Carrot

The old canned chat Club Penguin was a safe space for kids on the internet in my youth. Sure, you could have snowballs thrown at you, but since there were canned-chat-only servers, it was a safe space to hang out and make friends, despite not getting to know them very deeply.

I think it was a pretty solid approach to teaching children how to interact with the internet

Are you kitten me right meow??

Yeah, I agree

While I agree, it's a pretty lame thing to say "This doesn't work for your use case? That's because your use case is wrong" If the distro doesn't support PIA, then that is an issue with the distro, not the user.

My exact thought

I agree, simply because that's around when I realized he was a piece of shit. But to give the benefit of the doubt, if I wasn't actively trying to form an opinion about the guy, I think he would have flown under the radar until his being openly racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic (God he's really gone and collected them all) became front and center of the mainstream media. Like, not everyone was paying attention to Elon Musk, and before the Thai Football team debacle he had a pretty favorable public opinion.

Only private tracker I use is MyAnonymouse, they've got all the books/audiobooks anyone could ever need, which I have had a really hard time finding on public trackers. Their rules are super lenient as well.

That is exactly the argument that was made

Depends on your definition of "damn near everywhere" I guess. I don't see that as a declaration that "almost every single place in the US looks like this" I saw it more as "there are places all over the US that look like this".

so definitionally not the whole US

I think it's pretty silly to hear someone say something is everywhere and assume that someone meant that the entire US is covered by only this exact type of road.

a claim you have nothing on which to base it except that 1/4 of people in the country live in the big cities

Actually, that's just near major roads. 80% of the US population live in cities or urban areas. Considering that these stroads are a standard feature of US urbanization, and can even be found near smaller towns, it would suggest that the vast majority of people in the US live near this type of road. I don't have actual numbers because no one is collecting this data. But by presenting data that provides some level of tangential evidence, we can start to form a rough picture of the data we're interested in.

Mate the argument isn't that the entire US looks like this. I've been to all the US's national parks, and a boatload of of state parks. I've lived in a small farming town with more cows than people. However, in terms of where the majority of people actually live in the US, this kind of road is very close by. I can't find the numbers on what percentage live within a few miles of a freeway, but I'd guess it's a majority. ~24% of people live within 500m of road that handles an average of 25,000 cars per day. Sure, in terms of space, the freeways are small, but people live near freeways. I'd argue that the sort of street in that picture is within 5-10 miles of pretty much everyone in the US.

You can remap using AHK. I did it for my father in law a few months ago. AHK runs at startup, he doesn't have to do anything

I've road tripped through most of America. This is definitely in the majority of places near a freeway. Yeah, there's a boatload of other stuff too, but if you were to pick a town right off a freeway, it's very likely it'd look like this

They have a mode to turn off the creatures for exactly that reason. I haven't tried it, but other than the spooky factor the creatures don't add a ton to the game, so it probably wouldn't lessen the experience. (There is a small thing, but it'd spoil some story elements if I were to say them here)