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)

Society will have to relearn a lesson like this every so often, because people kind of yearn to offload the mental energy involved in controlling some aspect of their lives to someone else. And while they’ll probably start by offloading or to someone competent and with their best interests at heart, eventually someone who wants to extract wealth from that position will rise in such a space.

Can’t get there. The Bosphorus is closed to warships

What if your robot was just a guy?

Well, one of their founders and early PMs (and the grandfather of the ex-PM and recent assassination victim, Shinzo Abe) was one of the guys who ran Manchukuo (Manchuria under Japanese occupation in the run up to WWII). With these guys, you always have to wonder how much of the ‘rehabilitation’ took.

Grok Habsburg

We even let AI write our script!

That’s a remake of (and is subtitled as) The Incredible Journey.

In the last decade? People who have lived there for generations but that the Tatmadaw, in an attempt to rally support from the majority population has declared to have immigrated illegally so that they can murder the ‘illegals’.

Not left, not right but center somehow ever farther right.

This is the only way they’ll play with a cat tree.

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.

A farcical accident

They invented FSD in the sixties and it makes a handy little loop through downtown Detroit.

You’re definitely paying for legality and safety, but when you have to search through five different streaming apps to find that the movie you’re looking for can only be rented via yet another service, the convenience becomes debatable.

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.

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.