Xenophobia and racism, mostly. And yes, it’s a solution to the aging demographic crisis many countries face (at least in the medium-term).

I remember seeing a video of a presentation back in the Bush years by some neo-con group that advocated for immigration to Pentagon or DoD officials or something. The argument for immigration was mostly the same: we have an aging population, so we could integrate immigrants (who are statistically younger) to solve this issue. I didn’t agree much with the broader idea of the presentation though. The broader idea was that there were still some parts of the world not a part of the global U.S.-led hegemony (mostly the middle-east and Africa), and we must spread democracy and capitalism to them. The argument was that globalism/capitalism ensures peace, and that both WWI and WWII happened because globalism was falling apart shortly before those wars. So, to ensure world peace, we need to globalize the entire earth and bring all countries into the the U.S.-led hegemony, even if that means starting wars to spread democracy, lol.

Poor countries, such as the countries people are immigrating from, have a more terrible environment and higher birth-rates.

If you just want it for emergency purposes or irrigation, rain water harvesting can be fairly cheap and easy. Even a proper cistern, with a pump, and plumbed into your house is probably cheaper than whole-house off-grid solar. Probably want good filters for PFAS though.

Lol, good catch.

Wary of the bill. Seems like every bill involving stuff like this is either designed to erode privacy or for regulatory capture.

Edit: spelling

Where I live, I would still need to pay for a VPN to use torrents. I’ve been banned from an ISP before for torrenting (thankfully, I had multiple ISPs available for me).

At the moment, I just “pay” legally because I get a few “free” streaming plans from my mobile provider and ISP. Occasionally, I just use a free streaming site if I really want to watch something that’s not available to me. Every once in a while, I try anonymous p2p such as Tribler or torrenting over I2P, but it’s still extremely slow, unfortunately. I’ve never used Usenet, but I think it’s about the same price as a VPN or seedbox would be?

I can understand capitalism resulting in slavery, because it wants to minimize labor costs, so slavery is the logical conclusion (also, slavery is still used by capitalists). I don’t see anarchy resulting in slavery, because slavery is inherently hierarchical. I also don’t see socialism resulting in slavery because the workers own their means of production/businesses/workplaces.

What a “man” or “woman” is changes over time and by culture. Some indigenous cultures have more than 2 genders. “Boys” become “men” at different ages, depending on the culture. It is a social construct (though I’d argue constructs are “real”).

Those type of bags are usually used to hold illicit substances, and typically only bought by small-time drug dealers.

I’ve never heard of or had a HVAC “tune-up.” If it’s a standard air-to-air heat pump, you likely do not need one. You just need to change or clean the filters regularly, and maybe clean the coils once a year at most. I’m guessing that’s what the mean by “tune-up?” Modern cars do not need “tune-ups” either.

I’ve worked for a few small business tyrants that did horrible things as well. It’s more of a system issue. Billionaires do the most damage of any individuals, but I think it would be pretty similar if CEOs made small amounts of money (the corporations themselves often lobby for their interests), or if there were only small businesses (they’d probably just form national organizations to lobby for their shared interests).

This isn’t really true. A lot of Democrat voters are also Christian. If by “fervent,” you mean “hateful,” this may be more true. A large percentage of Democrat voters are also Christian, but not as hard-line about LGBT issues, and perhaps not as hard-line about abortion.

The type of Christians that Republicans court are easy to persuade and control. Religion has historically been used to create in-groups and out-groups, and as a form of control.

If one were to take the Christian bible at face-value, they would oppose things like sexual freedom. Most leftists/socialists think about intersectionality, so they would be opposed to people who have the “morals” of many Christians.

AI is simply a broad field of research and a broad class of algorithms. It is annoying media keeps using the most general term possible to describe chatbots and image generators though. Like, we typically don’t call Spotify playlist generators AI, even though they use recommendation algorithms, which are a subclass of AI algorithms.

Eh, I’m not sure what position Bezos has now. If I ran Amazon, I’d probably covertly support unionization of the entire workforce. I don’t really care about a luxurious lifestyle, and don’t plan on having kids to give an inheritance to, so yeah, I’d probably just give almost all away and buy a small farm to garden in and work on open source projects or something. Like, that’s my dream. It would actually be really hard to figure out how to give all that money away. Could provide the initial funding to like 100,000 decently sized worker-coops I guess.

Edit: I should say, I don’t think most people care so little about luxury and money as I do. My problem is not so much about people having wealth (though wealth is a limited resources, so that does mean others will not have it), but my problem is what people do to get such wealth. It usually involves deceiving your network of associates and exploiting your employees. I do not think most people would be ok with forcing their employees to shit in bags.

Yeah, I agree. Our economic system and some of our culture encourages and rewards antisocial behavior.

Nah, only about 5% of the population have antisocial personality disorders. That’s a lot of people, but not “most.”

Nah, Java is alright. All the old complicated “enterprise” community and frameworks gave it a bad reputation. It was designed to be an easier, less bloated C++ (in terms of features/programming paradigms). It’s also executed fairly efficiently. Last time I checked, the same program written in C would typically take 2x the time to complete in Java; whereas it would take 200x the time to complete in Python. Here’s some recent benchmarks: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/python3-java.html

I haven’t had a chance to try Rust yet, but want to. Interestingly, Rust scores poorly on source-code complexity: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/how-programs-are-measured.html#source-code

Stuff that is used and immediately disposed of like trash bags, paper towels, and toilet paper. You need to be a little more careful with the cheapest trash bags and toilet paper, but it will still get the job done.

The difference between soda is very noticeable to me. Some store-brand sodas taste almost flat.

I can’t tell much a difference between wines of the same type. They taste slightly different, but I can’t say which taste “better.”

Cheap liquor seems “harsher” than more expensive liquor; even with vodka, which doesn’t really have a taste. The difference in taste of say, the regular Jim Beam and a barrel-proof bourbon is pretty noticeable.

I’ve noticed no difference in 100% fruit juice by brand. Well, except for orange juice.

Tea quality is very noticeable to me, but I’m a heavy tea drinker.

Even different water brands have different tastes. But, as long as it’s not my tap water (which is very hard and smells like a swimming pool), I don’t really care.

Nah, they’re an incremental improvement. EVs are more efficient at turning energy into locomotion. They get >100 mpge. The increase in tire wear isn’t nearly as significant the CO2 emissions. I’m pretty sure there are studies that show EVs are better for the environment as a whole than ICE vehicles (even accounting for things like lithium mining and fossil fuel powered grids).

Tesla is a horrible, anti-consumer company. A lot of companies make EVs now (but a lot of those companies are pretty horrible too, I guess).