Oh no, those subtleties aren’t lost on me, I’m just lamenting that literally anyone is falling for this scheme. Even if this would be technically unenforceable it’s still 1000% bad and should never even be in congress. I hate that every few years some draconian bullshit like this pops up and we need to muster all of our collective will to raise awareness and fight it. Someone else said it best in the thread - we need to win every time, but they only need to win once.
Does me tapping my order into a self-service kiosk at a restaurant count as “using” the operating system that it is running on?
Like, I feel like this is going to be really difficult to enforce, and big business might actually push back against it if they think it will hurt their bottom line, but my god can we stop with this nanny state internet surveillance bullshit already? The government is too stupid to actually protect anyone with this dumb law because there will always be loopholes and workarounds.
Tesla would be worth basically nothing if the federal government weren’t artificially propping them up by banning Chinese EVs.
Sweet and savory do seem to be pretty complimentary flavors, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this was delicious.
It’s real, but 1000% staged. No way secret service would have let an unvetted Doordash driver approach the front door of the White House, let alone meet the President in person. It’s a publicity stunt.
Despite this, some people still believe it’s an organic moment, as if any Doordash driver would be comfortable just standing there as a political prop for two hours instead of running more deliveries.
Why do I find this slightly unnerving? There’s just something uncanny about it, I can’t explain it. It’s not even some backrooms liminal space shit, I just can’t quite put it into words properly.
Someday everyone will claim to have always opposed him.
In my own personal opinion, there are at least two major things that bring the prequels down:
The pacing sucks. They tried to cram too much shit into three movies, and the Episode 1 was kind of a wash for character development because they spend the entire movie simply introducing us to the main characters for the next two films. If they had either spread it out over more films or narrowed their scope a little more, it would have been a much more enjoyable viewing experience.
The dialogue is bad. The wooden acting, flat delivery of the lines, and lame slapstick I attribute to George being high off his own supply - both fans and the creative team puffing him up and telling him what a genius he is when what he really needed was someone in the room to step in and write and direct for him when he was clearly having issues with both late into production. Just in general he needed someone to tell him “No” from time to time.
There are probably more things than that, but just taking the prequels in a vacuum and not considering their greater impact on the lore, those are the two most glaring issues with them. Supplemental media spends a lot of time trying to plug plot holes and lore inconsistencies that were created by the prequels.
Overall I think they are decent but flawed films. I never thought that the political intrigues were bad, but they could have shown us more and told us less to really drive the point across.
This doesn’t hurt Iran at all, it just makes the problem worse for everyone else. All this will accomplish is loading more international pressure on the United States to end the conflict immediately with major concessions to Iran.
The first way we could fight, and probably the most likely to be successful, is an economic attack. General strikes, mass protests, and civil disobedience still have the chance to sway those in power that if they want to keep their status, they need to side with the masses and not with a megalomaniac dictator. Historically, we have seen great results from strikes and protest - organized labor is a powerful force to be reckoned with. Unfortunately, labor unions are at their weakest they’ve probably ever been because the U.S. government and large corporations have been colluding to make unionizing as difficult as possible. That’s not to say it can’t work in a spontaneous and unorganized way, but that requires people to give up a lot of security and comfort, and those who are not marginalized or are actually happy about the whole Trump crowning himself king would not be likely to show any kind of solidarity with others. It’d be an uphill battle, for sure.
The second way, is by abandoning the fight altogether. At some point, people will decide that throwing their lives away for the American Dream, the way of life that hasn’t existed since they were kids, if it ever truly existed at all, is not worth it. Emigrating to another country willing to accept them, or in other words, mass flight from an oppressive regime, is more likely to happen than the third way.
The third way is revolution, a violent and organized militia that forms to overthrow the government and start a new one. As you’ve correctly guessed, it’ll be very hard for a force to fight against a fully-actualized surveillance state complete with the most well funded military on the planet. We’re not there yet, but if the goal was to make it impossible for any kind of resistance to organize and strike at the heart of the regime, they could have that system in place before the end of Trump’s current term. Now, the one saving grace is that the present day U.S. military has zero experience fighting on their own soil, and modern warfare has shifted dramatically from having armies meet each other on the battlefield to asymmetrical warfare, where the under equipped side employs tactics that are difficult to counter or predict in advance - guerilla warfare, hit-and-run strikes, drone attacks, electronic warfare, cyber attacks, suicide bombings, etc. A civil war fought on American soil would be an absolute bloodbath for both sides, but not an easy win for the mighty U.S. armed forces. I wouldn’t count on the armed forces siding with the anti-government faction, either. At least not in any quantity that would matter.
I suppose there is a fourth way, and that is for the state governments to balkanize and secede from the Union. This would ultimately end up in one of two ways - either Trump let’s us go and those former states become countries of their own, possibly banding together to form a new coalition or democratic state. Or, more likely, Trump will go to war with the secessionists and probably win unless those now-sovereign entities can get help from some other country. America won independence from Great Britain thanks in no small part to France, and something like that could happen again if, say, all the west coast states formed their own country and then allied themselves with the Chinese government.
That has always been the most fucked up part about flight delays. They get everybody boarded and seated, plane is ready to go, maybe you start taxiing, and then you’re just sitting there waiting for potentially hours.
I refuse to believe that returning the plane to the terminal jetway and allowing the passengers to deboard is some kind of unsolvable conundrum or major issue that can’t be surmounted with better logistics. They have never been able to properly explain why they can’t do exactly that, other than that they don’t want to do the paperwork.
Thanks, corrected the original post to reflect that.
You’re right, my bad. I corrected my original post. Cheers.
She still has a heavy Russian Slovenian accent/intonation despite many years living in America, and her voice is reminiscent of Natasha, one of the villains from Rocky and Bullwinkle who along with Boris were stereotypical Russian caricatures created for a cartoon that aired during the cold war.
This is an absolutely hilarious way to hear about this news.
Sometimes I get into the weeds a bit arguing with someone over trivial shit, and my brain just can’t handle not getting the last word in. Blocking helps with that. It’s petty, sure, but it lets me move on and get back to my day rather than angrily typing out dumb responses that I would no doubt regret later.
I try to do it sparingly. I never want to be the one hardheaded guy everyone knows that will never admit defeat under any circumstances, so getting taken down a peg or two from time to time is probably healthy for me. Keeps me grounded in reality rather than huffing my own farts and calling it perfume.
I think I’ve had to ban more people from the community I moderate than people I’ve had to block for being assholes/trolls.
Good thing this isn’t a popularity contest or I might be in real trouble.
Can’t relate.