Indeed. I would say that the Epstein Files were a distraction from this, except that I don’t think the people in power in the US understand quite what magnitude of blowback their actions are going to result in, even now.

Looks about the same facially to me. He might be taller, but it’s hard to tell when they’re only showing him from the hips up.

I’ve often thought we should have continued burning the White House down every thirty years or so, just to keep 'em humble.

So what percentage of them would like Canada to annex the US?

Someone too lazy to update their listings to reflect a rising sticker price (or not wishing to do so for other reasons) isn’t too good to be true. If they’re an established business selling new-in-box items at more than the wholesale price they would have paid (around 50% of the lowest sticker price the good’s ever been sold at isn’t a bad estimate), then you may have found a genuinely good deal.

It’s when someone starts selling at below their cost (unless it’s obviously to clear out old inventory or the like) that things get suspicious.

You only need one piece of (timeless) advice regarding what to look for, really: if it looks too good to be true, it almost certainly is. Caveat emptor.

Seriously, ending up with nothing is always a risk you run when buying something advertised as non-functional in the hope of fixing it or recovering any undamaged parts. The fact that the components on this card weren’t original is almost irrelevant, because the result would have been the same if they were authentic but damaged beyond recovery.

Beyond weird. Dude tries to push this off on workmen who had scaffolding up against the building exterior, but what reason would they have had to make a tunnel between the units? This is just insane.

Thing is, if Yuri says outright that one of the humans aboard is (in effect) a pathological liar, Yuri will probably be accused of being a gnosia making an inept attempt to sow dissent. It might not even be the ACF making that accusation, because it’s such an outlandish thing to say. If Yuri is voted out, then they’ve failed Yuriko’s test.

As for Kukrushka, if she really is the Guardian Angel (there’s nothing that says she isn’t the ACF and lying about the other, technically), she might have chosen to protect Jonas on the first round, due to emotional attachment or something—we still don’t know what’s going on with those two.

Maybe it’s just confirmation bias on my part, but it just seems like these kinds of shows are more likely to actively receive bad reviews than be ignored, which is what happens to most of the stuff that I would judge as truly bad. Compare, for instance, Hell Mode, an utterly cliched isekai that’s also currently running and which I would say was more deserving of bad reviews, because its creator wouldn’t recognize an original idea if it bit them—not one word’s been said about it. Even Beheneko, which was an unapologetic brainless boobfest held together by a thin surface skin of plot, didn’t draw as many bad reviews here as Sentenced to be a Hero.

Upon reflection, the answer might simply be that the people who are giving this one bad reviews watch a lot less trash than I do and therefore have a differently calibrated evaluation scale.

Sentenced to Be a Hero

the characters are frankly a drag

I find it interesting to see multiple members of this community - myself included - shit on its first episode despite how well-received it was among the broader anime community. Looks like we are just not the target demographic.

Dark/edgy fantasy doesn’t seem to be very popular around here, it’s true. Makes me feel a bit isolated sometimes, as someone who does like those kinds of shows. 😅

The document which governs this in Canada is the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, part of the Constitution Act. The relevant portion is right at the beginning: “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” In other words, rights are not absolute, which allows things like laws against hate speech to be passed. Among the rights guaranteed by the Charter is “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication”. Freedom of speech is a subset of that.

( Full text of the Charter )

(In fact, even in the US, the right to freedom of speech is not quite absolute, as there are laws against libel and slander.)

I find myself more curious about Caster’s identity than Saber’s. Saber I can at least make a guess at, based on his “Loxley” remark, but Caster is a total blank.

Ontario’s economy is heavily reliant on their auto industry that’s pretty tightly coupled to the US.

Looking over statistics in Wikipedia, it’s about 10% of the provincial economy, and not all automobile manufacturing in Canada is twinned to US companies (Honda and Toyota both operate plants as well, and probably have a better chance of competing with the Chinese companies). It’s nearly all concentrated in a handful of cities in Southern Ontario. Their local economies would be in trouble if the US automakers pulled out, but I think the province as a whole would weather it, although some of Ford’s more ambitious and useless projects would have to be put on hold due to the drop in tax revenue. Some of the factories and resource streams could probably be offered to non-US automakers or moved to manufacturing armoured vehicles, which (unfortunately) it looks like we may need more of anyway.

So, Ford is kind of speaking up for the short-term interests of a small, vocal subset of his constituents. The rest of us, not so much.

I suspect they’re making an unwarranted assumption that the experimental patient ended up with high cholesterol due to excessive consumption of animal products (rather than, say, a genetic defect that would cause them to overproduce it regardless of diet) and applying some typical vegan arguments regarding livestock farming. No need to listen to them.

Remember, Windows will install updates without user intervention. If you remove things, it just puts them back.

She also seemed to have a lot of information she was withholding, why?

Maybe it’s just Yuriko’s personality? She seems to enjoy acting superior.

For what it’s worth, I’ve also seen it, although it was quite some time ago. My feelings about it at the time were mixed—it was interesting in many ways, but there were also aspects of it that I could have done without, and unfortunately it’s mostly the bits I could have done without (like that one torture scene) that have stuck with me.

Some people seem to need the psychological crutch religion provides them with in order to function, and I’d no more take it away from them than I’d take a physical crutch away from someone in a leg cast. I have no issue with people who want to pray or carry out ceremonies in private or in a public building clearly marked out for the purpose. If you voluntarily enter a church, synagogue, mosque, temple, etc. then you should expect religion.

The problem is forcing religion on people who don’t need or want it, including children. In other words, the real issue is proselytization (trying to either encourage people to join your religion, or shame them into it) aimed at random members of the public. It shouldn’t be illegal, but it should be treated as much more impolite than it currently is.

Sounds like the soil failure taking place was natural under those conditions, but the conditions themselves were not entirely natural. Situations like that make weasel-wording easy.

Well, all the entrants could have been AI-generated isekai novels.