Bassman1805

The first mRNA vaccine for covid was synthesized within a month of the national emergency declaration. But there was about a year of trials and approvals before it was allowed to be mass distributed.

The plot is an inverse of population density: rural areas have more exposure to cows, cities do not.

Evolution - at a species level or a societal level - has no "guiding hand". It throws shit at a wall to see what sticks, and the best-adapted variants tend to propagate.

Selfish behavior is very powerful in a large and strong society where most people are producing more value than they're consuming. There's so much wealth to be found that if you don't care about the enemies you make, you can just jump from victim to victim as you amass power faster tab the people you leave behind. The problem is, this drives the society towards no longer being one of such surplus.

In a smaller society where people are largely just surviving, selfish behavior will cripple your own ability to survive. If everybody has only a modest surplus, they only want to share it with people they can trust to return the favor when they're the one in need. If you make enemies with everyone in a small community, you're going to have a hard time finding community support.

Given that this is a laptop we're talking about, OP is definitely over selling it. Bring a backpack, unpack the laptop box into your backpack (assuming the box is too big to fit in the backpack itself). Something bigger like a TV would be more problematic.

The main worry is that being seen with new-in-box fancy electronics makes you look like "guy with money". It's not so much that someone's gonna steal your TV on the subway, but if you can afford a new TV your wallet probably has good stuff in it. Then it's just a question of "how bad is the crime actually on this commute?". Most places it'd be fine but some rough parts of some cities I'd be worried.

It's the apathy, or the belief that it somehow doesn't matter. To quote Walter Sobchak:

Nihilists, fuck me. Say what you will about the tenets of national socialism, at least it's an ethos.

Hawaii was not a state for almost 2 decades after pearl harbor, so yeah.

The original white house was burned to the ground by British/Canadian troops in 1814.

Not to mention about 100 different American Indian Wars, though some of those were more slaughter than war.

I mean...

[Gestures broadly at the state of the world]

People see headlines and the comment section of the social media platform where that headline was posted.

This, basically

https://xkcd.com/1019/

Shit, even doing shades of purple without getting more granular than the state level would change the map drastically. This winner take all bullshit is the dumbest part of the electoral college.

Personal/Family use is fine, it's kinda fiddly but so is most selfhosted software.

At an organizational level, that fiddliness spirals into a ton of work, which doesn't really overlap with other IT Duties in the way that troubleshooting OneDrive usually ends up solving problems with the whole Microsoft suite.

Charlie Wilson.

Texas Democrat known for partying hard, and was investigated (by Rudy Giuliani) for a party he attended in Vegas.

"The girls had cocaine, and the music was loud. It was total happiness. And both of them had long, red fingernails with an endless supply of beautiful white powder...The Feds spent a million bucks trying to figure out whether, when those fingernails passed under my nose, did I exhale or inhale, and I ain't telling"

The US may affect the whole world less next year if everyone else works hard to find alternate markets, but it's going to take longer than that for the rest of the world to totally detangle themselves from our mess.