Jesus fucking Christ… Qatar is basically a scumbag real estate agent conning an idiot into buying a condemned shack in a swamp as a “cozy waterfront getaway”, but on a colossally stupid level.

We will get somewhere, but I’m not sure it’ll be a good place. Here’s my prediction of how it will go:

Once Gaza and the West Bank are fully and exclusively populated by Israelis and American tourists, once the Palestinians have all been slaughtered or run out of their own country, once all the dust has settled and resort hotels have been built on top of all the mass graves, then and only then will our news agencies finally refer to what happened as a genocide. Some well-known news anchor will look into the camera with weary eyes and a little ribbon pinned to their lapel, they’ll take on a somber tone, and they’ll say “never again”. Someone will win a Peabody for the story. And just as society starts to believe those words, “never again”, the history of those events will be banned from schools and libraries, and those teaching it will be fired and jailed. The memo will come down from corporate and that same news anchor will again appear on TV. They’ll look into the camera with a sparkle in their eye, flashing their overly white news anchor smile, and talk about how all the trans people being rounded up and put into camps is definitely not a genocide, and saying so means you hate God.

“This is Jim Tradman for Channel Five News, signing off. Blessed are the fruit, under His eye.”

But then, I’m a bit of a pessimist.

Most definitely. And since their entire job is illegal, why not go all-in and do more illegal stuff on cam for higher pay? That would be my thought process.

Some will. But like with alcohol prohibition, many of the people who work in the industry will just go to work in the black market.

Yeah that $3 billion won’t do squat. California spent $24 billion over a five year period and didn’t track any of the money, how it was spent, or the outcomes. It’s a safe bet that most of the money went to contractors charging extortionate fees for services while providing almost nothing in return, and probably quite a bit landing in the pockets of local politicians. It was basically a big scam to further enrich a bunch of greedy parasites. A few low-level idiots were charged with fraud and embezzlement of like $400k, but that doesn’t even scratch the surface of corruption involved in that whole scheme.

This is exactly it. A couple of days ago there was an Ask Lemmy thread about the legalization of marijuana. My entire argument is “Prohibition of vice does not work and only empowers organized crime.” This has been proven over and over again throughout history. It shouldn’t even be a question anymore.

Just think about the popularity of the “schoolgirl/barely legal” image as it currently exists in porn. If it becomes just as illegal to hire a young-looking 25 year old actress as it is to exploit an actual child, a lot producers will opt for the latter.

Alternatively, the number of fistfights I’ve almost been in with Albanians who aggressively refuse to let me pay for anything is off the charts.

If you think the porn industry is exploitative and abusive now, just wait until they push it all underground.

The comment you were replying to was clarifying to someone else that the person Trump paid hush money to (Stormy Daniels) was not the person who was alleging rape (E. Jean Carroll). Your reply that E. Jean Carroll did in fact allege rape made me think you were also conflating Carroll with Daniels. If I misunderstood the intent of your reply, I apologize.

Not that I’m in favor of disarming citizens, but if you bring up gun control around these people, one of their first arguments against it is that a database of people who own guns is bad because it will be used for nefarious purposes. The unspoken part is “because that’s what we would do.”

I was 24. People started panic-purchasing guns and ammunition the minute the whole Y2K story broke. Here’s a CBS News segment from 1999 about it. Here’s a DOJ paper about it. Background checks shot up 15% from the previous year, with over a million background checks in December 1999 alone.

It turned out to be a huge nothingburger with no riots, no looting, no violence… But there was definitely panic, at least in the sense that a lot of people were prepping for some kind of apocalyptic outcome “just in case”. Once the clocks rolled over and people saw that planes weren’t falling out of the sky and nukes weren’t auto-launching, they realized it was a bunch of over-hyped media nonsense.

