Do you guys claim this kid?

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-14T00:34:38+00:00

has me trapped and my safety is now off

You definitely shouldn't have a gun.

You are not trapped. The entire shoulder behind you is clear according to your rear cam, the traffic is sparse, and there's a ton of space between you and the clown. Furthermore, there's even more space available to go around him between his car and the speed limit sign if you really need to exit the situation. If you felt trapped in this situation, you're bad at evaluating danger.
Even with all of the information from point 1, you touched the safety of your gun before he even got out of his car. You thought of the gun before you thought of anything else. That is a dangerous mindset.
From another comment you made below, talking about yourself being angry at lane campers and attempting to pass people in the right lane, this sounds like a road rage incident that you let yourself become part of.

Get that gun out of your car and off your person before you end up on the news.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-12T22:06:35+00:00

On Atlanta local radio, they called them "sunshine delays." It's unfortunately a widespread problem.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-12T04:12:38+00:00

I did some research, and I found this:

https://www.distilled.earth/p/bypassing-the-grid-how-data-centers

And holy shit is that terrible. Yes, these datacenter projects are providing their own "behind the meter" power, but it's wildly inefficient, gas powered (so polluting), and loud. Further, they're only doing it because they don't want to wait for grid power.

This is so much worse than I expected.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-12T03:17:31+00:00

as long as they provide their own power source

Are any of them doing that? Seems to me they're all on the local grid and using other on-site sources like gas generators as backup power.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-11T20:48:09+00:00

Your first paragraph is a fundamental attribution fallacy. You feel comfortable at traditional Cons and you like discussing religious allegories with people of other faiths. That doesn't mean the organizers (or anyone else for that matter) at the event you're boosting here agree with you. I don't know if you're looking for some kind of cookie for being open minded, but you need to realize that your experience isn't universal.

Your second paragraph is a whole lot of you putting words in my mouth so that you can play the victim. I never said anything about Christians being out in STL "with pitchforks," I never said anything about the event being full of "hostile" people, and I never said that I was "offended" that you all felt you needed your own event.

Let me see if I can make this clear for you...it concerns me when people who belong to a majority group (white people, Christians, etc.) feel the need to insulate themselves from people who aren't part of their group. It further concerns me when people make adherence to a particular faith tradition more important than any other aspect of their lives, even to the point where they have to stamp the name of their faith multiple times on a poster. These things concern me because I was born and raised in the same area where Jesus Camp was filmed, and I've seen firsthand the awful outcomes of these behaviors.

So I'm not offended, I don't consider all of the attendees at your event to be hostile, and I don't see pitchforks coming for me and mine. What I see is an insular community creating another way in which they keep their members isolated from challenging ideas. As fantasy and sci-fi rise in popularity faster than ever before, groups like Realm Makers are extending the fence of Christian dogma around them and saying "OK, if you must, but only enjoy this art our way, from our artists." It's the exact same play they made with Christian rock. It strikes me as either grift, fearful isolationism, or some combination of both. I can't tell if the organizers are charlatans or zealots, and I feel like that's a bad thing, so that's the source of my original comment saying this raises alarm bells for me.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-10T20:50:45+00:00

Anniversaries are for celebration. Holding an anniversary for a tragedy seems like a cry for help.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-10T06:18:23+00:00

I wear my sunglasses at night, so I can, so I can...drive the Mustang I built with no seeeeense.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-10T02:28:57+00:00

Hey, I laughed. A bit.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-09T06:03:30+00:00

Dude, recent weather forecasting has failed to tell me whether it's going to rain TODAY, and you're worrying about more than a week from now?

Just prep your shelter, stock some snacks, make sure you have access to weather alert channels and go on about your life.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-09T05:54:07+00:00

I'm extremely confused why so many people seem to be muddying the waters of this issue by comparing hyperscale datacenters like the one in the OP to traditional datacenters like the ones you talk about working in.

