I'm a host, and have been for many years. This really should have been the default all along.

Clearly, he's a winner. So, which agency is Trump going to put him over?

Sure, I'm American, and I think the CCP deserves plenty of criticism.

But I'm WAY more worried about the free speech throttling by social media companies led by American billionaires who are cozied up to the far right wing of our own country's politics.

And X can't? Or Meta? Or Google/YouTube? Or various TV and radio networks? Or church pulpits?

The only way to counter one-sided speech is more free speech Forcing TikTok to be sold to one of the existing players above (or some other group of billionaires) will just further reduce people's opportunity to hear a wider variety of voices driven by a wider variety of algorithms.

FWIW, there's plenty of both MAGA and Kamala on my FYP, despite my having a hard preference for one of them. Meanwhile, X has been shifting far-right for over a year, slowly drowning out my own feed with random MAGA / Joe Rogan types who I have zero interest in but Elon seems to love. So if we're going to start whining about election tampering, let's start there.

If you are a consultant and see "enterprise" databases made by Fortune 500 companies, you'll see a lot of this "schema rot," due to patching, organizational disfunction, merging of data from old (and incompatible) legacy systems, lack of written documentation and version control, and chaos left behind by past hiring of low-cost contractors who neither understand database design nor the business domain the database should be modeling. You'll also often find that only a few people have been there long enough to "know where the skeletons are buried," and they're so busy trying to fight fires and create convoluted reports from bad data that they can't ever find the resources to address those issues.

YouTube premium is ridiculously expensive. It's the same price as Disney+, but where Disney has sunk millions of dollars into creating every *minute* of content you watch on their platform, Google gets most of its content for *free*, they just host it and pay a tiny slice to a small fraction of the channels.

If it was $5 a month for my whole family, I'd pay it. But not $14. Even if, for that $5, only non-monetized channels were ad-free. Most of the time I spend on YouTube, which isn't much, is watching random repair videos for (insert random device/appliance) or watching smaller creators who aren't monetizing or who just do their own in-video sponsorships.

Precisely. I lead a camp there. We stayed an extra half-day so our vehicles could roll, did our extensive "MOOP" sweep to ensure we left *no* trash on our site (or part of the road in front of us), and got in line to exit.

We saw a *few* abandoned vehicles while exiting (people who drove in mud and/or not on the Gate road when they were told to stay). A few vehicles out of 40,000 vehicles on site during the event is a nothing-burger.

I'm sure there will be more trash than usual this year for Restoration crews to clean up. Not just based on the rushed exits for some, but also due to temporary tire ruts giving more places for small bits of trash to hide. Also, it was going to be a "moopier" year already, I believe due to larger last-minute "burgin" crowd this year than normal -- many core people took this year off after last year's heat, leaving camps scrambling to find and quickly acculturate newbies.

But from what I saw on-site with our camp, our neighbors, camps we walked past during the last few days, and on the way out, burners are doing what burners do -- building a city, tearing it down, and leaving no trace. I have full faith that Resto volunteers and staff will do what they always do and pick up the slack for the minority of the participants who don't care about the playa or the communities around them.

Acer still exists?

Once again, the blame goes not to the manufacturers who choose plastic for convenience, price, and shelf life, but to consumers, who mostly have the choice of one plastic or another.

Climate change, environmental pollution, and the water crisis won't be solved by berating individual consumers and households, asking them to pay unreasonably high prices for sustainable products. This only changes the actions of a small percentage of consumers -- the highly motivated ones who have the privilege to be able to pay more.

The only solutions here that **scale** involve regulation (artificial constraints), because that's the thumb on the scale needed to force companies to innovate and change, which then drives down the price of better options for consumers.

Case in point: back when seat belts were optional accessories, they were expensive and rate, and the number of lives they saved were a rounding error. But since they became required, the price to produce one is now tiny, and the number of lives they've saved is innumerable.

You can't "steal" copyright by stealing their NFT.

Copyright, trademark, likeness, and patent rights are legal constructs, not digital ones. IP rights can be conveyed by contract, including digital transactions. But for any contract to be held valid **legally*, there must be a "meeting of the minds" and "consideration." Neither is the case here with theft, which would be fairly easy to prove.

Also, the thief would have to *reveal their identity* to file a civil claim of copyright infringement, which would open them up to a criminal charge of Grand Larceny.

This whole idea is as idiotic as saying that someone who steals the Mona Lisa from The Louvre can then sue the museum for selling prints in their gift shop. Possession is *not* 9/10ths of the law.

lol. I hear ya. But I'm glad my little Oculus Go is at least fully untethered now!

EOM

- Warmer beaches than Silicon Valley.
- Cuban food.
- Less "government regulation" telling you to keep your workers safe, pay a living wage, etc.

In addition to my career in software development, I'm a fine art photographer, and I've minted 2 NFTs -- one on Ethereum, one on Polygon. Neither have sold yet (I won't shill, I'm easy to find lol).

The "cool kids" right now are the big pixel-toon collections, generative art, and digital rendered artwork. But photography (my space) has been getting some attention recently. Photos in the "Twin Flames" collection have been seeing some bonkers prices, but there are plenty of other photographers who are also doing well.

Like any space where creatives find buyers, it's very much about marketing and "who you know" and having strong ties to the community and its players. I'm still very new to this and I'm terrible at marketing, so I don't expect to go "to the moon" or anything, especially with gas fees where they are now on ETH. But while I haven't found those "1000 true fans" (or even 1) who will always snag what I mint, I am bullish on the space -- especially as Layer 2 rolls out and drop the environmental impact and transaction cost.

"I promise, Charlie Brown, I won't move the ball! You just have a trust deficit with me."