I’d like to stay optimistic and hope they did as well, though if my own experience is any indicator, there’s equal chance they fell into the pit of “Maybe climate change is real, but it’s not that bad/it’s better for me.”

“If you had just picked a better water bucket, we wouldn’t be in this mess. It’s your fault if the house burns down.”

Humans (and most other animals) see better side-to-side than up-down. Your eyes are spaced horizontally, giving us a wider horizontal field of vision. People generally prefer putting things side-to-side in work environments, maybe also reflecting how much easier it is to move and work within a horizontal plane than a vertical one. So the upper threshold for monitor width would be longer than the upper threshold for monitor height.

That being said, I know reading is best done in narrower columns, to reduce the amount of left-right movement your eyes need to do which can cause you to lose your place when skimming lines. Three columns of text on a 16:9 monitor is way more readable than one column of text that spans the entire monitor.

And then why do we make an exception for phones which are predominantly used in portrait mode? I guess maybe just for easier 1-handed use? Maybe also to give us more peripheral vision of potential hazards and other things happening in the background when using them, since they’re mobile devices.

Ending it as quickly and painlessly as possible then, I guess. I stick by the opinion that a life without agency and with no means to obtain it isn’t really living at all.

Fuck Oracle.

Good recommendations, I hadn’t even considered Zoom and we use it all the time for work.

It sounds like you have no agency either way, then, which still sounds like a bad deal to me. I’d rather die at 40 living a life of my choosing than live to 400 with essentially no free will.

I’m not sure I understand the question. If the premise is that you become physically incapable of doing any action that introduces greater risk than some alternative, which isn’t even a guarantee of “immortality” as described, then it’s basically a life not lived at all. The safest option would always be to go nowhere, do nothing, speak to no one.

Imagine living life as if everything was covered in California Prop 65 labels saying “This action can expose you to risks which are known to future you to cause premature demise or other bodily harm.” It sounds awful, I’d never take that bet.

Not the best answer because it’s not open source, but both Google Photos and Apple iCloud support automatic cloud backups of photos and videos over data. That media can also be accessed separately from a browser or another device after logging in.

Those are the only immediate solutions for the problem you describe that I can think of off the top of my head, I’m afraid, but hopefully other options are out there, too.

True, another valid point.

They probably can, even if it means spending billions more in the end to hire out private contractors to do the work they can’t find enough sycophants for. The whole point is grift.

I mean, DOGE is already an example. They’re just hiring conservative kids fresh out of college for peanuts because they believe blindly serving the Trump admin is the most alpha resume builder one could ask for. The government is basically being run like one big racist fraternity.

And if they can’t find enough people to do the actual work, they just do things like give NASA contracts to SpaceX so Elon and his billionaire bros can get richer off the taxpayer dollar.

No, he wants to pull a Reagan part 2 and fire any government worker who goes on strike. Trump has an army of loyalists willing to do whatever he says, who would be more than happy to scab any strike to inefficacy. Even if they’re terrible at the job, all that matters is that they’re loyal.

No, you don’t get it, this is his fault (and Harris’s). Genocide Joe, right? We sure taught the Dems a powerful lesson.

What is the purpose for standing up when the judge enters the courtroom?

This I can at least guess at, typically you’d rise for important people to demonstrate that you are interrupting whatever you were doing and giving this person your full attention and respect. I guess that’s really just a show of dominance/submissiveness, but in a pragmatic sense I suppose it is a good practice to mandate focus and engagement during legal proceedings.

Definitely not a good thing. I use Proton VPN, but only because I paid for a license before I realized the CEO is a scumbag. A lot of people are moving away from Proton’s platform, so a browser choosing to bundle it in is just privacy-violating bloatware for everyone except for a subset of users who are also still using Proton, and also for some reason don’t just have the standalone app installed.

Once upon a time, I would have thought this sort of thing unthinkable around here. This is practically my backyard.

They’re targeting northern states on purpose.

Weird that it would be coming from Americans given how often US media has depicted the importance of the homefront during the various wars that America has participated in.

Militaries still need food and supplies to operate, so someone has to be making/raising/growing all of that stuff. And those workers need to be paid, accommodated, and kept happy, so every other industry like banking, education, healthcare, entertainment, etc. needs to keep running at full steam to prop up all aspects of the supply chain.

Guessing the Supreme Court ruling last year against Colorado undid all that. Since they ruled that states cannot make decisions that impact federal elections, it wouldn’t surprise me if the fed can now legally demand voter registration records or else refuse to count those votes.

Thanks, Trump.

More than just the ones in America, I’d reckon.

Agreed, it’s an interesting thing to think about at least. The nature vs nurture debate is practically as old as time itself but it feels like we’re no closer to an answer outside of “it’s a bit of both.” But how much?