Exactly! So we throw him in a for-profit prison, where he is essentially a caged animal made to fight with the other caged animals. After a decade or two we put him out on parole with no marketable skills and a felony conviction to ensure nobody will hire him.

Then we act confused about why recidivism rates are high.

They aren't even trying to come up with believable lies any more, right?

Yeah I'm wondering that too.

I looked at the thread on Reddit and I can't find one single user who says this is a good idea.

Yeah exactly. I tried to set it up once, installed it on a NAS box, and it starts talking about me making a cloud account. Why do I need a cloud account to log into my own hardware on my own network?

I do not want the cloud
I do not need the cloud
I will say it very loud
No cloud, no cloud, no cloud.

But apparently it's set up so the only way to log into your own locally hosted software on your own locally hosted hardware is with an external cloud account.

To that I said no thank you and uninstalled it.

While their statement is entirely correct, they're still wrong. YouTube is basically unusable without an ad blocker. Multiple 10 to 15 second long unskippable ads before the video even starts, and unless you watch videos all the way through you end up watching as much ad as you do content. It is damn near impossible to hop around between videos trying to find the one you want because of the pre-roll ads on every vid. On the other hand, with an ad block enabled YouTube is actually quite nice. The engagement algorithm is fucking trash of course but if you know what you're looking for and you go directly to it it's pretty good.

That is actually not such an unreasonable assumption. Yes there are groups like Pink P who help arm and train LGBT folks. But someone who is LGBT is much more likely to be on the liberal side of things, urban rather than rural, and thus less exposure to civilian gun ownership.

There is also a lot of stigma among liberals. I have heard from a number of LGBT folks that it was far easier to come out to their Republican friends as gay than their Democratic friends as owning a gun- Republicans disapprove of gay people a lot less than Democrats disapprove of gun owners.

Absolutely 100% Right now having solar panels on your house is 'branded' as some sort of green save the planet thing.

Putting enough panels that your house can go totally off-grid with a little cutback and usage, that's as independent as you get. Save money too.

Yes absolutely this. Cheating should not be a crime you go to jail for.
But it should have consequences. I think a good way to go is a law that unless there is a prenup that specifically deals with cheating, and unless it was an agreed to open relationship or there was otherwise permission to cheat, a cheater is ineligible for alimony and must be considered morally suspect for the question of child custody.

Just like conservatism, the problem is what parts of it you push.

Focus on divisive issues like gun control, open immigration, and hyper inclusion of any possibly marginalized group and you push people away.

Avoid the wedge issues, and focus on things that will make everybody's lives better, like honest government, social safety net, and good health care, and you bring everybody together.

If you look at the entire range of issues, including the ones politicians don't often talk about, you might find that Americans generally agree on more than they disagree on. But rather than focusing on those shared agreements and trying to build a better country, both parties are focusing on wedge issues where there is strong disagreement.

The smallest ones are the most agile and the least to lose by going virtual.
Big ones however have a conundrum. If the company has spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars building a giant headquarters, and then they go virtual or largely remote, then that money becomes basically a wasted investment. And so they have to admit to their investors that money was wasted, much of which can't be recouped even if they sell the building. That goes triple for companies with big campuses like Apple or Google. That's why you get a lot of companies demanding things like in office 3 days a week, to create justification for having the office in the first place.

There's also a simple human factor. A lot of management, even tech management, still has the attitude that being able to physically watch the employee somehow enables better control or management or increases productivity. It's crap of course, unless you have lazy unmotivated employees they will work just as well from somewhere else as they will with you breathing down their neck.

But it's caused some interesting shake-ups. A while back I read a great interview with a (fully virtual) tech startup CEO, he said whenever their bigger competitors announce RTO his HR department quickly buys a bunch of LinkedIn keywords targeting them.
He found, as almost anybody could figure out with basic logic, that the best and most valuable employees know their worth and thus are the first to quit rather than RTO, and his company is right there with an offer of 'work on some exciting new tech and we will never push RTO because we have no office to return to'. Said he's gotten some of his best people that way.

So when the bigger CEOs are now saying they don't see full return to office, I think that's because they are realizing they have no other choice, the labor market has changed and demanding full-time in person or even hybrid has become the same as a significant salary cut.

Huh? This might be a different wording thing. In the US, entree is another word for main course. So the meal I am illustrating is for two, has two starters, two main courses, two desserts, four drinks in total.

Technically a contract can have anything in it that both parties agree to, unless some are all of those provisions are actively illegal. I would agree that assumed agreement should be illegal. You could probably fight this in court, make the argument that this is a material change to the contract what you did not agree to and would not have agreed to had you been aware of it. But that costs money and lawyers and time.

What do you mean? I haven't followed the development directly, I've just been a user and so far things seem to be going pretty well. Curious what shortsightedness you are talking about?