I’m really hoping his cult of personality dies with him. (Or tries to glom on to Junior, who lacks, well, everything required to make him an effective populist leader).

Of all the people in the Trump orbit, I am most afraid of Jared. He seems to have been smart enough to avoid getting stuck in any of his father-in-law’s messes. And he is way, way too close to dictators abroad. I don’t think he wants to actually insert himself into politics. But he could end up being the one that finances the next attempt a dictatorship in the US.

Not exactly the same playbook. Hitler was much younger when he tried his coup. And I don’t think Trump is writing any manifestos, unless he gets put in the same cell with his ghost writer.

If Trump goes to prison, he’s old enough that he will likely die there, even with a shortish sentence. And there’s a chance that a smarter buffoon takes over the party, but did you see the clown show last night? I doubt any of those has what it takes.

Trump is not the next Hitler, no matter how badly he wants to be. My fear is that the next Hitler is just around the corner, and uses the Trump playbook to come to power.

Well said! I would also like to add that we shape the community here (and in Social Media in general) through our interactions.

Whenever we post, we are making a conscious choice to interact with a human (or possibly a bot, beep boop). Even if we are disagreeing with that human, the act of replying is, in some ways, a vindication of their point of view. You felt, among all the posts on the Internet, everywhere, to reply to that one.

So if someone posts nonsense or gibberish that doesn’t help the discussion at all, and spreads negativity about you or other people, you are under no obligation to respond! These people are negative because they seek conflict. The worst outcome in the world for them is if you simply ignore them, because it means that you didn’t think enough of their opinion to respond.

Don’t feed the trolls!

This might be the Genesis of a meme

It’s like every time Trump opens his mouth, he shows us his taint…

Perhaps this “Biden Crime Family” thing was just projection all along…

You have to either be rich, or run enough grift on a regular basis to appear rich, by sticking other people with the bills.

I don’t see in these comments any compassion or empathy, in fact all I see are excuses for why we don’t need to have compassion or empathy

This basically sums up the entire article, right?

But as I understand it, all the discussion in the article is about Internet comments. People often resort to hyperbole and sensationalism on the Internet, because it’s an easy way to get attention, and they can talk tough without actually having to witness the suffering that their views would lead to. The problem is, though, when they vote based on these views, they elect psychopaths who try to live up to what these incels are writing in their parents’ basements, which is a stunted adolescents idea of what being “tough” is.

Especially since the “originalists” are being quite disingenuous. They’ve wanted for quite a while to start a new Constitutional Convention to rewrite the thing from scratch. They don’t really respect the founders as much as we think they do. They want to become the new founders, and force their great-great-grandchidren into boxes they make.

I was very ambivalent about WFH all through the pandemic. But I had a job which involved hardware development. When I was forced home due to the pandemic, I had to bring half my lab home. When we were contemplating going back and being hybrid, I told my boss that I had too much physical shit to interact with on a daily basis to be in two places. I either had to stay home, or move all my shit back to the office and stayed there. But I had an actual cubicle and a lab there. If I needed privacy to get stuff done, I could sort of get it.

Meanwhile, I got a fully remote job offer and took it. It is more of a systems role, and I can do much more of it remotely, so it works well. I still make several trips a year to the home office though, in an extremely HCOL area. Their office is one of the super-open-floorplan offices. Before the Pandemic, I was told it was packed and nobody liked it at all. But during the pandemic, people literally got days of their life back because they no longer had to spend 2+ hours a day commuting.

They’ve been trying to get folks back to the office at least once a week, but they’re not forcing the issue. If anything, the managers end up there more often than the workers. When I go there, I have the advantage of being able to expense my travel, so I can stay close. And with the exception of that one day a week, the office itself is a ghost town. There might be a few dozen people in a place that can “hold” hundreds (like sardines). But on that one day, there are so many people talking that if I have a critical meeting, I just stay in my hotel instead. Plus, so many meetings are with offsite people anyway (the company has employees around the world) that even with so many people on site you’re still doing the meeting over the Internet anyway.

