Oh, it’s definitely with me. Good bikes are a pleasure to ride and get you there faster, handle well and are generally safer. Clunky cruisers and lesser bikes handle poorly, go slow and shift even worse should they have gears. I still ride the 1987 Bridgestone MB-1: Cro-mo steel, suntour, drop bars. It’s old but nothing shitty about it.

I just don’t get societies that embrace the bicycle but ignore the technology and quality that makes them good.

But are they good bikes though? I’ve been to Amsterdam twice, once in the 80’s and again a couple of years ago. I love the bicycle culture but the bikes themselves, not so much. I saw a few decent ones but they were few and far between the heavy looking cruisers most were riding. I was a transportational cyclist in California for a few decades and my last bike was $1100 new in 1987. Would be a few thousand today and I can’t picture riding anything lesser. My standard commute was a little over 11 Miles, so 18 km…

Uh…you can take a train from New York to Philadelphia today and it leaves like every 20 minutes. Two a day from New York to Cincinnati, but 19 hours. Car would be half that, airplane a fraction. I think it’s less conspiracy and more convenience…

150 years ago, most cities were a bunch of unconnected small towns surrounding a central smaller city. They slowly grew together into the sprawl we have today.

It’s not a matter of privacy or safety. It’s a matter of how does this technology benefit me? So far, that’s none at all. I live in a place of low crime, so it’s ability to keep me safer is minor if at all. Police abuse it and the upper classes seem safe from it. I do not see any benefit in it’s current form. Lock it down behind court orders without general police/organizational access and maybe? But I’ll still vote against it…

Why? The forces behind MAGA and Trump have been part of most democracies their entire history. They percolate up every one in a while then disappear into the background noise until next time. McCarthyism looked like the end of the world as well just to disappear just as fast as it came about. Cults of personality rarely outlast the death or disgrace of the founder.

Costco is a huge market so it has many suppliers. I bought a bag a month ago that matched this post: a noticeable amount of empty shells. The next bags were fine. Probably just a wave of product from one supplier.

What do mean by majority? 51% is a hell of a lot different than 80%. I think much of MAGA is more populist than ideological. Some will disappear, some will follow the next populist to come a long and that populist could have different ideas that they latch on to. Compare the “tea party” of Ron Paul to the co-opted Tea Party that came later…

True of all democracies. Canada has it’s share of fruitcakes and could suffer a similar insanity and elect one…

I think Canada, Iran and most of the rest of the world have figured out that Trump is six months away from being the lamest of ducks and two and a half years of being out of office entirely. Wait for the storm of insanity to pass and deal with the aftermath then.

The next President of the USA will definitely have to go on a serious suck butt tour to heal the damage this administration is causing…

Same here. I occasionally follow a link to normal reddit it and it lets me see the tread for about ten seconds then tosses up a login popup. Looks like they are locking down the whole site.

At least the bots are pretending to be intelligent. A lot of idiots on reddit that are really degrading the site.

I encountered this playing with stable diffusion. I was doing Art Nouveau images. With “Mucha” as a prompt I got lots of images in his style but none matched any piece I was familiar with. Whereas if I used “Klimt”, everything was pretty close to a couple of his more famous paintings. Just a variation in the amount of individual works in the training data…

A lot of games on Steam hold zero interest to me. AI is just the newest form of slop. Beyond that what I see is a hell of a lot more games are being released in the last 4 years. That means more competition but also many have not been around long enough to build up over time revenue. To a certain extent you are comparing life time revenue to launch revenue. On AAA that probably doesn’t matter as much but on the lesser hyped indy games I think it would be an important distinction.

How is it for ripping apart PDF’s and fixing them? As a prepressman I have yet to find a tool as good as Illustrator for that purpose. I assume being open source it does not have support for Pantone? I was using the Affinity suite before they went freemium and that was not terrible but not quite up to Illustrator…

It’s probably be viewed as heresy, but GTA Vice City is by far my least favorite. Miami is just a flat boring city to drive in. You know it’s bad when the high points are bridges and parking garages. Vice City’s only redeeming feature was the flying car cheat. Got a few hours of enjoyment with police chases with that on…

And yes, I’m mildly concerned about VI…

Does old.reddit come up as mobile if used on a smart phone?

But still, it’s nowhere in the constitution beyond Right to peaceably assemble and the right to petition the government. The way I look at it, you would still have the two parties as a necessity. Otherwise no candidate gets 50% of the vote, and congress decides who becomes president. That is not going to change without a constitutional amendment. All the 3rd parties would be more like influencers to the main two. When looking at a primary, one might be a progressive party member/democrat or a green/democrat and who they chose to vote for could be influenced by the 3rd party endorsements. We don’t have to have a parliamentary like party system as we do not have that organizational structure.

Challenge mutual exclusion in political parties. In the US we vote for the person, not the party. Why can’t I belong to more than one political party?

The problem I see is meaningful change to the voting system requires a constitutional amendment which is a high bar. Political parties are not in the constitution. Getting rid of mutual exclusion just requires a good legal argument…