Ive usually seen “Expat” defined as someone working in another country, but explicitly with the intent to be there temporarily and leave once their time at that job ends, rather than moving there with an intent to stay and join that society. Which, granted, doesnt seem to be what OP is actually talking about in this case.

from the sound of it, no, the article suggests that someone probably commanded them to fire back in the 70s while the thing still worked, and its just unclear when exactly this was and who did it.

Because having a revolver or a rifle or something is going to really do anything if the government comes after you personally.

Any actual resistance movement capable of achieving much is going to find a way to arm itself regardless of if the country theyre from allowed guns during peacetime or not, they seem to in other countries that such things have formed in after all. Could be through illicit purchases from elsewhere, or homemade weapons, or theft, or whatever else, it always seems to happen.

to be fair, he had more checks on his power then, had less motive for revenge against the justice and electoral systems, and is now even more crazy. Im hoping it will be just some incompetence and international embarrassment, but Im worried that it might be more.

well no, there just arent any wind turbines as far as I remember. No solar either

I mean, theres geothermal

Satisfactory is a weird game where coal and oil are renewable, but trees, as far as I’m aware, are not.

Back when computers were nowhere near capable of teaching kids, one can handwave away issues with the tech by saying “when the tech is ready to do this, it will be great” essentially. When the tech is at the point where it can sort of do something, but not do it well, one instead imagines how badly things might go if one tried the notion right now instead of at whatever point in the future the technology is good enough to actually do a good job.

I mean, It has partially worked, information is more accessible than it would be if you had to go find a library and search through a ton of book that may or may not even have what youre looking for, or had to try to find someone who knew something or had some skill that you wanted to learn. And it has brought together people across distance, consider the number of online communities and subcultures whos members live in far-removed places, some of whom might be in fairly small towns or rural areas that just wouldnt have enough people of a particular interest to even have a branch of that community there. And it does also reduce the monopoly on dissemination of news and information that traditional media outlets and governments used to share. Its just, the predictions didnt also take into account that it would increase the ease of spreading false information either, or that not all debates have an answer that is obvious to everyone if only they are presented certain info, or that people wont want to talk to everyone and will instead choose to talk to those they find commonality with even given the means to talk to people they dont.

While I do agree, I also find that even though I find VR a lot more intense and enjoyable than any flat screen game I’ve played, I also only rarely use mine even still. There’s something about it that seems to make it a hassle to use casually somehow, between actually getting the headset straps feeling comfortable, getting the passthrough cables plugged, launching driver programs on both the pc and the headset just to get to steamvr. It’s not a problem at all if I’m feeling specifically like doing VR stuff for a couple hours as it doesn’t take that long, but if I’m recently home from work and want to just chill for a bit without really knowing what, even that inconvenience means that the VR stuff basically never gets used for me.

My current VR headset feels a lot more polished than my previous, older one, or previous experience with earlier devices owned by people I was visiting, and admittedly I bet it’s probably a bit smoother on standalone than on pc passthrough like I go for, but I feel like to really take off, putting it on is going to need to not feel like setting up a printer whilst wearing a box on your head.

Iirc the Russian casualty rate was supposedly on the order of 1000 a day recently, so probably implying the former.

Theres someone I sometimes encounter in a discord Im in that makes a hobby of doing stuff with them (from what I gather seeing it, they do more with it that just asking them for a prompt and leaving them at that, at least partly because it doesnt generally give them something theyre happy with initially and they end up having to ask the thing to edit specific bits of it in different ways over and over until it does). I dont really understand what exactly it is this entails, as what they seem to most like making it do is code “shaders” for them that create unrecognizable abstract patterns, but they spend a lot of time talking at length about technical parameters of various models and what they like and dont like about them, so I assume the guy must find something enjoyable in it all. That being said, using it as a sort of strange toy isnt really the most useful use case.

“hey Google, download Firefox for me please.”

-“Im sorry Dave, I cant let you do that…”

I would think of life as being ordered, yes. complicated, and with components small enough that we have a hard time envisioning it, but its not really much different from what you would get if you made a bunch of microscopic robots able to assemble more of themselves, and had them stick together to form a larger structure. We would probably imagine such things be made of something other than water and carbon chemistry, because when we make machines we usually use metal and silicon, but at the scale of cells where a component can be an individual molecule, carbon chemistry works well. I just think that we have poor intuition for what chaotic and ordered systems look like if the scale is beyond what we can see unaided.

why doesnt it make sense for a natural system? What do you expect a natural system to look like? As far as I can imagine, a universe that can be observed must display some consistent sent of mathematical rules (because any universe that did not, would be too chaotic to allow an ordered system like life to exist within it, and therefore all observers will find themselves existing within the limited ones), and a simulation is itself just executing a bunch of mathematical rules, and so any universe you can exist in will appear indistinguishable from a simulated one from the inside (unless the simulators do something specifically to reveal it).

The poor have always been treated poorly. But if you look at the people that actually have most of the influence in society, they’ve generally been mostly men. Not exclusively, and less now than before, but you can hardly argue the distribution of power has been anything close to 50 50. Talking about this isn’t ignoring that poor men (and poor women for that matter) are and have been exploited for their labor- because that is simply a different conversation than the one on gender status. There can be more than one issue in play in society at a time, and it is not ignoring or denying the rest to talk about one of them without bringing up every single other one while doing it

Is there a reason that you use some character (I’m afraid I don’t know the name of it) wherever you would otherwise use “th”? I can’t guess if it’s some kind of technical issue with federated text, something from a different language you’re incorporating, or one of those “I think we should add x symbol to the language so I’ll use it to draw attention to the effort” deals, like with the people that use the combined !? symbols whenever both are relevant at once.

being treated as an object of reverence to be kept and provided for rather than a person of equal contributions to be given the same status as everyone else, is itself a form of oppression. Consider that “revered and provided for” is also the status of a cat, and while we certainly love those, they arent exactly treated as anything like our equals.

Did the judge actually determine it, or did the judge just relay information given to them by someone else?

I’m not sure that something like a public orgy would be a good idea, not because of “morals” (I tend to think modern society is far too repressed about sexual stuff), but because of the health implications that would come of encouraging sexual contact between large groups of strangers. That sounds like a recipe for STI spread unless you were very strict and thorough with testing, vetting participants, and enforcing protective measures, which inevitably not every instance would be.