How about we say, smoking in your basement alone, in a house only you live in to avoid the semantics.

Cool, you’re going to die or move sometime, and that smoked in house will go to someone else, which will harm them.

Your house burning down harms your community by using up emergency response resources.

Hell, the smoke from your burning house harms your neighbors. I should know, since the house halfway down the street from me caught fire and fogged up the whole neighborhood for a day. I had to take my wife to stay with her parents because the smoke was extremely irritating for her.

Other people like contractors and such can refuse to enter until the place is aired out.

Tell me you’ve never been in an indoor smoker’s house without telling me.

Universally no one has any rights. Sort of, the opposite is also true. Universally, nothing is illegal.

That is litterally what we are discussing here. No it’s not universal anything. It’s my opinion.

Ah, so your opinion is law? Must be nice to be a despot. Am I talking with Kim? Maybe Vlad?

People who smoke do end up needing more medical care. But so do people who drink alcohol, eat red meat, or any of a large number of lifestyle choices

Yes… This was my point actually, and it takes away from your point that harming other people cannot be a right. Rights are determined by the society you are in. I don’t have a right to murder because the society I’m in has said that murder is not a right. It’s not any more complex than that.

What are you even arguing here? You’ve jumped around so much, I can’t even really tell if you remember what your position was? I think it was something like…

“Laws should be restricted to protecting people from other people, not from themselves.”

Or…

“Well to be honest, there is an argument for letting you build bombs in your basement.”

People smoking in their basements present a fire hazard, major issue if you live with other people.

People smoking (at all) creates second-hand smoke, which harms the people that come into them, or their spaces (like say, a contractor, or first responders, utility technicians…)

People who smoke end up using more critical and limited medical resources because of their habits.

I’m not as daft as to say that smoking harms to the same degree as outright murder, but it’s equally stupid, if not more so, to say that smoking (even in your basement by yourself) harms no one else.

Also…

The only rights that should be considered for law are rights that impact others.

Who decided what rights should be considered for laws?

I’ll give you a hint; it’s not some universal property of the universe, nor a divine command.

At some point in time, the society I live in established that murder is against the law, and that is the sole reason I’m not allowed to murder anyone. My “right” to murder was just as valid as my “right” to smoke in my basement until there was a law created that defined (or changed) those “rights”.

So, back to my still very relevant comment from earlier…

But no, it doesn’t boil down to why have laws at all.

Okay, let’s play this out. Laws against murder remove my right to murder people. Just because you weren’t going to use that right doesn’t mean that I wasn’t going to.

But no, it doesn’t boil down to why have laws at all.

Okay, let’s play this out. Laws against murder remove my right to murder people. Just because you weren’t going to use that right doesn’t mean that I wasn’t going to.

What people do in their own time in their own space is their own business, as long as they’re not doing it in a way that puts other people in danger.

Smoking does put other people in danger. So does driving, or skipping vaccines.

Just remember that laws are not inherently moral or ethical.

Yes… That’s kinda my whole point. The sole basis for a law is if people decide to enact it and then enforce it.

Just because it may come later in life, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

You understand that if we change laws, then things that were previously legal will become illegal and vis versa? This avenue of argument ends in “Laws can never be created, removed, or changed.”

People who were not permitted to buy tobacco and vape products are not losing a freedom they had either.

Regardless, laws are written and removed constantly throughout our lifetime. It’s not legal for me to park where I used to, it’s not legal for me to bring a big bottle of orange juice or a tube of toothpaste on a plane anymore. The fact that things can become illegal or legal is a necessary consequences of having laws that can be changed.

Also, you could legally make your own explosives right up until there was a law passed that made it illegal. There isn’t some universal property that says humans aren’t allowed to make explodey shit.

Sure there is an argument for letting me do anything, but when you keep persuing and reducing the argument, it eventually boils down to “Why do we even have laws at all?”

The answer to that question is “because we as a society decided to.” By their very nature, laws created by people are arbitrary and intangible, their only actual effect is derived from society’s willingness to actually enforce them.

Why is my freedom to build bombs in my basement being overridden?

Oh that’s right, because laws are ultimately created based on relative perceptions of risks and social acceptance of the populace (generally, in a democratic society, there are a lot of exceptions here).

Note for my FBI agent : I’m not building bombs in my basement, I’m using that as an example of why we have laws at all.

Well, the better overall solution would be to ban it entirely, but here is the rub…

The addictive nature of these products is so strong that there is significant health risks to quitting them “cold turkey”.

The alternative is mandated addiction rehab programs, and completely banning the sale, use and possession of tobacco and vape products outside of licensed rehab centers. So, even though it feels arbitrarily restrictive to ban that 27 year old, but not the 28 year old, overall it is much more permissive than the alternative.

Could be either, if there was other music playing first…

As long as you don’t jump on AAA title games on launch day, you’ll be fine gaming on Linux.

That, or if you are a fortnite, LoL addict… Those don’t work for reasons totally up to the devs.

I got my not-quite-as-techy friend to switch, and they’re like a week in and already so pissed off about how bad windows was.

Mocking up whole websites seems like a pain. With a Pihole, you can create different service groups for computers and apply a whitelist to just their machines. Plus you get adblocking too!

Mint?

It’s the implementation part of ending net neutrality, the legal framework was put in during Trump’s last administration. Goal is to make your home network entirely managed and visible to your ISP, who has huge incentives (financial and otherwise) to comply with government requests for information and censorship.

01/01/1900

Because I like chaos.

It’s more than just the hardware.

They screwed up by finally forcing everyone onto an objectively shitty OS. Every other time MSlop has dropped support for an OS, they’ve had at least two others to choose from, and one of them was passable.

They screwed up by letting AI vibe code updates, which were then vibe tested and vibe deployed. The last 3 “patch Tuesdays” have been absolute nightmares of system breaking bugs.

They screwed up by sloppily forcing AI in to every aspect of their OS, and then (allegedly) bragging about how the next one is just going to be an AI.

They screwed up by not recognizing that AI is not popular among the common user. There are like 3 people at my workplace who actually use it, and the main thing they use it for is to add fluff to a chat message to turn it into an email.

They screwed up by putting a “line go up” business moron in charge of the company, who then put more “line go up” business morons in charge of the projects and departments. It’s no wonder that the new outlook sucks and is not fully featured, despite being the “default” outlook for years. It’s no wonder new teams is buggy, inconsistent, bloated, and always changing for the worse. It’s no wonder why all the perfectly functional menus and features of 10 have been hidden by slick and useless facsimiles in 11, while confusing and clunky elements of Win95 still lurk in the shadows.

If Microsoft wants to get back on top, they need new leadership. An apology changes nothing, action does. The current man in charge and his posse of yes-men flat out lack the character and understanding to make a good product that people and businesses want to use. They’ve been coasting on the momentum of being the top dog for 30 years, but that source of market force is not infinite.

Jokes aside. You can build you own solar charging station for a few grand.

Not a lot of people can build their own oil extraction and refinement system in their backyard.

On the flip side, might be a good time for everyone to learn about wood gasifiers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas_generator

The one thing you are forgetting… Is that Tesla lobbies the regulatory agencies.

For another comparison, the cyber truck is 17 times more likely to burn you to death than the Ford Pinto, a car that is practically synonymous with fire.

Robot/AI

FDR was dead before the first nuclear test dentonation ever occured…

So I can pretty conclusively say that dropping atomic bombs on Japan was not his response for pearl harbor.