While I am not defending Rodney, who is has not been found guilty of the charges, I cannot tell you what I would do if my child was taken from me.

I have a spouse and multiple kids. I have parents who still live. I have siblings. Intellectually, I think I would not murder my child’s murderer and inflict extra harm on my family through my actions… but that situation hasn’t happened and I have no clue how I would actually react. Right now, my blood is boiling just contemplating it, though.

If I were a single parent of one child, and that child was killed, then I would turn into fucking Liam Neeson without hesitation.

edit: I finished reading the article after posting this. It’s not clear that the officer Rodney struck was the same officer who shot Rodney’s son, and seems to be unrelated from the wording. I feel for Deputy Henderson’s family, and hope he wasn’t an innocent who happened to be wearing the same uniform.

Police in the US regularly choose to escalate, and our politicians choose to keep firearms available. All these deaths are on Congress.

While I would hate to lose actual trees, I’m medium on the idea of this on it’s own. People need lots of things and space, which causes the removal of trees. If we can replicate some of their functions, such as CO2 absorption with this tech, then that seems good. If upkeep is the same as a tree, I don’t see a downside to the overall concept.

My thought would be that this shows up on top of the buildings instead of at ground level, though… Plant real trees and put these on the roof. The real loss would be if we stop making green spaces because these things meet the need for O2. Green spaces in cities do way more than just clean the air, though, so I’m not sure we’re that dystopian yet.

The photo looks like it doubles as a bench too, so maybe that helps justify its footprint. Make them a mini-light show with varied colors and it can become a functional art installation. How long until it has spikes to prevent someone from taking a nap on it, though?

I used to operate a dashboard on a wall-monitor in an IT ops center. For Halloween, I wrote a script that very briefly played a video of a creepy set of eyes that opened, looked around the room, focused on something/glared, then closed, all over around like 2 seconds, but ran 1-3 times an hour. It was funny the first few times it happened and I got told to turn it off.

Instead I changed it to run 1-3 times a year.

My manager thought that that was absolutely hilarious without being too disruptive and let me keep it. We had enough turnover that there was always a newbie in the pool and every now and then, someone would say ‘what the fuck was that!?’ and we’d get a good laugh.

You are fucking devious. Mouse sensitivity/acceleration curve is my largest ‘minor annoyance’ between various machines/operating systems. Having that change on me randomly without changing systems would really mess with me.

In November I woke up ready to bail. but upon reviewing my options, I determined that nowhere was really better.

There seem to be precious few countries that aren’t flirting with authoritarian parties right now and leaving this one, where I have my social safety net (friends and family, if not government aid) and at least a small amount of power to vote for my values, to go somewhere where I am an immigrant or refugee and lose the power to change policy seemed to be a poor choice. so far. I’m white, straight and middle class, though, so that may be entirely different math for other people.

I’m choosing to stay and fight.

reviewing my replies much later.

What you are doing is perfect. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is normally a quote around material goods, but still applies to things like time and involvement. If you are uncomfortable calling your elected officials, that’s fine. Adding a person to a protest is still an addition that shows engagement.

Your points indicate you are not only voting in presidential elections. You have choices to make things better: ‘Vote blue no matter who’, ceding your choice of “who” to others more involved; or to become involved even though it’s uncomfortable.

I’m not talking to you alone, but also to all those who read your comment, identified with it, and then could use a prod to get involved. I’m also poking at those who vote once every 4 years and are unhappy at their options.

I’m pretty sure that ‘heavy bags filled with books’ is a backpack for school, but I think it’s funny to imagine you also carrying a burlap sack with anti-goose novels specifically to ward off this creature.

Don’t just hope, Act!

Find and join your local democratic organization. The initial cost in time is almost nothing. Just meet up and introduce yourself.

Once part of the conversation, you can help influence your local party and select candidates for local office that share your values. You can select delegates who vote in larger offices, and through them promote your goals.

It’s not perfect, and we currently don’t have a flawless democratic system, but participating only every 2-4 years during the major elections is not how you get the results you want. A lot of complaints exist online around weak candidates, or ‘opposition party’ that exists only to be a foil for the Right. Those things can only exist if we are not engaged.

The time to be engaged is NOW. Help find or support new House and Senate candidates for your state legislature as well as federal. Contest every office. Even if your precinct/district seems 100% red, not having candidates on the ballot is a huge disservice to anyone who would want to vote for them and hides our strength.

Now is the time to be loud.

I don’t know that ‘Conservative’ exists anymore. I’m American, but I think these comments work everywhere else, as Authoritarianism rises.

Growing up, I believed that liberal/conservative was just a difference in approach, but not a difference in end-goal. Both ‘teams’ wanted the country to prosper. In my 40s, now, I clearly see that we have different goals: Liberals want everyone to be prosperous, healthy, fulfilled. Conservatives value the prosperity only of those on top.

You may identify as conservative, little ‘c’, respect tradition and be careful with spending, etc; but I want you to closely evaluate the actions of people using that label across the globe. A vote for a conservative or right-wing candidate is a vote for the top 1% or less of the population of the planet. They may align with you on some topics, such as religion, abortion, fiscal policies, regulations, and more; but that is a ploy and they are absolutely willing to throw you away as soon as they have your vote and will cut everything you depend on once in power in order to pad their own pockets.

