Prairie and Craftsman Bungalows. Unfortunately, I don’t think that either is a particularly energy efficient design.

I have one. I hated the stock skin. I like having the apps I use regularly groups together by purpose on my home screen so I can get to them quickly. I immediately re-skinned it.

Well, shit. I hadn’t known about Inquisition. I think the last time I saw them was something like 2016? At least I only have the one t-shirt. :(

I haven’t heard anything about Agalloch; what’s going on there?

Gov’t funded doesn’t drop the cost that much. Countries in the west that are single-payer and/or have national/socialized healthcare systems pay between 1/5 and 2/3 of what we do per capita, on average. It might be better in countries where the entire supply chain is subject to price controls (e…g., China), but I don’t know. But, regardless, if our system cost 20% of what it does now, or $900B, $3B would still be only .3% of the entire expenditure. Part of the problem is that, as far as western countries go, the US is just big. The population of Israel is estimated to be about 9.5M, compared to 340M or so for the US.

Again, to be clear: I’m not suggesting that we should be giving–or selling–Israel anything at this point.

Yes, $24B, sorry.

If they spent $24.00 on their own defense, and the US gave them $3B, then, uh, they’d be 100% dependent on the US.

You think you’re doing that. But are you? Or are things happening below the threshold of your consciousness, and your conscious brain thinks that it’s the one running the show? Consciousness would be like the toddler with the toy steering wheel that thinks it’s driving the car.

It wouldn’t even be noticeable. We spend a total of about $4.5 trillion [EDIT: on healthcare]; $3B is 0.07% of that total.

And, BTW, we have terrible outcomes for how much we spend.

They won’t; sponsored by the big capital

Yes, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get away from it. Sanders managed to run very strong presidential primary campaigns, twice, and almost all of his funding was from individual donors giving his campaign under $100 each.

Dems could do this, if leadership had the will.

3rd parties can’t, or they can’t yet, because none of them have put in sufficient work at a grassroots level yet to consistently win places on state legislatures, much less federally.

If the unconscious mind is making the decisions prior to cognition about the thing, how could our will alone affect it? It seems more likely that things outside of our direct control are changing how we are acting, and then the conscious part of ourselves creates the reason that we acted in a specific way.

This is both true, and not entirely accurate.

Israel spends something like $24 on their defense. The $3B that the the US gives them (and it’s $3B, not $4B, based on what I can find) is largely in the form of military materials: ammunition, bombs, air defense systems, etc. So what we give them is about 20% of their total defense spend, and yeah, that’s a lot.

But the flip side of that is that American workers in American factories are the ones building the bombs, missiles defense systems, making the bullets, etc.; the money that the gov’t gives Israel ends up creating a benefit for workers in the form of work that wouldn’t otherwise exist. I’d have to see a real economic analysis, but this might be a case of each dollar that the gov’t spends creating more than a dollar of effect. (And yeah, I know that a lot of that effect is going to e.g. Raytheon shareholders rather than line workers. But still.)

BUT

The fact that we see an economic benefit in terms of jobs and growth by giving Israel aid doesn’t mean we should. Because we’re directly funding the genocide of the Palestinians.

No. Last I knew, PET (?) scans appear to indicate that decisions are reached by your unconscious mind before they’re made by your conscious mind; the implication is that what you believe is you making a choice is actually you rationalizing a choice that’s been made through processes that you can’t directly see or affect. IF that’s correct, then people are quite deterministic, as long as you know all of the inputs.

But on a practical, day-to-day basis, calling it ‘free will’ is a convenient fiction or shorthand. While free will may not exist, we largely believe that it does, and our perception of that in turn shapes our perception of reality. So it ends up not really mattering, strictly speaking.

Meh.

IMO, the problem is that Dems aren’t focusing on the economy in the correct way. Yeah, Biden did some good things. But you’ve still got massive wealth inequality, high rents and home prices, venture capital firms buying up small companies and jacking prices way the fuck up, executives raking in huge profits and salaries while laying off workers, etc. Dems keep saying, “the economy is great!” while working class people–the vast middle class in the US, which includes mid-level white collar jobs–are feeling like they’re working hard for less. Ever since the crash in '08, jobs have been less stable, and people have been turning to gig work to make ends meet, or to have anything extra in their budgets. Sanders is the only left-leaning politician that’s really banging on that drum.

