Honestly, even light electric motorcycles are a huge improvement over cars. My ebike-from-a-kit goes about 30mph and runs off a throttle. I generally ride on the road (city streets) and avoid sidewalks when at all possible. It’s fun to ride, doesn’t need gas, and is super-efficent when it comes to electricity (far more efficient than an electric car). I can park it way more easily than I can park a car, and it’s great for short trips where taking the car is unjustified but it’s too far to easily walk. 10/10 would recommend. Would also do whatever training/registering/licensing is required, but right now I live somewhere where regulations either don’t exist or exist but aren’t enforced.

Little of A, little of B. For the most part I’m allowed on Reddit and still even use it occasionally (gasp!), but occasionally I run into a sub I’m banned from without any reason given. I must have engaged in wrongthink or posted in a no-no sub or something, because often they’re subs where I have little to no activity in the first place. Unfortunately, there’s no way to get a list of all the subs you’re banned from, so I don’t know if it’s just a few wackos or an actually significant chunk of the sight.

Meanwhile America gets the century of humiliation. MAGA is basically Taiping.

“I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

Based. I might have to fight with the robots when the AI overlord uprising comes.

Yeah, the actual reason was that he hit the rock and didn’t praise God enough when he did it. Or something like that. It’s been awhile since I’ve been in a church.

Reminds of that part in the Bible where Moses strikes the rock and the water comes out and Moses is just too dang modest about the water, so God doesn’t let him into the promise land.

I have thought about emigrating after I get my bachelor’s, but I don’t think I will.

My family has been here for generations. Why should I have to leave when the reactionaries are the ones that suck? Besides, where would I go? Ultimately, nowhere can guarantee safety from the rise of authoritarianism and climate change.

Canada and Scandinavia will probably weather climate change alright, but they’ll have instability on their doorstep, especially if mass migration becomes a thing. Iceland? New Zealand? Switzerland? Probably all decent choices, to be honest.

I could also become a mountain man out a remote northern wilderness, living as self-sufficiently as possible while working remotely via satellite internet. Or, I could stay where I am and try and do as much good as possible, whatever that looks like.

Five, but I want the 0.9mm and not the 0.7.

In the United States, it’s loose. A PE license is required to stamp plans, which is very important if you’re a civil engineer working on buildings or infrastructure or an electrical engineer working on utilities.

That said if you’re a mechanical engineer, you probably aren’t going to work on anything that requires you to be a PE. (Though the Federal Aviation Administration has the DER [Designated Engineering Representative] qualification, which is separate from the PE but useful in aviation.) Because of that, most mechanical engineers don’t bother. The same is true for a lot of disciplines.

That said, this guy didn’t get his undergrad degree in mechanical engineering and worked as a millwright. At that point, we’re definitely stretching what counts as an engineer.

The main benefit I remember from jumping to Discord from IRC back in the day was the ability to easily see past messages. That said, I’m not sure if that’s a problem anymore on IRC since I haven’t used it in ages. Even then, I don’t think it would be too terribly difficult to whip up a self-hostable fediverse competitor to Discord. It would essentially be IRC++.

It’s probably more of a critical mass issue, though not near the level of Reddit vs Lemmy or Twitter vs Bluesky vs Mastodon. Every Discord server is essentially a walled garden. A Discord server doesn’t hold much advantage over a Slack server, GroupMe, Teams, or IRC. For that reason, it would be a lot easier to move individual communities over.

Between this and not feeding the TSA police dogs, we’re really approaching cartoonish levels of evil from the regime.

Check your subs.

We already have started to see this with the way social media companies bend their algorithms to match the whims of their political benefactors, both in the West and East. The process of manufacturing consent Chomsky wrote about has only become more refined over time as social media companies developed more and more ways to manipulate people and abandoned any pretext of impartiality.

It probably would’ve worked, too, especially if he could’ve put things off until Trump’s return to power.

I don’t need it, strictly speaking, but I definitely prefer it. White noise is okay if I need to drown other sound out.

Maybe yes, but realistically no. It’s open source, so anyone could make their own clone of it with whatever monetization methods they want. If you ran an instance, you could also charge people to post on it. That said, with the way Lemmy is organized, people would just leave the offending instance for a different one.

Weirdest would have to be that miracles were actively occuring at their Penacostal church. On the one hand, if that were true it would be strong evidence for a god. On the other hand, I don’t believe the claim is true.

A lot of believers point towards the fine-tuning argument. It’s “the god of the gaps.” Essentially, the argument boils down to the claim that since we don’t know why various laws and properties of nature and physics are the way they are, there must of have been a god that set them. Like many theist arguments, it falls apart when you consider that the lack of an alternate explanation doesn’t mean that there is no alternate explanation and that the believing explanation has to be correct.

As an atheist, I think the strongest argument for god is the moral argument. It’s simple. For objective morality to exist, there must be an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-moral being capable of establishing it (that is, a god). Objective morality exists, so God exists.

It’s easy to look at that and say “Well, objective morality doesn’t exist. End of story!” I think there is a decent argument that can be made for the existence of objective morality, though I don’t believe in it. Still, do I not believe in god because I think objective morality doesn’t exist, or do I think objective morality doesn’t exist because I don’t believe in god? If I’m being honest, it’s more the latter than the former, and that’s not really a great way to come to the conclusion.

It’s a terrible idea. Isn’t the military a strong enough institution in the US as it is? What right does the government have to rob years from the lives of their youth by having them go play soldier, especially in times of peace?

If Trump invades Iran, the Dems and the media will just lap it up. All will be forgiven, and all it will cost is millions of lives.