Schadrach

The blue check went through some twists and turns. Originally it was meant as “your identity is verified”, then it became a status symbol, then it had extra features attached to it. At one point the people approving them were literally taking bribes to expedite or guarantee your blue check (like personal bribes, not a payment to Twitter). And at some point along the way it somehow became a “Twitter approves” thing, because at least one person had their blue check stripped for going too far as a right wing troll (Milo Yianno-whatever). All of that pre-Muak.

Post-Musk, it’s just a subscription you pay for with some extra features and there’s now a different checkmark for corporate or government entities that merely verifies their identity.

How can a car like this be SO vulnerable?

I’d be tempted to see how they respond to a salt and acid mixture. Maybe even just something as mild as heavily salted lemon juice as an experiment. Depending on how those stainless panels are treated it could be effective. Acids and chlorides are hard on the passive layer of regular stainless, which is what protects the underlying metal. Maybe a different acid+salt mixture that won’t have as obvious a smell after it evaporates? Would make for some “fun” “water” balloons or “water” guns, especially to play with at night. Without your phone on hand. While wearing a mask and plain black hoodie as PPE, of course.

Haha, Leviathan was certainly the “big bad” in Job.

To quote a work of fiction I particularly enjoyed, during a discussion between the characters on the Book of Job:

“You know,” said Bill Dodd, “what is Leviathan, anyway? Like a giant whale or something, right? So God is saying we need to be able to make whales submit to us and serve us and dance for us and stuff? Cause, I’ve been to Sea World. We have totally done that.”

“Leviathan is a giant sea dinosaur thing,” said Zoe Farr. “Like a plesiosaur. Look, it’s in the next chapter. It says he has scales and a strong neck.”

“And you don’t think if he really existed, we’d Jurassic Park the sucker?” asked Bill Dodd.

“It also says he breathes fire,” said Eli Foss.

“So,” proposed Erica, “if we can find a fire-breathing whale with scales and a neck, and we bring it to Sea World, then we win the Bible?”

https://unsongbook.com/

And if you have the opportunity to question Him directly, you’ll say the same thing Job said.

That would be what, “Why are you so weirdly obsessed with Leviathan?” after Job 41?

But in all honesty even if it did work that way, the exporting country would just jack the prices up to cover it. The end result for US citizens would be the same.

This. It doesn’t matter whether the exporter or importer is payign the tariff, the result is the same - it increases the cost of goods, and that cost is going to get passed down the line, plus margin.

I saw the “and there’s no filing for bankruptcy on this one” at the end and all I could think is that even if you thought running a country like a business was a good idea (it’s not) why would you pick a businessman who’s filed for bankruptcy quite a lot to be the one to do so? I feel like he needs to ask himself that.

No one cares about your unique social characteristics or what demographics you fall into.

Of course they do, they make great lines to create schisms to prevent people from really grasping the rest of what you wrote.

A husband is someone who wants to be a husband and has consent from the person they’re a husband of.

No, a husband, wife or spouse is in a legal marriage with their partner, and in many jurisdictions carries specific legal rights involving one’s partner. That’s what makes them one of those terms and not a boyfriend, partner, fuckbuddy or whatever else. Unless you want to go the route that every noun or adjective describing a human is an identity, and thus no words for describing people can possibly have any meaning other than “person who applies this label to themselves.”

Both of these words are identities, and letting people be who they want to be when it doesn’t affect other people is one of the values of the left. So you can go ahead and extend this reasoning to all personal identities that don’t harm others, and I think that answers your question.

looks over at Rachel Dolezal

You sure about that? And that’s without jumping deep down the radqueer rabbit hole. Lots of identities in there that mainstream progressives will reject the idea that you can simply identify as (even if we ignore the weird pro-pedo stuff).

Let’s be honest, the Dems were hoping that being afraid of Trump was going to win them 2024 the same way it won them 2020, except that the only reason it worked in 2020 was because being under Trump was fresh in people’s minds.

It’s a matter of state law, as most election stuff is. Trump could vote because he’s a resident of Florida and Florida only bars people convicted of felonies in Florida from voting, and only then until they have fully completed the punishment laid upon them (meaning both any custodial sentence and any fines). Trump was convicted of felonies in New York, so Florida doesn’t care and Trump could vote.