Dems used to be out there running for good jobs for hard working people, work with dignity that you could live on. But they’ve been ignoring their roots for the last 40 years, and have been bought and sold by corporate America. The liberlization/globalization of the economy [EDIT] has largely been a disaster for working-class people, as they’ve been forced to compete against lower-wage workers, while the capitalist class gets even larger profits. (OOH, the liberalization of America’s trade policies has resulted in millions of people outside of the US being able to live in something other than grinding, abject poverty.)

In addition to that, Biden’s debate performance was a fucking disaster, and made it very, very clear to everyone that he was absolutely not fit to be president. Harris should have put some distance between herself and Biden, but she couldn’t, or wouldn’t; she was suggesting that we continue the same policies that are squeezing the working class, rather than calling for systemic reform.

Meanwhile, Trump was promising that he’d make foreign companies pay, and that he’d bring good jobs back. If you’re a low-information voter that doesn’t understand how tariffs work, and don’t think about the logistics of bringing all the manufacturing back, then this sound great.

Meanwhile, you’ve got the whole right wing media machine telling people–mostly men–that they’re right to feel screwed. And yeah, they are. It’s just that it’s not ‘libs’, women, typical immigrants, etc.; it’s corporate profiteering, trade globalization, the loss of power from unions, importing highly-skilled labor to displace higher-paid American workers (e.g., H1-B abuse), outsourcing everything, etc.

If Dems want to win, they need to get serious about good jobs that pay a living wage for middle America, putting a choke-chain on corporate profiteering, and rebuilding the power of labor.

I don’t know that my parents were ever the kind of person that bitched about paying taxes. They might have privately, but i don’t remember it ever being a big deal. Me, I understand that my taxes are too low for what I expect the gov’t to be doing.

And you’re exactly right about the social experience. One of the enormous struggles for atheists has been building a community. Churches fill that need, even though they cause real harms in other ways. If you go to a church, it’s easy to meet people and make friends when you move to a new community. If you don’t, well, good luck because you’re going to need it.

Honestly, this is why I don’t discuss Mormon history and the massive, gaping chasms in their claims of Truth with my parents. My parents are old–old enough that the family is talking about who is going to call the coroner, who’s going to deal with tying up finances, etc.–and knowing that they’ve wasted an entire lifetime and hundreds of thousands of dollars in tithing on a con isn’t going to do anything useful at this point. Fifty years ago? Sure, they would have had plenty of time to come to terms with it. Now? Meh.

The low birth rates aren’t just rampant capitalism though; it’s also SK women having a choice to not get married and have children, combined with a culture that’s almost rabidly misogynistic. If I were a Korean woman, I absolutely would not want to get hitched to a Korean man and have children with him, because I know that it would be very unlikely that I’d treated like a real person or an equal partner. But the culture–much like Japan–seems to prize people that put in horrifically long hours, and even if you fix the cultural misogyny, you’re still stuck with not having much time to spend with your partner.

Honestly, it’s hard to find information about exact temperatures versus times. Usually the temperature that’s being used is the temp needed to immediately kill all solmonella bacteria, which is–depending on your source–145F-165F.

Oh, I agree; makes me gag, and that takes some real effort.

I’m not saying I would want to, just that you can.

Not where I am; DOT 5.1 costs 2-3 times as much as DOT 5 locally.

DOT 4, $.375/oz.

DOT 5.1, $1.42/oz.

It’s 3.8x more expensive to buy DOT 5.1 locally.

Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry

I fail to see any downside to this.

I’ve had a car with where the oil pressure sensor failed; combine that with an oil leak, and you quickly have a major problem. So, what happens when the sensor telling you the oil level fails? A dipstick is extremely unlikely to ever fail to work correctly, so…?