There’s always somebody winning at SEO and gaming the algorithm, and there are few tactics more effective than “Exciting and Wrong”

Nah, death by bulldozer shows up in any modern industrialized country that really wants some people out of the way. For instance.

I wonder how much of the rejection of real issues with marijuana are the after effects of nearly a century of it being demonized with sources like “we made it up” or “we just really want to jail black people and college students”.

Then again, we have people out there believing that the entire world was ruled by a single nomadic horde, the world was flooded with mud in the mid 1800s, and 1*1=2 so we might just have a broader issue with people rejecting facts they don’t like.

Blue sky (and just about anything else) is an improvement, but remember, there is no bottom, things can always be worse. Truth Social and Gab both still exist.

These websites, because they are all centralized, are all ultimately moderated in accordance with the whims of their owners, the effect of which was thrown into sharp relief after Apartheid Willy Wonka bought Twitter.

With a federated platform like Mastodon, no single owner would be able to do this. If an instance suddenly became terrible, they could be de-federated and they’d lose their reach.

Of course, if one instance became particularly large, the ‘whims of the owner’ problem would come right back, but at least the alternatives would still be readily available.

Should be about sea level.

(The top of the cliff is, assuming Google maps is halfway accurate, about 600 meters)

What if your robot was just a guy?

Grok Habsburg

We even let AI write our script!

Adam was a golem

Every vote for Biden in Steubenville is another vote that somebody in Cleveland doesn’t have to counter, so yes, vote.

The electrical vote is state by state (with two states, Maine and Nebraska divying all but two of those votes one per congressional district), so your vote in a swing state matters.

You know how the Tesla board voted to gone him a $50 billion compensation package? After child support gets deducted he’s actually making a modest six figure paycheck.

Debs ran from prison (for the high crime of telling people that WWI was none of our business and people shouldn’t enlist to get turned toa pink mist in Belgium) in 1920

As for voting as a felon, that varies state to state. I don’t think there’s anyplace that allows people to vote from prison, but quite a few states let convicted felons vote once they’ve completed their sentence and any parole that follows it (and in some states, pay additional fines, which sounds a bit like a poll tax to me, but I’m not one of our nine kritarchs, so what do I know about that sort of thing?)

As for people running for office when they couldn’t vote, Elizabeth Cady Stanton ran for office well before she could have voted, and the first woman elected to Congress (Jeanette Rankin) was elected in 1916, several years before women’s suffrage was added to the constitution, though her state, Montana, had allowed women to vote already.

Best guesses would be the way that Ticketmaster’s site shit the bed when people were buying tickets when the Eras tour kicked off or the way that ticket scalping has grown online

Yeah, pay to post was Something Awful founder lowtax’s idea.

We’ve finally figured out how to trick the computer that’s bad at math into being less bad at math.

These kinds of guys have been active in California since basically as soon as it was granted statehood. The Big Four (a clique or robber barons) tried to rule over the state with the wealth they built up with the Central Pacific Railroad.

One of them, Leland Stanford (of Stanford University), actually did become governor and eventually senator.

Another, Charles Crocker, invented Californian NIMBYism with his infamous spite fence.

That’s good advice. Shame he and his colleagues didn’t follow it in 303 Creative

Because maintaining a train length vacuum is really difficult and doesn’t really provide that big of a benefit.

Atmospheric rail has been attempted with varying degrees of success (but never to a ‘replaces traditional rail’ degree) for 200 years.

The Devil’s Milkshake