Decided to look into the yellow counties in Montana because I was shocked if they could even be 49%. Petroleum County (a truly American name) in Montana has 228 occupied households and seemingly no public transportation. However, 58.2% of the county is employed in mining.

So my best guess is a company bus that comes around and picks up everybody? It seems like the bulk of the remainder are farmers, which would mean they don’t “need” to drive anywhere. Although they do drive constantly across their property as part of the work, which feels like cheating.

Gotta post this to the !RichardScarryPosting community. This looks like something Goldbug would drive around in.

This is very very loosely the plot of The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. They weren’t sent to necessarily convert the aliens, but the Catholic Church were the only ones willing to bankroll a trip that would take at least 60 years and have no possible ROI.

It definitely does not go as planned and, maybe unsurprisingly to modern readers, ends with the Catholic Church being cast as a bunch of perverts in the public eye.

I was gonna post it if nobody else did.

This is the strategy I am now forced to adopt as well. I bought a 2 TB SSD for my home server in late 2024 for $80, then it died exactly a year and a day later. I knew RAM was out of control, but didn’t expect to see the same SSD for $350.

So I guess it’s back to the old 250 GB SSD and rotating old stuff onto an ancient HHD, then hoping prices tank again before one of those implodes.

You can exchange money for goods and services? I thought it all had to go to the rich overlords.

I think size is the biggest factor. OS ISOs are pretty big, so having a managed download is helpful. If the 100 GB triple-A games were open source I would certainly expect torrents. But the FOSS things I download directly are pretty small, and the vast majority are done through a package manager or docker compose. So there may be a Goldilocks zone in the middle where it’d be helpful, but in those cases I’d expect a small installer that downloads the bulk of it for you.

So not much benefit for the consumer, but what about the provider? Spreading the traffic would reduce load on the hosting server which is a positive. You’d still have to handle the bulk of the traffic until the seeders outpace the leechers, but on long enough timescales it’d be helpful. Except you can’t really update a torrent, which means each release needs to start fresh. This still works for OS creators because updates tend to be far apart, there is a large user base, and there is still some market for older versions. For regular programs you may only get one of those three, at which point adding torrents may be more hassle than it’s worth.

That’s only five and a half movies per day! Easy peasy!

Must have been a microscopic aperture too. Even a pinhole picture would be washed out after 26,280 hours!

Thank you. I was a bit skeptical, but communism is such a boogeyman here and the RIAA (and MPAA) are so hilariously evil and out of touch that I was ready to fully believe it.

In that vein, The Song Of Achilles by Madeline Miller is quite good. Circe is also good, but focuses more on the struggles of women as opposed to the sex of gay men.

I can’t say I disagree, but I am ignorant of what the alternatives would be. A tagged database of files so you can query by tag, filename, or such?

It took me longer than I would care to admit to figure out this was an Onion article. Reads just like a normal story involving US cops.

Is it Marxmas or Christmarx?

That looks amazing!

That was an act, like all the diners talking to each other, to immerse Carol in the memory. They did the same sort of thing for the gross dude in the casino scene, but I find it strange that they did it of their own volition this time. Maybe they really are just trying to distract her, but it feels like there is more to it.

This may be too big: Arthur Christmas. It was made by Aardman (Wallace and Gromit, Shawn the Sheep) but using CG instead of claymation. I honestly don’t like the animation as much as their claymation, but they did a good job with it.

It’s the best representation of the “Christmas spirit” in my opinion. The story is great and the character arcs bring a tear to my eye.

Especially good if you like Star Trek cameos!

🎵 There goes my hero / watch him as he goes 🎵

In theory they aren’t individuals anymore, they are appendages. So there would be no issue with consent the same way you decide consent for your hand or mouth. In a sense your mouth consents because it is part of the you making that decision.

Except… If there were any chance your hand could separate from you and become an individual in the future it’d be immoral to use it for sex now. And Carol is already very confident that it’s possible to reverse the Joining. But even if she wasn’t it was always a possibility. So having sex with any of them is incredibly wrong, which should be obvious to anybody on a gut level.