This right here. The existence of carriers is what has always allowed people to own copies of things they themselves did not create.

Digital “sales” are using mediation to outright ignore that fact that ideas must be expressed in a physical manner for sale. And yes, digital files are physical as long as they continue to be written to storage media like hard drives and tape. Selling access licenses is what they are doing (and I’m okay with that when the companies doing it aren’t asshats about it.) but they also need to stop derailing the discourse with statements about how “we’ve never owned anything ever because we’re not the copyright holder!”

All of this just demonstrates how much IP law has lagged behind and how abusive corporate IP holders are when exploiting loopholes and faulty mental models.

It’s Columbia, not Colombia. But either way, it’s named after Columbus, which he has a bit of a hard on for, so that name is unfortunately safe.

I’ve always interpreted “small government” as single-party with lots of privatization of government services instead of small government that stays out of people’s lives.

Only because their basic needs are already met by the income of, you know, their regular professional job.

Musk’s obsession with an author like Heinlein, who wrote several books about a multidimensional polygamous space time sex cult with a dash of incest, makes a lot of sense.

Age, in this case, shouldn’t be what’s stopping him. Something, something constitution.

Unless you are being willfully obtuse, you either misread or ignored the intent of my comment.

“People having kids and wishing they didn’t” is due to a lack of options, social pressure, ostracism for choosing abortion, the stigma of remaining childless, and a whole bunch of propaganda.

People choosing not to have kids because they don’t want them is a relatively modern lifestyle.

For most of history, people having kids wasn’t so much a choice as it was something that happened to them.

I don’t know one that sums up Florida, but I know one that sums up how I feel about Florida: Fremdschämen.

Edit: Actually, I guess we could just add Höllenloch to it and get what you were trying to say: Fremdschämenshöllenloch or Vicariously embarrassing hell hole. I’m sure someone whose German is much, much better than mine will breeze through here and correct me.

I mean, yeah. My point was that the people who believe in fantastical boogeymen are the most likely to support the people who are the closest to being the actual Antichrist if any of that were real.

The graphic design of MAGA will be studied at some point. I think it has the effect of looking like some “Everyman” did it themselves. Who’s to say whether this effect is intentional psyops or just the result of distancing themselves from people who actually practiced and studied an art, trade, or discipline, but this shit worked on a certain slice of the population pre-MAGA, too.

I mean, they already have a rootkit, a few worms, and a half-dozen viruses running in their wetware. Why not go ahead and install a few crypto miners and some assorted malware on their PC?

And then, if you do take into account the Book of Revelations, Nostradamus, various 20th-century evangelical ramblings, and the 1976 historical documentary, The Omen, the people who are most likely candidates for antichrist are Trump, Thiel, Musk, Ellison, etc.

Maybe Thiel is worried about who his father really is.

sanguis bibimus corpus edimus

Your heart is in the right place, I think, but FOIA is useless here. FOIA is cool if you want to know what an agency has on file about you (which is usually nothing) or learning the “truth” about JFK, EBEs, and UAPs.

Sarcasm aside, the most important thing to note about FOIA is that agencies handle their own FOIA requests; each agency has a staff (sometimes even a staff of one) for processing FOIA requests. FOIA is also a “devil’s in the details” type of law: you won’t have much luck with vague, open-ended, or ambiguously scoped requests.

Some information and data are exempt FOIA requests, including information about law enforcement activities or investigations, the personnel files or personal details of staff, and anything considered relevant to “national security.”

Even if the information requested is cleared for release, agencies know how to stall. FOIA requests are legally required to be responded to in 20 days or less… unless “the information needs to be closely reviewed and redacted before release,” “we’ve received too many requests for the same information to answer them in a timely manner,” or “our staff are experiencing difficulty locating the specific files that would satisfy the request.” Flooding an agency with FOIA requests for the same document or topic typically makes things worse until the amount requests becomes so high that that agency just dumps them online somewhere.

The last thing I’ll say is that a lot of FOIA requests only get satisfied after a lawsuit.