I’ve met my federal representative in person a dozen or so times at her office locally, and been to 6 town halls, both in person and virtual teleconference town halls. My state House rep I have met a ton. He’s extremely active in the community.

Lol yeah that’s the issue. You cannot expect people to put rules on themselves like that if nobody is going to enforce it. It truly does fall to the constituency to be the enforcement by voting them out when they abdicate their responsibilities.

It should be, yes. The good ones are already doing this, but there absolutely should be some requirement to make the lazy ones actually do their job.

And, ideally, we’d have an active and informed constituency that keeps their representatives honest. They should be terrified of being voted out because their constituents keep their feet to the fire.

Oklahoma has had Service by Publication for over 20 years.

Most places have Service by Publication, including Oklahoma.

She would need to file the petition, and then run a legal notice in a paper that serves that county, and that would count. Doesn’t matter if he ever actually sees or responds to it. She will have fulfilled her legal obligation for service.

You’re wrong, but for a different reason.

Being on recess isn’t the issue. They should be on recess and working in their districts more often than they are actually in session in DC. They ideally shouldn’t be in session that much at all. Their primary role is being at home in their district working with their constituents and that’s where the vast majority of work is intended to take place.

Not working while on recess is a completely different issue, and that’s up the constituents to enforce via voting. Plenty of representatives and senators are actively working in their districts when on recess, like they should be. Those that aren’t should be voted out by their constituents. If the constituents keep voting them in, they’re openly saying that’s the representation they want. And that’s on them.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how Congress works.

Time spent in DC is supposed to be the smallest part of their job. Recess isn’t vacation for them, if they’re doing it right. Recess is when they actually do the job of representation. They’re supposed to be spending time in their districts holding town halls, having open office hours, and working with local groups on issues that need to be brought up when they are in session.

They should be spending more time with their constituents than in DC. Spending time with constituents is the most fundamental job function of a representative.

A lot don’t do that though, and that’s on their idiot constituents for continually voting them in and not holding them accountable.

No. They are required by law to buy their own health insurance from the ACA marketplace.

There’s a difference between “has connected features” and “REQUIRES connected features” though. Again, you’re making a false equivalency.

Yes, pretty much every new vehicle has some sort of connectivity, and almost all have some sort of paid subscription to use those connected features in the app.

That’s entirely different than requiring you to have a subscription and use the app. Most new cars do NOT do that. They still have all the basic functionality without using the connected features, and the features are literally extra features so you can do things outside of the range of the fob, or add some extra things that the fob can’t do.

Buy any of the other vehicles out there that don’t pull that bullshit?

Lol it wasn’t a choice between that car and walking. That’s a massive false equivalency.

Yup. Blame Google for that one. They built a trillion dollar empire on collecting data better than anyone else, and using that data to sell extremely targeted ads.

Yeah it wasn’t entirely ads, but that was the major factor along with the transition from print to digital.

Things do still have to get paid for. High quality journalism means paying high prices for journalists. There’s server costs and other overhead. Early on people were still buying the paper. Ads covered being able to put it online for free and people buying the paper paid the real bills.

As print died, that killed the main revenue stream. That meant more ads to keep the online side free and make money. But more ads meant people get more turned off by them and start using ad blockers. That kills that revenue stream, so you introduce a subscription that gives access to everything ad free.

Eventually, you get to where we are. You want it, you pay for it. Which is really just back to buying the paper, but digitally. Back in the day you bought the paper. Either you yourself did from the paper machine, a street corner paper stand, or you literally had a physical subscription and got it delivered. Or you read it for free when someone else paid for a delivery subscription, like the doctors office, the donut/coffee shop, or your work put it in the break room.

Because they had ads to bring in income to pay the bills, which allowed them to give the news for free to the end user.

Then everyone started using ad blockers, killing that revenue stream.

They can’t give things away for free without something else paying the bills. That ends up being the end user with a subscription now.

That would be an absolute nightmare to administer lol. Though I guess that tracks.

1, 01, 001, 0001, and 00001 would all be different users

Unless by “digit” they mean any alphanumeric.

You’ve got a lot of options if you go to a 5 characters with letters.

Which they’d kind of have to with 700k users if it’s 5 characters.

If it’s case insensitive, you’ve got 60,000,000+ combinations, and if case sensitive then 916,000,000+ combinations.

We already do with tidal generators.

And theres ways to follow currents for extra help, but you’re limited to that and where the current moves.

Anything else and you’d have to violate the laws of physics.

It’s like putting a wind turbine on an electric car. The increased drag would cost more electricity than the turbine could produce.

It’s kind of funny to see all these headlines not long after everyone was going on about Apple not doing enough with AI and going to slow with their rollout.

They have just done it a lot smarter than the others. Not rushing out to throw piles of money at something. Same thing they did during the pandemic, when other companies were massively overhiring trying to ride the wave. Apple didn’t and subsequently hasn’t needed to hold massive layoffs.

Focused on private groups of friends and family

So, a group chat.

the future of social networking lies in small, private communities powered by messaging, photo sharing

So it literally is just a fancy group chat. Or I guess a singular feed of multiple group chats…

Well, no. Even by the most conservatively estimated study, there are a minimum of 60,000 defensive gun uses in the US each year. Up to 2.5 million per year on the high end.

There are around 40,000 deaths from all unintentional falls per year. Of those, 85% are aged 65 and older.

You’re more likely to use a gun in self-defense than you are to trip and die. Especially if you’re not geriatric. So you’re wrong immediately there.

And yes, owning a gun makes it more statistically likely for someone to die by a gun. That’s because nearly 100% of gun suicides were the owner of said gun. Suicide is a leading cause of death in the US. That’s pretty irrelevant to anyone not suicidal.

Like they say, there’s three kids of lies. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.