EDIT: I was incorrect regarding Florida law. Florida also bans people convicted of crimes from voting in Florida if the state where they were convicted would prevent them from voting. This doesn’t impact Trump because New York does not do this.

Look at it this way. Pluto didn’t change, we just changed the definition of a planet to exclude it from the cool kids club because if we included it we’d also have to at the very least invite Eris too, and nobody likes Eris (hence the Trojan War).

No, the opposite; it’s a classic example showing that correlation doesn’t necessitate causation.

Right, but ice cream sales and shark attacks have a shared cause, and it’s the weather. Humans both get in the ocean where they are shark-accessible more often and also buy more ice cream when it’s hot out.

Basically causation is X->Y. But there are other relationships between X and Y, and in the case of ice cream sales and shark attacks it’s W->X and W->Y (one doesn’t cause the other, but they are caused by the same thing). It’s also possible for two things to correlate without any connection whatsoever, because sometimes things just happen to move in the same directions at the same times for a while.

People have trouble dealing with that, and much magical thinking arises from X and Y happening together being believed to necessarily mean X and Y are connected in some fashion because humans are very good at building patterns even when they don’t exist.

That’s literally where the vaccines cause autism thing started from - kids start showing clear signs of autism at about the same age they get several vaccines. The guy who originally proposed it with a deeply flawed study was only specifically claiming it was the combined MMR and not all vaccines generically and produced his study in an attempt to sell a separate MMR series that could be spaced out (rather than being one shot with all three) which would allegedly prevent the effect, because he would directly profit from his vaccine series being used instead of the combined MMR.

My parents told me that I’d understand how the world works when I get older, but I just hate it more and more.

That’s how you know you’re understanding it.

Presuming there are still elections, this is basically calling for a general strike when it will have the most electoral weight. So, basically it comes down to whether or not you believe there will be another presidential election or if we’ll already be a fascist dictatorship by then.

I know we have citizens united but corporations are not people lol

Citizens United didn’t make corporations people. Corporate personhood had been a thing for a very long time, largely about whether or not forming a business means you lose legal rights operating under it (Does a business entity have freedom of speech? What does freedom of the press even mean in an 18th century context if it doesn’t apply to a business [aka a newspaper]?) and whether or not regular old laws prohibiting a person from doing a thing can be applied to businesses.

Talking about being able to ride a bus in the US is comical.

Depends where you live. It’s much more doable in the densest urban areas than it is somewhere rural. I have a friend who lives in Boston for example and he doesn’t have a car, at all. Because Boston’s mass transit is good enough for his routine needs. I can’t do that here, however.

No, no, no. Just like a tax on unrealized gains is a bad idea because of how much it would royally fuck up the stock market, including every 401(k). What they need to do instead is tax the ways used by the extremely wealthy to utilize their gains without technically realizing them, even if that sometimes means taxing debt (aka treating it as income when they borrow against it and taxing accordingly).

Sounds like an obvious spot in the market for a bullshit-free smart TV. You’d just have to get the UX right.

Kraft singles are still cheese. They’ve just been pasteurized and adulterated with sodium citrate.

No, if it was just cheese that’s been pasteurized and adulterated with sodium citrate it would be pasteurized process cheese. A couple other additional additives are acceptable.

When it has other additives but is at least half cheese by weight it’s pasteurized process cheese food.

When it’s pasteurized process cheese product it’s not meeting any of those standards. Often because it’s less than half cheese or an addictive outside the accepted list to meet the other definitions is being used. Milk protein concentrate is an example, but also increasing the fat content with something like vegetable oil or adding flavoring agents to make the result taste more like cheese.

The FDA caught Kraft singles not meeting the definition of pasteurized process cheese food something like 20 years ago which is why it’s labeled a pasteurized process cheese product.

For any curious, the sodium citrate is an emulsifying agents that helps the natural cheeses used melt together smoothly, and pasteurization was originally done to prolong the life of the resultant mixed cheese as the whole original point of American cheese was to reprocess ends and scraps into something homogeneous and comparatively safe for long distance overland transport before refrigerated trucks were a thing.

The idea is that Spain and Portugal are part of the “West”, but not Spanish or Portuguese colonial offshoots, which are mostly South American and haven’t fared as well as the colonial offshoots from other nations of western Europe.