If you add music and occasional roleplaying, this would also be a pretty great retirement for me. Hopefully my gaming group won’t go fascist on me.

Well played! I hope you enjoy many years of contentment.

Under capitalism, you need a suffering underclass to keep the working class scared enough to accept their bad conditions and low wages. Generally about 2-3% of the population is sufficient.

Pssht. I’m waiting for the inevitable Dromite.

Why would the garden of Eden need rulers?

Knowing about naked corporate greed being the source of 2/3rds of all inflation since 2020 is also politics. (The remaining third is due to input costs rising.)

It is indeed. Mainly because I’m from Australia, so my very weak knowledge of the subject extended to knowing that the RAAF thinks even FA-18s are too old to use. Kind of a shame, btw, they are the best to have zooming loudly over you at barely safe heights above the War Memorial on Anzac Day.

Does the US still use F-15s in combat operations?

Uh, who do you think usually joins the military? They’re already in there, mate.

These days, you really do.

That’s actually pretty sad. Also a serious problem for the USA. NYT, for all its faults, really was the best one.

Ideally, we would have our own personally run AI instances that can give us a probability that what we are reading is LLM generated. It’s still pretty good at recognising itself. That will be an arms race, though.

Yep, it’s kind of the wild west out there eh.

There is no mandatory certification system for midwives. So you might get lucky and get a former emergency room nurse, or you might get unlucky and get someone who believes crystals will stop the bleeding or turn the baby around.

That would be a reduction in the service quality, which is the other thing that always happens when utility services are privatised. So you get to pay more money for less service. The company has no incentive to provide a good service, because what else are you going to do?

Batteries.

Batteries plus solar is still cheaper than all other power systems. It’s remarkable but true.

If it was private, you would pay more for the same service, because the private company has all the same costs as now, but also needs to make a profit. So if you keep it public, it will cost less.

FYI, Cyberpunk 2077’s DLC is the best I’ve ever seen, and thoroughly worth paying for. Unlike quite a few others, as you mention. It makes everything in the base game better, and the additional story is even better than the story in the base game.

That’s fine, becoming an expert in the field is a fucking nightmare. Even the people who can stomach it need regular therapy to keep them from suffering too much trauma. I would not recommend it.

I do not see a lot of csam, I’m not in law enforcement or the legal arts. However, I’ve worked with people who do both, and there’s also plenty of literature on the subject. Studying the material itself is absolutely necessary to solve a lot of these crimes.

It’s not often the abusers directly showing their face, but that does happen more often than you think. Criminals are often dumb. But you can tell a lot from the backgrounds, or objects carelessly left in view, like newspapers or phones or food wrappers. Locations can be determined. If the child can be identified and it’s unclear who took the pictures, you can identify the people they were in contact with and use the photos to narrow down the search.

In this case, the photos were taken partly as blackmail material, so they are very useful to find the people guilty of the abuse, and prove their guilt.

Now, I am sure you would agree that what should happen is that the DOJ and the FBI should go over all this evidence, using all the resources they have available, the professional investigators, etc, which does not require releasing any pictures to the public. Any that do get released, to satisfy the public right to know, should be carefully redacted to protect identities of the victims, not show their bodies even if they cannot be identified, etc, because that is basic decency.

WE ARE WAY PAST FUCKING “SHOULD”.

The FBI and DOJ are dead. They are useless sacks of shit. They have been captured by the people who did the crime. There is now no alternative but to crowdsource the justice that has been denied by normal means. That means that the pictures should be released, with victims redacted, and abusers left visible, so the world can know who they are and exact what justice can be obtained by whatever means.

Yes, that’s not ideal. Ideal left the conversation years ago.

Often the abuser is in the photo. That’s led to the arrest of many a child abuser. The only reason that releasing the evidence in this case is necessary is that the people who we usually trust to look at the evidence and pursue the guilty party are not doing their fucking jobs.

I think I see why mainstream culture was so goddamn earnest and antisatire in the 40s and 50s.