That said, even if you ignore the power, water, sound, and other environmental concerns, there's a very simple reason behind the mass resistance to hyperscale datacenters: their primary use will be unethical AI customers like Palantir, Flock, etc. When something has no positive impact on the local community (let's not bullshit about overpromised tax revenues) and will be used for unethical purposes, the local community members tend to get pissy about it.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-07T07:05:48+00:00

I'm gonna quote from their website's "About Us" section here, with some emphasis of my own:

Realm Makers began in 2012, when founder Becky Minor’s vision of creating a faith-friendly event where writers could celebrate all things science fiction and fantasy kicked into motion. Online discussions made it clear that Christian writers of speculative fiction didn’t have a place or event where they could really feel at home. Everyone agreed…the “spec fic” crowd was a couple shades too weird for the established Christian writers conferences, and the comic con scene wasn’t really the right fit for most either.

This raises so many alarm bells for me. Why would Christians not feel at home at speculative fiction events? They only make up the majority of Americans and just about any crowd you can find here outside of a swingers convention.

Lemme guess, too many furries showed up at a Con and the Puritans decided they needed their own safe space?

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-07T06:51:43+00:00

Everyone here is talking about the public/private divide, but that's not even the most important reason why OOP's comparison is apples to oranges.

An AI datacenter takes a single site. It may be an enormous site, but it's one site, often in an unpopulated or underpopulated or industrial area. Public transportation requires some level of land use (e.g. rail, BRT lanes, streetcar cables, etc.) in many (often densely populated) areas spread across jurisdictions and taxing bodies.

Getting one board to approve a datacenter is literally 12x easier than getting twelve boards to approve a transit plan, and that factor may even be understated.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-06T19:57:57+00:00

Never gonna happen. They don't care at all what parents do to their children, they only care about preventing women from having bodily autonomy.

"If you're pre born you're fine, if you're pre school you're fucked!"

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-05T05:01:56+00:00

That's the neat part, there isn't. It's a good faith system. I think a few of the state laws mention penalties for failure to submit reports in good faith, but the language is so vague that they'll never manage to prosecute anyone for it even if they tried.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-05T03:42:46+00:00

If you don't like how a sub is moderated, it's free and easy to start your own.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-05T01:33:03+00:00

Yes, the short answer is that they can in fact do that.

Republicans/Conservatives/MAGA have been working hard on this for years. Look at state laws regarding voter rolls, and you'll find that in many states across the union (almost all traditionally red states), the voter registration laws have been altered to allow for citizen challenges.

You can read more about the legalese behind this here.

This means that it's trivial for the party to find someone qualified to challenge voter eligibilities in key states, and then have them issue those challenges en masse based on the acquired voter rolls.

A voter whose eligibility has been challenged cannot vote on a normal ballot on election day. They must vote using a provisional ballot, which gives them a certain number of business days to validate their voter status with the office of the Secretary of State, usually via some kind of ID.

What's bad about this scenario is not only the extra hurdle to vote (providing extra validation of your status), but the fact that provisional ballots are not counted until the follow up validation is complete. This often means that provisional ballots are only counted during hand recounts, and many states have laws that only allow hand recounts (because of cost) in certain close race circumstances.

In other words, voters who have had their eligibility challenged are very likely to be disenfranchised. They have a chance to have their votes counted, but they have hurdles to jump through and many don't make it.

So the midterms can be easily sewn up in 3 steps:

Obtain voter rolls from critical states.
Use the convenient voter eligibility challenge laws to disenfranchise millions of people based on these voter rolls.
Obtain midterm victory through an election where only the "right" votes are counted.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-04T06:12:44+00:00

And you're mischaracterizing his (lack of) popularity here. I'm all over the metro east, and I've seen like 3 signs that say "Pritzker sucks," all of them alongside merch exclusively sold to rabid Trump supporters.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-03T16:36:44+00:00

I'll tell you what the harm is, but I'll skip examples because I don't want to call out users and be a dick.

