pjwestin

Not sure comparing Biden's performance to the dementia President's is doing him any favors right now.

I don't know, but it seems weird that they wouldn't know that but still know what Super Saiyan Blue is.

Pretty sure kids these days are going to be more familiar with Goku and Hulk than Mighty Mouse.

Guy who has been acting erratically since his stroke: "Biden seems fine to me!"

I think his point is that, if our only alternative to fascism is to vote for a senile old man who was forced upon voters without a primary, then this system can't credibly be called democracy.

God I miss my S10. It really was a perfect phone. I finally had to let it go when the screen cracked. Replacing it cost more than a refurbished S22 or S23, and I couldn't justify purchasing another S10, since it will probably fall victim to planned obsolescence soon.

Relics are almost always fake, and there are usually multiples of them at any given time. A lot of people have had Jesus' foreskin throughout the years, and I think there are 5 or 6 heads of John the Baptist floating around right now.

It'd be like thinking the Democrats and Republicans are arguing about whether America should he a direct or representative democracy.

In my experience, 100% of executives don't actually know what their workforce does day-to-day, so it doesn't really surprise me that they think they can lay people off because they started using ChatGPT to write their emails.

Really sad that the last time we hear Kevin Conroy as Batman is gonna be in this train wreck.

Because conservatism is no longer a set of political beliefs. In the modern conservative movement (basically starting in the 80s, liberals and conservatives were much different before that) conservatives had social beliefs, like preserving cultural norms, promoting religion, and maintaining the nuclear family, as well as fiscal beliefs, like limited government, individual liberty, fiscal responsibility, free markets, and a whole lot of other bullshit that basically boiled down to, "we don't want to pay taxes."

Now, conservatism is really only about establishing an in-group and othering their opponents. Oppositions to trans rights may seem like an attempt to preserve cultural norms, but it's real goal is to create outrage and panic over trans, "groomers." Objections go CRT and DEI serve a similar role in othering people of color. "Wokeness," is just a meaningless catch-all for, "enemies." Similarly, fiscal policy is meaningless, and can be picked up and discarded whenever convenient; corporations can be deregulated and given tax breaks in service of the free market, but subsidized or bailed out whenever needed.

This is because modern conservatism isn't a political ideology, it's a fascist movement. I mean that literally, and while the meaning fascism is notoriously hard to pin down, I use Umberto Eco's 14 properties of fascism. And, to bring this back around to your original question, fascists hate liberals because hating a group is very important to a fascist movement. The modern conservative hate for liberals is especially clear in Eco's 4th, 5th, and 7th properties of fascism (disagreement as treason, fear of differences, and obsession with plots, respectively).

So, tl;dr: the one-sided hate that conservatives have for liberals is because conservatism is no longer a coherent political ideology, it's a fascist movement.

I'm on the left, but I'm far from a communist, much less an authoritarian one, and I 100% use lib or liberal as an insult. I think to most people younger than 50, Liberal refers to a certain type of Democratic voter. They'll hang a BLM sign in their window but support NIMBY policies that keep people of color out of their neighborhoods. They'll talk a good game about labor rights and unions, but still go to Starbucks and throw a shit-fit if their order is wrong. They cared very deeply about Iraq and Guantanamo when Bush was President, but stopped bringing it up once Obama was in office.

The Third Way Democrats of the 90s basically turned American Liberals into Neo-Liberals. I will still support them when I have to, since they hold all the levers of power over the only ostensibly progressive party in America, and not siding with them at this point basically ensures the rise of fascism, but I have no love for Liberals.

On a similar note, I get irate when people call the Business Plot a conspiracy theory. It's just a conspiracy. We know it happened.

Going to try to give you a clear, concise summary, since a lot of these answers are either too specific or blatantly unhelpful.

First, alcohol has been used by humans since before recorded history. It was probably the first drug we ever used, and barley was even used as a currency in ancient Mesopotamia. Alcohol is ingrained in almost every human society, and banning it is always difficult. The United States actually made alcohol illegal between 1920 and 1933, and it was an unmitigated disaster.

Second, Marijuana wasn't always illegal in the United States. To give you a very oversimplified summary, the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst ran a racist, xenophobic campaign to vilify Marijuana in the early '30s. He saw hemp crops as a threat to his holdings in the lumber and paper industry, so he had his newspapers run exaggerated or false stories about crime and violence related to Marijuana use, usually center around Mexicans or black Americans. The movie Reefer Madness is a great example of this kind of propaganda. Marijuana was eventually made illegal in 1937, and as the War on Drugs ramped up over the decades, enforcement and penalties for Marijuana crimes only got worse.

Anyway, there's a ton more that could be said about Prohibition, pre-Hurst Marijuana use, and the War on Drugs, but those are the broad strokes. Hope that helps.

A week ago, the difference between the two would have been that Trump would enable Israel in every way, while Biden would enable Israel in every way, but staffers would leak stories about how much Biden didn't like Netanyahu from time to time. Now, Biden has started sending aid to Gaza while Harris is calling for a ceasefire, and this is entirely because 100K voters in Michigan voted uncommitted. When done properly, threatening to withhold your vote can be an effective way to make your voice heard.

He's taking the Michigan numbers seriously. Let's hope it's not too little too late.

No. Sherlock has cocaine, but he doesn't share cocaine.

Yeah, this was the only Google product that I really liked, and of course they're killing it just to force people to use YouTube Music. AntennaPod is an open-source alternative that functions very similarly, I've been using it for a couple of months now and I'm very happy with it.

That seems a little reductive. I've never moderated anything, but I bet if I spent years building up a community I would also find it hard to just walk away.

