Ha, I should’ve mentioned that you definitely won’t. It seems to paint this damned if we do damned if we don’t picture. But it at least paints a picture, versus what can at times feel like this great big unknown. It may also shed some light on some of the motivations for what’s happening. I dunno.

My brother sent this to me the other day and I gave it a watch. It feels pretty unbiased (although I’m uneducated), and seems to have a more macro, zoomed-out view of America and just nations on the whole. I thought it was pretty interesting and it helped to put some things in perspective.

The East India Company is the first example that comes to mind. I’m sure others.

I really don’t think we are living through unprecedented times, unfortunately. People have sucked for as long as we’ve existed.

Just access GMaps through your VPN through Mexico, and your wildest dreams can come true.

Google is worth more than Mexico. A frivolous lawsuit, which is what this would be, will hurt Mexico more.

Don’t worry, maybe they misjudged the size of the asteroid and 2032 is it.

I saw Deadmau5 and he stopped to play Rocket League mid show one time. That’s as close as I can get to the prompt.

You won’t hear me disagree.

I think MAGA represents to Republicans what progressives like Bernie and AOC represent to Democrats. Republicans were able to reimagine their party into a form that isn’t just going to follow the status quo that, like you said, has led to a stagnant existence for average Americans over the last 50+ years. And stagnant is probably a nice way of putting it, since buying power has essentially disappeared, on top of wages barely moving.

So Trump comes in, he says drain the swamp, and you hear that to mean the whole machine, everyone who, for the last 50 years (and some folks have been involved in that government for a good chunk of that 50 years, just perpetuating that status quo) has allowed the rich to get richer at the expense of the working middle class.

And so you toss on your blinders. You’re not necessarily a bigot, but you believe social issues are a distraction from actual problems (i.e., ones that affect you directly), and you vote in a way that you hope will better your life. It’s hard to blame someone, especially someone just exhausted from grinding through their shitty life, for thinking about themselves. It’s not the right way to think, but I get it.

Smedley was a G, and the committee who looked into basically found wrongdoing but did nothing about it.

It worked out like 20 years later, let’s not kid ourselves. Shit, it worked out then. The government committee suspected wrongdoing but did nothing, nobody got in trouble. It’s safe to assume they found another way in. And it’s clear they did. American middle class has not improved for 50+ years.

Easy, you pack courts with shills, you eliminate government oversight, and then you do whatever you want.

Dunno if your typo was intentional or not, but all I see in this thread is that somehow a typo is a way to bypass whatever block they have on discussion related to political figures. Which is bonkers. The great minds at the Goog somehow missed a pretty obvious workaround.

Don’t worry, they’ll have America on their side this time.

Not the greatest timeline to be living in right now.

My parents bought a beach house (a bungalow on a postage stamp, before anyone gets an ideas that we’re some 1%ers) and it came with an old washer dryer. My old man put a single pair of jeans in the dryer and seemingly forgot about them. He says he did it for a timer. Leaves the house. Nobody there for a week. My mom comes in, dryer still running, jeans essentially translucent at this point. One of the things you can laugh at only because it wasn’t a tragedy.

The game came out in 2008. I can’t believe it was that long ago.

L4D was a phenomenal game. I wish I could go back in time and get a group of four of us together to play the way we used to.

This diet was easy with a health dose of amphetamines. Wine took the edge off.

Yeah, good point, perhaps there is some engineering rationale for having them powered the same, so that the speakers are guaranteed to work as long as the Starlink does.

Yeah, Subaru can have the Starlink disabled pretty easily by removing, essentially, a module behind the head unit. The only problem is that module also sends power to the front speakers. There’s been workarounds created, but it’s just asshole design at its finest.