Yes. So similar in fact that Romneycare basically never changed in its original state of Massachusetts. All the systems set up for Romneycare were copied at the national level.

You can always check out the e-book version even if you go find a physical copy to read instead. I saw a librarian asking people to do stuff like that since the active use of library services let’s them argue for better funding and services.

Also, see if they have a physical copy at another branch. My local library is part of a network that spans across multiple towns, and they can often get books sent to them from other branches if they don’t have a copy themswlves.

Not “tyrannic” yet, but Project 2025 is 3 months away.

Flowery words coming from someone who now lives in a tyrannic monarchy.

Big Carrot is coming for your stew

Add in a magic trick (experiment) that they can do themselves, and you’ve created a little baby physicist.

It’s just Minecraft, bro. I won’t teach them about logic gates again, I swear!

I think the modern car climate is a better comparison than the change from horse and buggy to Model T. Many people work on their own cars, but it’s mostly for fun and the increasing levels of computers and sensors in cars makes it more difficult to do all the work yourself. And then you add in the nuts and bolts car companies make that can only be unscrewed using special tools that the companies also make to force you to bring the car to one of their dealerships.

Tech literacy rates are falling like the skill to use a car with a manual transmission. Since everything kids do is on their phone, and phones are like that one car company that welded the hoods of their cars shut, they never need to pick up the skills with computer software that the work world expects them to have (but who really wants to know how to use Word and Excel anyways), nor the skills with working on your own hardware.

Sidenote: Fax machines are, unfortunately, still very much a thing. At least, if you ever have to deal with the federal government or the medical industry, they are.

I’ve seen this reported in other countries as well, and it makes perfect sense. If you’re already at risk of being deported just for existing, why would you do anything to put yourself at higher risk.

Crocodiles are also one of those rare animals that don’t “age” in the traditional sense. Once they reach adulthood, they continue to get larger and larger until they eventually starve or their organs collapse under their own body weight. They don’t lose muscle mass or bone density or any of the usual issues we attribute to getting older.

Imagine having the build of a 25 year old at 100 and being 7+ft tall. That’s how crocodiles age.

Plenty of people, even right here on Lemmy.

The worst I have to do is use a different proton version or add in a launch option.

And therein lies the problem that keeps most people from switching to Linux. It’s a super simple thing to do, but Linux users fall into the same fallacy that experts in any field do: just how little the average person knows about the subject. The fact that something doesn’t just work when you try to open it would leave many people stumped. Especially with tech literacy rates declining thanks to kids growing up using mostly cell phones as their daily driver rather than an actual computer and the plug and play nature of Windows and Macs. Asking your average gamer to add command line arguments to a launcher would probably be like telling them they just have to hot wire their car if it doesn’t start when you turn the key.

Same here. It’s grade A game design.

For me, the big question isn’t what are the effects, but rather, what is the cause?

I see this as an effect of something else that other effects of could be mistaken as symptoms of this here.

Basically, the destruction of third spaces and public life in general has caused an increasing number of people to find relationships (both romantic and platonic) online because they no longer have the opportunity in their daily life. That, and the increased ease of long distance relationships and meeting people from far away means that people are probably more likely to have the opportunity to fall in love with somebody outside of their tiny corner of the world.

I’d honestly be very surprised if that was the case. There’s so many different ways to interact with people online that I expect dating websites to make up a majority, but there’s probably like a 45% spread of things like social media/forum communities, online games, etc. All the kinds of things that used to be done offline (like meeting people through DnD at the local hobby shop) but can be done online or have become largely online thanks to the commodification of existing in public spaces. Shared interests are a great start to a relationship.

Hell, I’d love to see a breakdown of the percentages just to see how many relationships start from 3rd place games like Second Life and VRChat.

I like the way Ghost of Tsushima handled open world navigation with their wind system. Instead of a big GPS line or whatever that takes away from the game, the wind blows in the direction of where you’re going. Very subtle and works narratively while still being able to find where you’re going easily by just observing the world around you.

The other side of the coin is that AI currently uses more power than is produced by all renewables across the globe annually. So at least they’ll be offsetting that, which would be a net positive.

And it seems like Google’s funding will help advance safer and more modern nuclear plant designs, which is another win that could lead to replacing coal plants in many countries with small scale reactors that don’t run on uranium.

It already is as far as I know. I’ve heard before that ChatGPT is strictly trained on data from before, like 2018 or so for this reason.

As plenty of people have gone into the production pipeline, I’m gonna comment on the history of anime and manga and how that affects the way they’re produced, since I did a paper on it many years ago.

Manga dates back at least to the era of woodblock printing, as a famous artist by the name of Hokusai released a collection of prints titled The Manga, but the manga we know today was actually originally inspired by serialized Sunday comic strips from American newspapers imported via South Korea. The comparison to modern Western comics is clear, but I think this connection to the Sunday comics is why production houses like Shonen Jump have their weekly releases which allows them to try out new artists and comics without as much risk as Western comic publishers would have starting a new series with a full comic debut. Manga books can be better thought of as anthologies of weekly comic strips like Calvin and Hobbes rather than superhero comics.

Anime is very much inspired by Disney films, but both anime and manga target demographics of all kinds and every genre you can think of. I think this goes back to the woodblock prints of yore, which were an artform that had no particular demographic or subject matter, ranging from raunchy porn to advertising for theatre shows and anything in between. Add in the economic boom that Japan went through in the 80s just as anime was taking off - a time where money was so easy to come by in the industry that they were just greenlighting pretty much any project regardless of subject matter - and anime had no qualms about portraying adult themes like sex or body horror, as well as deeper musings like the common references to the atomic bombs and the deep cultural trauma that did to Japan.

Also of note: America was actually one of the last places to be introduced to anime and manga, and it took a long time to take off here. The rest of the world was getting into anime during the 80s while Steven Spielberg is quoted as saying that a cartoon movie for adults would never take off in the US in reference to the theatrical release of Akira, the profits of which funded many of the most famous studios of the 2000s.

In short, the cultural gulf between America and Japan divested the newspaper comic strip of its stereotype as a media for kids, which resulted in an artform that catered to all audiences and interests. And upon circling back to America decades later, this lack of the stereotype and willingness to show deeper stories found a niche that had been completely unattended to amongst the teens of the 2000s, who gobbled up media in a form that they had grown up with but treated with more respect than most kids’ cartoons. Also, it probably helped that many kids’ shows were created with the sole intent of selling more action figures.

By “abrupt,” I mean that Windows 7 ended service updates just last year, and Windows 10 will end next year. And by “current,” I mean that Windows 11 overtook 7 as the second most used version of Windows in 2022.

We’ve known that they’re ending support for 10 next year for a few years, but that end of life timeline is very short compared to previous versions of Windows. If 10 had the same end of life timeline as 7, we’d be seeing service updates for 10 ending in 2030. And 11 may be the newest version of Windows, but it is by all means not the most used version and is most likely not the version currently being used by most people that this article is relevant to.