If we're going to let people drive all these unnecessarily large trucks on our roads, we should create a new license class for them. Something between a Class D and Class B that has its own written/road test, where they're forced to learn about how these cars have huge blind spots, longer breaking distances, and how they're not crash compatible with standard sized cars. Hopefully, if a government agency acknowledged how dangerous these trucks are, it might also lead to bigger insurance premiums for the dorks who drive them.

Congratulations to the American electorate for maintaining the barest minimum standards! ...sorta...for now.

At my last job my direct manager had to explain to upper management multiple times that X role and Y role could not be combined because it would require someone to physically be in multiple places simultaneously. I think about that a lot when I hear about these corporate plans to automate the workforce.

Actually 1/3 said it is genocide, 1/3 said it isn't, and 1/3 said they didn't know. Also, only1/3 of Americans saying this is a genocide isn't great, but it does represent a huge shift in opinion in a short time. Both our political parties support Israel, our news media doesn't cover Palestinians very sympathetically, and our education system tells a very favorable version of Israel's founding (most Americans don't even learn about the Nakba). I don't think criticism of Israel has ever been this mainstream (at least in my lifetime).

What are you talking about? It was the go-to app for journalists for a decade. They could live report from events in a simple, chronological thread, or collect eye witness reports by quote tweeting personal accounts. I followed the Charlottesville and January 6th riots in real time by reading journalists threads. There was a lot of trival or even harmful bullshit on Twitter, but the way journalists used it was a huge positive.

This is being spearheaded by Ed Markey, a Democrat. The reason lawmakers want to keep AM radio is that it's still used for emergency broadcasts. AM radio may seem like a joke if you live in a urban area with good infrastructure, but if you live in a rural area with poor internet and cell service, AM radio may be vital in getting emergency alerts. Auto companies are fighting this because EV components interfere with AM signals, so they have to spend extra money to shield EV components. The narrative about Republican lawmakers wanting to amplify right wing radio hosts is neat, but this is just another case of automakers not wanting to shell out a few extra bucks for a safety feature.

This is an awesome proposal that 99% of Americans can get behind and I can't wait for our oligarchs to kill this legislation before it ever gets introduced to congress.

Yeah, I don't think that's actually the main reason the people of Gaza are starving right now.

Get an artist to paint an airplane crashing through the ceiling and make the propeller the fan.

The simplified menu now features-

Simplified menus are why Panera Bread now sucks. A hedge fund bought them, decided they could save a small percentage by dropping their turkey distributor, so they dropped the Turkey Bacon Bravo, their most popular sandwich, from the menu. The same thing happened to Dunks, which is why ham is no longer available on breakfast sandwiches. This is the stage capitalism we're at; destroying popular goods and services to squeeze a few cents of temporary profits out for shareholders.

Later on Tuesday, Biden appeared to tone down his criticism of Netanyahu. Asked whether Netanyahu was “playing politics with the war”, Biden said: “I don’t think so. He’s trying to work out a serious problem he has.”

Every time he starts to give something halfway close to a good response to something insane happening in Gaza, he walks it back within days.

I'm still skeptical. I'm willing to bet that these systems work well in vaccum, but I suspect that they will struggle with things like accent recognition, order changes, and novel questions. Even if the tech really does work well in the field, they're all working on brand new hardware, and I'm curious to see how well they take orders on a microphone that's been exposed to the elements and car exhaust for a few years. I suspect that these will wind up like the self-checkout lane; more efficient when it's working well, but requiring too much human supervision to be a real replacement for anything.

I feel really bad for this girl. Disqualifying her was the right move, but I highly doubt a fifteen-year-old representing Russia in the Olympics was given much choice as to whether she wanted to use performance enhancers or not. On top of that, she got four year ban from professional skating, which basically robbed her of her peak professional years. Her career was basically destroyed by something that was, best case senerio, a mistake she made at fifteen or, wost (and more likely) case, something that was forced on her by her trainers/managers.

To he fair, no one ever accidentally received gender affirming care because they'd been drinking and got a little careless.

...TikTok would eventually be dropped from app stores in the US if its owner doesn't sell. It also would lose access to US-based web hosting services.

Oh no. Where would children act out jokes they stole from old tweets?

I'm a little worried this is going to galvanize his base, but it is still deeply satisfying to watch his life collapse around him, especially knowing that the criminal trials haven't even started yet.

To be honest, I don't think your cat thinks about things the way you're thinking about them. Your behavior has shown your cat that you're safe, so your cat isn't afraid of you. If you start acting aggressive or scary it will treat you like a threat and fight or flight based on what it decides in the moment, but that's about it. It's not thinking, "this giant ape could kill me if it wanted, I'm glad it's my friend," it just has a positive association with you based on your pattern of behavior.

Also, cats social cues aren't as obvious as dogs, but if you don't know what you're cats thinking, here are some clues: is your cat walking around with its tail up a lot, usually curled at the top like a little question mark? Your cat feels super happy and confident in it's territory (AKA your house). Does it ever look at you and narrow or close it's eyes and look away, sorta like it's nodding off? Your cat is saying it trusts you enough to let it's gaurd down, it's basically a cat hug.

Edit: cat tax.

Imagine creating a 150 foot climbable statue, everyone roasts it for being pointless and ugly, and when it finally opens you discover you've just built a suicide tower.

Sorry, I apparently wasn't being direct enough, let me try again; it's gross to use the starvation of Palestinian civilians, caused by an illegal blockade on humanitarian supplies, as a springboard for vegan talking points, and you should be embarrassed that you just did that.

Wow, Sony execs figured out something gamers and devs have been saying for ten years. Really proving why the C-Suite guys get the big bucks.