Until I saw your comment, my (flippant) response to the person you replied was going to be “Because Congress hasn’t figured out how to use Polymarket.”

Which is a far less eloquent corollary to your comment.

It also causes ass cancer, dick cancer, and vulvular cancer!

In my research, I’ve found that most humans have at least one of the following: Mouth, ass, uterus, vulva, or dick. Many of them have 3 (or more!) of those things. A special few have collected the whole set!

Definitely a vaccine worth getting. If your doctor tells you that you’re too old, tell them their knowledge is too old. More importantly, ask them to note in your chart that they have refused preventative medicine against your wishes.

Ah, fuck. I read an article earlier that painted it as an ask for help from Ecuador without the context of the leadership.

I thought “Okay, fair play. I feel weird about it, but I can’t be a geopolitical expert in all things, so I’ll try not to automatically assume it’s bad.”

But… needle solidly swayed.

Yup. Apparently the Clintons testified in front of Congress yesterday regarding the Epstein files. That’s not high on the list headlines today.

In same camp of supporting the sentiment, I played this out in my head.

Okay, but what if they’re open carrying a large gun?
[Bad outcome]

Okay, what if they open carry and have a body camera (that they turn off while in the restroom, obviously)?
[Bad outcome and ignored by media - bad outcome]

Okay, what if there’s a group that’s open carrying and have body cameras?
[Bitch, did you just determine they had to form a militia to go to the bathroom away from home? Sigh.]

I don’t know the solution, other than for people to mind their own fucking business.

I’m late to this train, but I recently got into Dimension 20, and the GM (Brennan Lee Mulligan) has some incredible characters. Here’s a fitting quote from one of them:

Laws are a threat made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted, and the police are basically an occupying army, you know what I mean?
Video source (YouTube short - sorry)

Very probable. I was also not the most economically secure back then. I was trying to save money on a $20 can opener!

Can openers is what did it for me.

In 2015 I needed a new manual can opener. The local big-box stores had two basic styles. A cheap, all metal one that was just stamped from a single sheet, and a more expensive one with better handles.
The more expensive one had previously rusted and began to look nasty within a few years.
Amazon had a bunch of different styles at less than the price point of the more expensive one.

I bought one. It was fine. I didn’t love the operation. It cut the whole top off from the side, rather than from the top in a downwards cut. The sharp edges were on the can rather than on the lid. It would catch the paper labels and sometimes wad them up into the can while you cut. Cans with no air space would leak when opened.

Anyway. Replaced it in 2019. Amazon still had a broad selection, but all except for obvious crap was as expensive as the local big box store’s expensive option. Wound up going to a smaller local(ish) bulk foods store and bought a cheapo restaurant one for less than Amazon’s/the big box store’s similar offerings. Minimal rusting to date.

I wish the article had more details about why they’re convinced it’s a black hole and not a neutron star.

They do say it could be either (once), but then only refer to it as having turned into a black hole through the rest of the article.

The 4 boxes of liberty: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box and the ammo box (preferably in that order).

I have (had?) an arms length friend that is prone to making bad choices.
He aspires to be a decent guy, but struggles with making the right choices. He made some pretty bad choices last year.

Cheated on his wife with a coworker that was, er, not someone I’d trust. Got caught. Coworker then got pregnant. A few months later he called me to ask if he could crash in our guest bedroom for ‘no more than three days’ while he cut things off with the coworker and worked on reconciling with the wife. While he was still that coworker’s supervisor and baby daddy, unbeknownst to his supervisors.
Seeing nothing but red flags there, I offered to pay for a hotel room for him for a week, and he never took me up on the offer. My wife’s eyebrows were almost at the ceiling when we got off the phone. She very much appreciated not inviting that mess into our lives. I haven’t heard from him since.

Increasingly, I’m reminded of this: Paul Bunyan vs. the spam bot (or how Paul Bunyan triggered the singularity to win a bet). It’s a medium-length read from the old internet, but fun.

The promise of money — even diminishing returns — is too great. There’s a new scraper spending big on resources every day while websites are under assault.

In the paraphrased words of the finance industry: AI can stay stupid longer than most websites can stay solvent.

You know, I posted that comment sort of unthinkingly, but you are right.

There’s a book called “Why does he do that? Inside the minds of angry and controlling men” that’s on my reading list. (A good summary of the book is available here)
The author repeatedly highlights exactly the point you brought up - that abusers will wield therapy language to perpetuate their abuse. He instead suggests the only real way to change abusers (who are not necessarily the same as sociopaths, mind you) is to put them in programs tailored to abusers to more or less make them realize how much they need to learn empathy, and equip them with the ability to use that empathy.

I mean, the alternative was to crumble.

I mean, fuck. I was just thinking it through -
In the U.S., Most millennials started out in the wake of the war on drugs and the damage it did to communities. From there, you have the racial tension of the 90’s, the death of truth with Fox News, the rise of school shootings, 9/11, the start of the rightward/authoritarian swing of the U.S., the ‘08 recession, citizens united, loss of democracy, COVID, another recession, inflation, housing insecurity, the loss of the illusion of democracy.

I remember back in 1999, when I was a kid, hearing folks talk about how in just a few years weed was going to be legal and so was gay marriage. I remember thinking that the future was going to be bright and not some authoritarian hellscape. Now there are license plate readers at the grocery store parking lot.

I mean. If we didn’t know how to manage the feelings we have about the future we were promised and lost, and all the trauma we’ve experienced along the way, I guess we’d all wind up driving Dodge Rams with U.S. Flags on them.

Every millennial I know is in therapy.

I do not associate with people who decorate their vehicles that way. I find they act like sociopaths.

Ergo, people who put flags like that on their cars are in need of therapy.

I’ve declared it to be true. Spread the word.

I’m not mad at you at all. I’m mad at the motherfuckers who think they have a right to my attention.

But to respond - it’s not better, because either option is detestable. I reject both.

You correctly called it that we’re answering different questions. I reject the question you’re answering, because I do not accept advertisements in my vehicle, that I own, as a foregone conclusion. You accidentally’d a step in accepting their bullshit.

I literally would rather threaten legal action, or show up outside their advertising executive’s house with a megaphone to try to sell them some scammy bullshit while they expect privacy. Maybe I’d even read off the advertising I get on the console. (Not that I’d ever buy a RAM truck, but still.)

New Business Idea: Buy unzoned property that can be used to block scenic overlooks around the homes of scummy advertising executives. Put up billboards.

Absolutely fucking not.

My attention is not free and they have no fucking right to my attention.

And second, fuck them for thinking they do.

They are!

Claire’s was a publicly-traded company listed on the NASDAQ in 2005, but was taken private by the private equity firm Apollo Global Management in a $3.1 billion leveraged buyout in 2007.
Wikipedia

After a period of rapid (dare I say, irresponsible) expansion, they underwent their first bankruptcy in 2018 to discharge the debt from the poor management choices. Shortly after exiting bankruptcy in 2021, they claimed record earnings and announced plans for an IPO that never happened. Now they’re bankrupt again.

Oh, he absolutely is a ladder puller and an absolutely despicable human.

My hesitation has less to do with respecting him as an individual, than it does with broadcasting an idea that is generally disrespectful of a group of people who, writ large, he would abandon to the gutters rather than provide social support for.
I’ve got fucked up morals, I know. As Marc Marin would say, I’m a buzzkill.