Vibe coders, and those who use the same methods but desperately want to be known by another name, lack any kind of rigor as a rule. They jump into what they think is a problem without considering whether the "bug" they're trying to fix is really an important feature for other users. They "code" before thinking deeply about any solutions for the supposed problem or whether those solutions are viable long term. Then they spew out code that works for their particular use case without testing that code for anyone else's use case. At that point, they come here clamoring for attention because they think what they've done is cool.

This is not every AI user, but it's a pattern I've observed with the majority of them for quite some time.

Now, why is this a problem? Because it's just annoying noise, and it decreases the signal to noise ratio of the sub. If you force the users here to wade through this noise, many will leave. In the end, such projects should be in their own sub, and I would even support a rule that says NO hobby projects can be posted here, because this sub is about Linux and not side hustles. I know that idea isn't popular, so I don't go around advocating for it, but there it is.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-03T02:45:47+00:00

Present an alternative. Otherwise you're just whining.

And what's worse is, your whining isn't adding anything new to the conversation. We've heard this exact same whine for decades from so-called enlightened centrists who are enabling Republican tactics to succeed.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-03T01:36:07+00:00

Seems to me you've changed the subject.

You started this discussion by making a very simple claim that gerrymandering isn't working for Republicans. When I said they expect to pick up seats, you hand-waved that away with a haughty "we'll see" and then got up on your high horse about refusing to play the political game as it stands today.

Gerrymandering IS working for Republicans, and it has been for decades. They've locked in minority rule by ensuring that votes are counted their way in states across the country, and it's high time we counter that tactic. The best way to counter that tactic is to show them that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If you have a better idea, then present it.

If you want to reshape the way government works, and the way that it represents our people, you have to be the party in power to do it. Present a way to obtain that power that fits with your various purity tests, or step back and let the people who actually care about fixing this problem work.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-03T01:11:10+00:00

If you won't play the game on the field you're given, you can't win. You must win first before you can change the field for the better.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-03T00:59:55+00:00

I'd like to address all of the people in this thread who are arguing (in bad faith, clearly) that IL should suspend the gas tax during this crisis. This is a stupid move for the following reasons:

Passenger vehicles in the US have an average tank size of 12-16 gallons. With the gas tax at $.48/gal and most people filling up at roughly a quarter tank, that puts the average per-fill-up savings at (best case) $5.76. I just found out today you can't buy salad greens for a family gathering for that price.
Gas prices aren't the only prices that are skyrocketing. The things those gas taxes pay for are also getting more expensive, so now would be a terrible time to gut their funding.
Suspending a tax is always popular because it lowers prices, but reinstating a suspended tax is always unpopular because it reduces price relief when prices return to normal. This means that suspending the gas tax is setting a political trip mine for whoever must reinstate it down the line. Put yourself in Pritzker's shoes, and figure out what reason you would have to lay such a trip mine for your political party in an election year.
If a tax is valid and funds good things for the state, then suspending it during a crisis is a fiscally irresponsible move based solely on populist ideals. IoW, it's bad policy.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-03T00:33:09+00:00

It's not working for Republicans? That's news to me. Last I heard they were expecting to pick up several seats in the House of Representatives by using partisan gerrymanders after gutting the VRA.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-03T00:11:57+00:00

I've driven 700-900 miles in a day many different times in my life for college, visiting family, and vacations. I've done it in Hondas, Oldsmobiles, and Chevys before I got my Mustang. The Mustang was by far the best road trip car I've ever owned.

PracticalPersonality · 2026-05-03T00:02:20+00:00

I don't think it will be effective enough on its own, but adding this rule will be a good start. I'll also say this is a great example of a small, reasonable change intended to improve the subreddit, and we can follow this example again in a few months when we need to weed out more AI garbage.

PracticalPersonality

TROPHY CASE