E. Jean Carroll is not the porn star who Trump sent hush money to.

Just to be clear here, Trump didn’t rape the porn star Stormy Daniels. He raped E. Jean Carroll. The hush money he sent to Stormy Daniels was to keep her quiet about the consensual extramarital affair he had with her.

My high school had a fallout shelter. I had English classes down there.

“Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.” - Heinrich Heine

Book burners have never once been on the right side of history.

Whenever I meet a fellow Gen X in the wild, they seem to fall into one of two categories. If they were born before the end of the Vietnam War, they are upper middle-class douchebags who film anti-woke TokTok videos in their Dodge Rams. If they were born after the end of the Vietnam War, they are solidly working-class and just quietly depressed about everything.

I’m obviously generalizing here, but older Gen X does seem to be far more Boomerish, and younger Gen X is just… Lost.

but I would assume that this only applied to a few old systems?

You might be shocked at how much of our infrastructure ran on those old systems. But thankfully, yes, the rest of your comment is exactly what happened. Programmers knew what was up, and jumped on the problem early enough to avoid any major issues. However, this didn’t stop the media from selling panic for ratings, which became the worst part of the entire Y2K experience. If you’ve ever seen the 1995 movie ‘Strange Days’ with Ralph Fiennes (and a great cast overall), it’s only a slight exaggeration of what the media was hyping for Y2K.

The panic it caused was the worst part of it, which was largely overblown by the media who kept predicting major crashes that would cause riots.

Gen X checking in. Here’s a list of world crises just in my lifetime. This is by no means a comprehensive list:

1975 - 1990: Lebanese Civil War
1976: Tangshan earthquake (China) - 242,000+ deaths
1979 - 1989: Soviet-Afghan War
1979: Three Mile Island nuclear accident
1980 - 1988: Iran-Iraq War
1981 - Present: HIV/AIDS pandemic
1983 - 1985: Ethiopian famine - 1 million+ deaths
1984: Bhopal gas disaster (India) - 15,000+ deaths
1986: Chernobyl nuclear disaster (USSR)
1987: Black Monday stock market crash
1989: Exxon Valdez oil spill
Late 80s - early 90s: Recession 1990 - 1991: Desert Storm
1991 - 2002: Somali Civil War & famine
1992 - 1995: Bosnian War & Srebrenica massacre
1994: Rwandan genocide - 800,000+ deaths
1999: Columbine High School massacre (the beginning of a trend)
2000: Y2K
2000: Recession (Dot Com Bubble, etc)
2001: 9/11
Early 2000s: Recession (Fallout from 9/11) 2001 - 2021: Afghanistan War
2003 - 2011: Iraq War
2004: Indian Ocean Tsunami - 230,000+ deaths
2005: Hurricane Katrina - 1,800+ deaths
2007 - 2008: Global Financial Crisis
2008 - 2009: Great Recession
2009: H1N1 swine flu pandemic
2010: Deepwater Horizon oil spill
2010: Haiti earthquake - 160,000+ deaths
2011: Tōhoku Earthquake and Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Disaster
2011: Arab Spring uprisings & Syrian Civil War begins
2014: Ebola outbreak (West Africa) - 11,000+ deaths
2014: Russian annexation of Crimea
2015: European migrant crisis
2017: Hurricane Maria (Puerto Rico) - 3,000+ deaths
2019 - Present: Covid19
2020: Australian bushfires - 3 billion animals affected
2020: George Floyd protests & global BLM movement
2021: January 6th US Capitol riot
2022: Russian invasion of Ukraine
2022: Pakistan floods - 1,700+ deaths, 33 million displaced
2023: Turkey-Syria earthquakes - 50,000+ deaths
2023 - Present: Hamas-Israel war and open genocide
2025: Global Trade War

The first third of this list took place during the Cold War, when WWIII and nuclear attacks were a real fear. Add in climate change, the discovery of microplastics in everything, the world seemingly embracing Fascism again, and a whole slew of other shit, and it’s no surprise that suicide rates have increased almost 40% over the past 25 years.