Open floorplans are an absolute joke. They need to die.

The Governor even screams “woke” at the insurance companies, for raising rates, or leaving altogether. But insurance companies are about as far from woke as you get. They don’t give a shit about the latent injustice in the system. They just look at their numbers, and tweak them until they maximize their revenue vs. risk. And all the bean counters have decided that Florida is too risky.

One of my favorite albums of all time

I don’t think there is a conspiracy that involves the RAND corporation, or the reverse Vampires.

I do think that Elon Musk is an idiot who failed upwards his whole life, and mistakes that for business acumen. I think his tweet to buy Twitter was originally a joke, but then the SEC got involved and he was forced to buy at an inflated price. Recall he did everything he could to get out of the deal; Twitter literally sued to enforce it because it was a much better deal for shareholders than anything they could do organically. When you realize he never really wanted it in the first place, his actions make more sense.

I also think Steve Huffman is a fraud who can’t see that Elon Musk is a miserable failure and looks to him as a mentor, so he is turning out to be just as petulant as Musk.

I didn’t know you could buy insurance for fucking

Isn’t this just a linear scheme? To be a pyramid you need to be kind to two or more people…

“A fistfight could break out at any moment,” Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett told The Daily Beast.

He then creepily added that, as a fan of professional wrestling, “it’s entertaining to think that a fistfight could break out at any movement. I kind of dig that.

Republicans are creepy.

Exactly. I’m all for gender equality and not treating trans people like second class citizens, but let’s not pretend that gender has nothing to do with all sports. I don’t play golf, so I did some looking around on the subject, and it seems like the womens’ courses are shorter than the men’s, for precisely the reason you describe. And some people think they need to be even shorter, because at the pro level LPGA scores are generally worse than PGA scores, even with the current course length difference. I infer that the technological advances that are affecting sports equipment have a much larger positive effect on the men’s game than the women’s, so tech is permitting the men to drive longer while not having quite the same effect for women.

I get all this from this USA today article, but it matches what I’ve read elsewhere:

https://golfweek.usatoday.com/2021/03/16/lpga-golf-course-setups-womens-golf-pga-tour/

Now, with all this said, I think that any decisions to limit sports participation based on gender (and the implications for trans people) should be made by the people who govern the sport itself, because they have the most data, and also the best idea of what good competition looks like in their sport. I don’t have any confidence that politicians can make decisions on this in good faith, no matter how many golf courses they own.

A toll is a more legitimate thing to “bill” to a car, though. The car was present, after all, and someone ought to pay. Now that tollbooths are going away, it’s logical to bill whoever the car is registered to. (And, if the toll is not paid, it’s the car that is “punished” by being ineligible to be registered, not the driver through fines or points).

If your boyfriend was speeding, though, and caught on camera, but the court said you were speeding instead, would you have just taken the fine for that, knowing it would also affect your insurance? I doubt it.

You’re correct that people can only “get away” with stunts like I mentioned a limited number of times, particularly if they go in front of the same judge multiple times. But it’s also a fact that if law enforcement can’t prove you were the one driving, theres only so much they can do.

I’m pretty sure they aren’t enforceable? If someone doesn’t want to pay one it’s super easy to get out of. Which ends up meaning that the people who need be held accountable, aren’t. And the people that are decent drivers, continue to be decent drivers

The problem is that any ticket that is issued solely based on a camera (like speeding or red light cameras) can normally only detect the car by its plates, while tickets are normally written against a driver. In some states, this means that points can’t be assessed, and fines punish the poor more than the rich. In others, all the car owner has to do is submit an affidavit saying “I wasn’t driving” to get out of it. If the owner is lying, that’s perjury, of course. But who will bother checking into it?

A camera that is coupled with a law enforcement presence is much more enforceable, because you pull the car over and issue the ticket to the driver right there, using the camera data as proof.

I saw a rock on the ground, picked it up, and yelled “YahHaHa”