I don’t understand how people do things like shopping on their phone. I mean if you’re only buying one or two items, sure, but if you’re doing grocery pickup at Walmart or something how do you even function on a screen that small? You can’t do any kind of comparison without flipping back and forth between multiple tabs.

Mobile is fine for reading articles, instant messaging, etc., but there are a lot of things that are absolutely better on a laptop.

I’ve thought about it; but with a wife and two kids it would be difficult if not impossible to pick up and move somewhere else and start all over.

They are regulated, but there’s a lot of breakdowns in the system. People passing background checks who shouldn’t, prior offenders passing background checks because local cops didn’t report them to the feds, etc. The DC Navy Yard shooter years back literally had fired a weapon into his neighbor’s apartment before and still passed a background check to buy the weapons he committed the shooting with. I also think if you’re a parent and you leave your weapon accessible by your children, and they go shoot up their school, you should be held at least partially liable. As somebody who is former military, the civilian population gets away with a hell of a lot with regards to firearms. No federally mandated training standards, concealed carry licenses are haphazard and go state by state, and not all states recognize other states’ permits, no federally mandated storage requirements, etc. When I was in the military, if I wanted to go target practice on base with my personal weapons I had to register them with the provost marshal on base, keep the weapons and ammo separate in locked boxes out of my reach while driving to the range, etc. And if one weapon went missing the entire base was locked down; gates closed and nobody in or out until it was located. Civilians get by with way too much.

I think a lot of our problem is loose or missing standards at the federal level, which leaves each individual state to kind of make things up as they go along and not communicate properly with feds when things go wrong.

1975 was 49 years ago, that’s basically half a century, 😋

Proton is just Wine from Valve. They add their own fixes and patches and whatnot and have an “experimental” branch you can try with games that don’t work right away, but it’s just Wine. Everything Valve does to Proton eventually makes it way back upstream to Wine proper. One reason Valve may not make it available for MacOS themselves is because they’re basing their SteamOS on Linux, and while MacOS and Linux are both Unix “like”, MacOS was/is more based on BSD, so the system calls may not always line up or work exactly the same when translating them. I do think however that Proton, or a modified version of it at least, is what Apple’s game development kit thingy leverages.

I’m using CalyxOS and it’s pre-installed as a system app, so this seems like something that’s being built in at the AOSP level of development.

I think a big part of it, here in the US, is besides all the post WW2 sentiment, a lot of folks here in the bible belt literally think they are God’s chosen people, and so whatever they do is right by God, no matter how terrible. I recently showed up for jury duty and was speaking to a lady there about her son who had joined the Marine Corps. and thought he might get deployed, and she said, I shit you not, “At least he’ll be fighting for God’s people”.

I’ve seen antisemitism. I’ve been in online communities that slowly devolved into rat caricatures and conspiracy theories about how Jews are out to destroy the world. So I know that modern antisemitism persists and is a thing to watch out for. But it’s not antisemitic to admit that Zionist Israel is butchering innocent people because they want to claim all of Palestine for themselves, and that the west is too weak willed to do anything about it for fear of being called antisemitic, or going against “God’s chosen people”. That’s not antisemitism, it’s an objective, observable fact.

Wow I was seriously shook for a moment until I saw the /s at the end, lol.