That’s not the social contract, that’s the dual contracts of residency (protection from fellow residents) and citizenship (protection from foreign elements). You have the opportunity of consent; on your majority you can leave the country for another that’ll have you. There’s a cost to it, but it’s fairly minimal in most places.
That there costs and requirements imposed by a refusal to consent means that your consent or lack thereof is subject to coercion, rendering the arrangement non-consensual.
This argument would be valid if you could renounce US citizenship without first producing another citizenship. But it's not, and you can't. I never asked for a US citizenship, I don't want a US citizenship, and yet I'm bound by it and not free to revoke it.
This citizenship situation is more analogous to a slaveholder telling one of their slaves that they are technically free, because they are welcome to leave once they produce documented proof of ownership by another, different slaveholder. The slave is no sense actually free, despite the misleading, bad-faith assertions of the slaveholder and those who recognize the slaveholder's framework as inherently legitimate.
Imagine waking up at a car dealership that tells you that you MUST pay interest on a car whether you take possession of it or not, despite you never having signed any kind of contract with them, but they tell you that you are still free and nothing is wrong with the arrangement because they will let you off the hook for paying them as long as you can provide proof that you're bound to pay interest on another dealership's car instead. If you try to refuse paying the interest on the car you don't want and never agreed to buy, they will send a team of gunmen to your house in the middle of the night, throw a flashbang through your window, chain you up, and drag you to a cage they lock you in. They insist that the whole arrangement is perfectly fine because the people in the car dealership took a vote where they agreed to force you to be bound by those terms, and that's all the justification they feel they need.
Now imagine the same thing, but in addition to paying interest on the car you didn't want and never agreed to buy, you're also bound to help murder people at other car dealerships, too, at the discretion and whim of the car dealership you're currently being extorted by.
FYI you can absolutely renounce citizenship without having another one handy. the us will simply extract extreme punishments on you for doing so—for most people it's simply not worth it.
This is factually incorrect in the United States. You cannot renounce your citizenship without producing evidence of another citizenship - that is a statutory requirement, alongside exit taxes, to renounce your US citizenship.
Pretty much all US news is the exact opposite of a broad and bare presentation of the facts. It’s a narrow set of facts presented through either a partisan lens or a purely business context, the difference is in what base facts are chosen to work from and none of the news agencies do a good job presenting even most of the relevant facts on any issue.
“As long as the user understands basic safety instructions”
Yes, the internet has basic safety instructions, too (and probably just as many bother to read them), number one or two is “almost nothing online is ever really private”. I learned it by the mid 2000s, not knowing it in 2026 is not excusable with “people don’t need to know how everything works”.
Pumped hydro energy storage relies on the cheapness of water and existing geology. If you have to build the chambers instead of damming a river it's too expensive. Most of the good spots to have a reservoir are already used. If you have to manufacture the bulk media instead of just using water it's too expensive.
The argument against lifting concrete is that you can dig a hole in the ground an pump water in/out of it for more reliability and lower cost than having a crane lift and lower concrete, and it's easy to make it much bigger both horizontally and vertically, so why bother.
But it does appear to be economical even with that, and water is cheaper.
We make lots of holes in the ground on a regular basis, including for extracting fossil fuels. Here's two, note scale bar, though I have no idea what the rock around it is like regarding water losses: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.9063171,6.4418046,17655m/dat...
There are exactly zero economically viable pumped water storage systems where water towers are involved. If you do the math for the amount of a mass of water, you'll see why! It's not feasible.
It’s a shit law, but it’s publisher- and distributor-targeted, so the overly-dramatic armchair-rebels in the forum can calm themselves; nobody’s coming after the person with a Linux machine bc it’s not compliant. Because it’s a state law, Cali will have geo-fenced app stores and this’ll just accelerate the breakout from manufacturer-maintained app stores. Websites that host downloads will just have a user attestation that they’re not Californians and be hosted abroad. There’s also no verification method; it’s literally just a requirement that account creation asks for an age - something websites do all the time and is not remotely burdensome, just ask all the ones convinced my DoB is a year and 4 months after my actual.
Microsoft gets largely pilloried on every UI rethink, Apple’s Liquid Glass just annoyed everyone I’ve heard comment on it, and, fwiw, YouTube Music asking if it feels outdated is an unnecessary annoyance.
England developed steam engines in an era where slaves were increasingly expensive and less socially acceptable than before and , contrarily, in an era where exploitation of the poor was still very normal and acceptable.
Hephaestus/Vulcan was disabled, yes, but also was very powerful (governing volcanos and fire in Italy isn’t a weakling’s domain). They absolutely valued technology… to say otherwise is wild.
Right. I was also pleasantly surprised; it looks great, reads fluidly, and is clean on the page. It is somewhat artsy, to be sure, but nothing complaint-worthy in comparison to modern websites.
