No thanks to the federal government beefing up privacy legislation.

Let’s see how the incoming regime goes. Most people seem to view him as a useful idiot and it wouldn’t be difficult for trump to bury him by ripping up contracts or regulating him into obscurity

Agree with the bit about it being easier to keep track of payments with electronic payment.

Cash does have a cost, though it’s less visible.

We need to set up a date with Daisy and Lenny

Something something sneaking into other people’s houses is haram therefore VPN is haram?

The US seems perfectly happy with socialism … for its corporate sector

Though the English is are weird

Local names in Britain do my head in

I miss the KDE 3.x crystal theme

I see an ostrich

Oh fuck! Buy travel insurance…

Then they were pulled on board, the survivors thought they’d died and landed in hell

❤️ from a 35yo

It’s not that I can’t stay up all night, it’s that I have too much on to waste half a day sleeping

A malicious gene drive. Basically, use molecular tools to ensure that a gene is always passed down from a parent to its progeny, regardless of the other parent’s genetic makeup.

Many choices available: propagate resistance to a pesticide for mosquitos, guarantee Huntington’s disease in a family, or crash a population of beneficial special by reducing fertility, to name a few.

Australia: carrying out elections.

Voting is compulsory and you will be fined if you don’t vote without an acceptable reason.

But because voting is compulsory, it’s extremely easy and accessible. Waiting in line for more than 15 minutes is a long wait. Even in the suburbs you’re not usually more than a five minute drive from a polling place.

If you think you’ll have trouble getting to a polling place on election day (a Saturday), you can request a postal ballot or vote early at a different polling place.

We have an independent electoral commission federally and in each state/territory to organise elections (depending on which level of government you’re voting for). They also handle district boundaries to remove gerrymandering.

All ballots are marked and counted by hand. The counting process is open and transparent: any candidate can send people to inspect the counting process and ensure there are no irregularities.

This sounds like a Carmen Sandiego heist

Russian windows really need fixing up

This is so mind numbingly fucking stupid. I have linguistics training and my dickhead uncle tried to pull this one on me. He’s never tried to flex his grammar on me since.

Next time this shit happens to you, try this trick.

In the above question, the word “can” could be interpreted in one of two senses.

• One is the deontic sense, which denotes permission or approval.
• The other is the epistemic sense, which denotes capability.

As a competent English speaker, you will easily infer that vampire is using the deontic “can”.

The confusion seems to derive from the recipient’s inability to understand that modals in English grammar can possess different senses depending on context.

It is worth noting that the deontic “can” has been documented in writings for hundreds of years. It is a normal and standard element of English grammar. Case in point: the idiot trying to flex on you knows what you mean but they’re pretending they don’t.

It’s not my problem that you don’t understand basic English grammar. Maybe you should go read a few books and educate yourself.

Did you ever contrast it with Brave New World? In many ways the latter is more disturbing since the masses are kept busy with frivolity to question their world.

Their rationale was, get this, “people don’t know who their councillors are”

Like holy shit nobody ever knows who their local MLCs or senators are, but are we scrapping hare clarke? No.

It’s a sleazy tactic to increase the impact of major parties.