding from Israel and the production and sale of weaponry. That didn’t just appear out of nowhere, that information was spread through social media in real time. You can’t get that from a book at the local library (you should still support your local library though, they do so much for a community beyond being a source of knowledge). But this rapid spread of information is exactly what makes the AI slop and all the other garbage (ads, misinformation, the list goes on and on) such a problem, because the bad stuff makes money for the big corporations who run the social media platforms we use. But that doesn’t mean we should ban a tool because people use it maliciously or excessively to the point of harm. Nobody is calling for a ban on TV for kids under 16 despite it having a negative effect on our attention span and being filled with channels like Fox News.

Plus, I am always wary of these “protect the children” campaigns because they are often a false flag to actually restrict minorities’ rights - often queer people. You see this most prominently with porn bans, but stuff like this that allows a government/group to better censor information and control the narrative come up time and time again. There was an attempt not long ago to get rid of Massachusetts’ multi-grade standardized test program called the MCAS. Standardized testing has its issues, but the groups pushing for the removal had no plans to replace it with any form of statewide teaching standards or anything, they just wanted to be able to teach kids that evolution is fake and gay kids go to Hell.

Also, I work with teenagers. They can’t read. Every year standardized tests get easier. The average ACT score in Florida is now 18. That’s almost the same as answering at random, and these kids pay for the exam in an effort to go to college.

I hate to tell you this, but I think this is a Florida issue. Florida is one of the worst states in a country that has been fighting against intelligence for decades now. Boomers but proudly illiterate is exactly what those in power - especially people like DeSantis - want. But the same internet that allows this to happen can also be used to give these kids a better chance. I go on YouTube and see videos of people making a fully working jet engine out of a can of Coke or a hobbyist launching a 3d printed rocket that breaks the sound barrier. I see kids learning about orbital mechanics and reentry heating through Kerbal Space Program and simple circuitry through Red Stone Minecraft tutorials. I see trans elders supporting trans kids who may otherwise never make it to adulthood - sometimes even to the point of telling them their legal rights and helping them get out of abusive households. I see up to the minute medical research news coming from furries who worked on the COVID vaccines on Bluesky. I see so much art, music, and support for passion projects that introduce people to interests that they never knew they had. And I would never want to take all that from kids.