There are certainly perverse incentives and systemic issues that make even liberal politicians support bad policies, but the voter bloc that is ‘liberal’ wants to make things better for everyone. The conservative politicians, at least in the US where I’m paying attention, seem to be hell-bent on making things worse instead.

This has less to do with Trump’s actions, and more to do with how the convervatives behaved…

I’m confident that it’s part of their marketing. Every store near me has a drive-thru line that impedes traffic and/or crosses over itself. I think this is so that you drive past one and cant help but go ‘oh! look at how much demand they have,’ as you are stuck the the line to get into their line.

1000% this. Half our problem is people bitching that their perfect candidate is not an option, and that they don’t want to vote ‘against’ someone.

The time to be active is NOW, not complaining about your choices in October 2028. Left media isn’t helping here, since they want to complain about how the election is still years away and yet we’re talking about potential candidates… YES, we are. If you’re not talking now, then you’re not in the conversation. Is it great to have a 24x365x4 political cycle? hell no. But is it what we have? yes.

Join your local democratic organization and get familiar with how things work. Help choose a ‘not fascist’ candidate for now and push for better down the line.

If you’re here, reading this, and you want things to be better, then you have two choices: vote blue no matter who (ceding your choice to others who are involved), or get involved and be part of the decision of ‘who’ is blue.

As much as I understand and support the sentiment, destroying things that are still functional is a very republican action.

Perhaps deface the mugs (sharpie marks generally survive dishwashers and can be reapplied later for new fun mustaches) and turn the shirts into dishrags or washcloths. (especially fun since in languages with gendered nouns, like German for example, a shirt is a neutral gender and a washcloth is masculine, thus making this really transformational.)

You think children are getting undeserved money from the government.

I think children are getting money from the government.

We are not the same. </meme>

Regardless of evidence provenance, children need to be our most sacred class of people, followed by the elderly and disabled. It shouldn’t even be a question about how and why we take care of them, we just fucking should.

Misinformation is real, so I see part of your point, but the people outraged at this are WILDLY different from the people outraged that kids might be getting money they don’t “deserve”. Can we not just be nice to each other? This isn’t actually a zero-sum game.

Every relationship is different, so I can’t speak to your situation and this may not be the root cause. This isn’t specifically for Darkmoon, but for anyone feeling the same way.

I’m male and my wife has a robust social network where I am included in some of their conversations. Most of her female friends are low-key angry at their husbands and resent how much work they (wives) do that goes unnoticed.

Make sure you are helping out in the home: obvious things like cleaning, cooking, dishes, laundry; but also kiddo maintenance like knowing what homework is needed, what they need to wear on Tuesday for spirit day, when the next dentist appointment is (or making it), etc; social maintenance like planning trips to grandparents, finding a babysitter for date night (and planning it), preparing for parties.

Take some of that work off her and she’ll have more energy for you.

I 100% clicked on that link expecting it to be a TVTropes rabbit hole… I’m actually a little disappointed.

Not OP, but this is a principle thing. We should not have to change our behavior to make the computers work for us. They are unthinking, unfeeling tools, despite anyone’s claims around “AI”. They change for us.

That runs into a problem of tech literacy, though. If the companies running the tech we use don’t have incentive to make it work better, you have to know how to do it yourself and that’s generally not trivial. If I were OP, I’d look into self-hosted home automation. There’s some overhead and tinkering required, but the customization and privacy gains are likely worth it.

Side note. Anyone have any knowledge of a Google Home Mini repurpose? I’m more of a software guy, and have no clue if or how I can make the hardware mine. I’ve been slowly removing my reliance on google products lately. I use it mostly as a speaker, though, so worst case is it ends up as e-waste.

I DESPISE AI in fast food restaurants… as well as just about everywhere else… but in fast food it really pisses me off.

I crave salty trash food every once in a while, but when my local Taco Bell greeted me with an obviously AI drive-thru, I just drove away and never came back.

Fast food and retail were the places you went to get your first job with no experience or school necessary. Using AI to ‘take their jobs’ in the pursuit of ‘efficiency’ is just adding velocity to our plunge into dystopia. I mean no disrespect to those working those currently jobs, though, as the ‘were’ in that sentence is carrying a lot and the article is right that the jobs are stressful and relentless, and it angers me that your livelihood is yet again being threatened by corporate greed.

If there were compensating factors, like UBI, free higher education and better worker protections, then sure, let’s let “ai” take over the things that we don’t want to do… but I don’t think we’re going in that direction.

My local one changed the play place into a conference room. That’s where adults have fun… right?

The McDonalds near me recently clobbered their tiny playplace and turned it into a … conference room/center?

About the only time I went there was when I need a place for my kiddos to spend some energy on a rainy day at like 8am, before other things opened. I was happy to buy a coffee and biscuit for myself and maybe a treat for them to pay for my occupancy.

Now, though, and I know I wasn’t a giant source of income, they have lost my custom and I just can’t see how any real business would ever run a meeting in a McDonalds conference room, so it just seems like a dumb move.

Maybe they want to discourage parents bringing their children? That also seems pretty stupid.

Slight modification… Billionaires deserve to live, but they didn’t deserve to be billionaires. There is no path to that much wealth that doesn’t involve increasing someone else’s suffering.