Could you help me understand something? Is this person also… dumb? I don’t mean to be disparaging or judgemental, but I’m trying to navigate all this and I’m having a hard time understanding how someone can lack this much self-awareness and still function in society. Unless, they can’t do that either? Thanks.

For a while now I’ve been paying attention to the way customers are treated, and noticed a kind of symmetry with how the employees of a given business/institution are treated. If you’re seeing one kind of abuse/neglect, the other is very likely to also be the case, because it all comes from the same place.

In the case of Walmart: employees under a rather heavy yoke of part-time-no-benefits-never-unions labor, and customers are given a dis-compassionate choice between poorly made and barely viable goods from dubious origins. It’s not that management/ownership doesn’t care about this or that, it’s that they generally don’t care about people and are grotesque about it. It’s all here.

How… how do they not have a smooth on-ramp for what is basically a straight upgrade to the same service?!

I was gonna say: we didn’t vote for him! Approval rating should be at 0% on that point alone as zero voters approved of this.

The fact that Ask Jeeves isn’t an AI-only search engine is just beyond me. It was laughable that someone thought to personify a search engine 25 years ago, but now is pretty much the right time for that.

More than zero, which is too many for my taste.

It’s a needle in a haystack, but that’s a really valuable needle. It might actually be worth it.

Good point.

Now that you mention it, eggs fit the right conditions for this kind of scheme. They’re experiencing an abnormal spike in value, are highly perishable (somewhat inelastic demand), and probably are stored under low security since they were (recently) cheap. Just the right commodity for arbitrage before everyone involved wises up or things normalize.

WASHINGTON, Feb 4 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said the U.S. would take over the war-ravaged Gaza Strip and develop it economically

The scope of this statement is a shock, but the motivation that led to it, isn’t. That said, I hate everything about this.

I’m not the first to bring this up, but it bears repeating. This is colonialism, plain and simple. That, in turn, is an outcome of unchecked capitalism. Practiced ideologically (i.e. as the guiding light in one’s life), it holds up “exploitation at all costs” as a virtue. Second to that is “give your competition no quarter.” Combined, that explains the current state of affairs.

We all may be used to thinking of colonialism as some thing that ended on one more more independence days in the last 300 years or so. In reality, the engines of commerce and industry that made that happen kept right on running. Since nation-state-sized real-estate deals like this don’t come along very often anymore, these animals are quick to react and pounce before someone else figures out how to exploit the situation.

As an aside: the attitudes and values that enabled things like the US westward expansion, slavery, classism, eradication of indigenous peoples, environmental destruction in the pursuit of minerals, pollution and litter from energy extraction, etc., are still alive and well in the population. Being this kind of evil is insanely profitable under the right conditions, which confers an outsized advantage to reproduction and social influence. Which is to say that it’s not the ideology of capitalism that propels these values to stay with us, but rather the other way around. It’s as though those colonists with exploitation in their hearts are still very much with us, and that’s something to keep an eye on.

So… “let’s be neither of those things by using both of their names at the same time”?

I honestly see this as more tree-shaking. It gives “disloyal” folks a way select themselves out, and provides a lot of empty seats to fill with “their” people.

Combined with the Section F stuff, I think this will also have a net negative impact to the economy of the greater DC-metro area. Yanno, those people that voted against Trump in the election. It’s hard to not see all this as punitive.

Yup. Everyone is quick to forget how the US treated Irish, Italian, and Jewish people in past generations. There really is such a thing as “not white enough”, and when these jerks run out of people to pick on, that’s next.

Trump might as well sign an executive order that declares himself Emperor of the Moon and Supreme Chancellor of Outer Space, it’ll have about the same amount of impact as this first round of executive orders will.

Look, not to call you out or anything, but the impact of these edicts (however nonsensical) is radically different now that he’s in office.

The problem isn’t the legitimacy or legality of any such order, it’s the veracity and scope to which they are carried out regardless of those facts. He just pardoned the Jan 6th insurrectionists. Now, people that are handed off-the-wall, yet much more clear, orders from the White House can now go on thinking that illegal activity pursued in the name of said order will be washed away. So, stuff like this will cause damage to be done well before any courts can intervene, constitutionality be damned.

As a bonus, this adds culpability to the actions of his subordinates. Step in line or lose your job. Fail me after committing a crime and you go straight to prison. This is an organized crime tactic to keep shady people in line.

I really want that to be true.

At the same time, we should probably start paying less attention to the mannerisms of an almost century-old-and-dead fascist regime, and pay more attention to our home-grown variety of the same. After all, when the bad guys come knocking, they’re going to look like the proud boys, not brownshirts.

Beating most any “hard” video game is always a great feeling just due to the sheer hours that go into it. In some cases, you have to develop the memory and skill to do the whole thing in one sitting. I can’t count how many from the NES era fit this criteria. Top of that list are: Contra, Bionic Commando, and most Zelda and Mega Man games.

The best one happened in the middle of my Dark Souls play-through. I kept having to quit playing after short sessions, as skill and vigor checks kept wrecking me. This lead to anger and rage that just made it impossible to proceed. Once I made the connection that I could concentrate more and flow through combat more easily while calm, I changed tactics to calming my own mind and keeping it that way. The game just “opened up” after that. From there on, it was much more about meditation and breathing than equipment and leveling - skills I now carry with me everywhere. DS literally made me a calmer and more resilient person.

Honestly, I just want to know who fed him this Greenland nonsense in the first place. I don’t think it’s his idea, originally.

Well that certainly gives nullification teeth. Interesting. Thank you.

I am not a lawyer.

Nullification is when the jury hands in a verdict of “not guilty”, even though there’s a preponderance of evidence that the law was indeed broken by the defendant. They basically ignore the Judge’s instructions to weigh the evidence and do something else instead. This would trigger an appeal by the prosecution on the basis of mistrial, since the optics on that situation look like something procedural is way off.

I’m not well-versed in these matters, but I am intrigued by what would happen if this went to appeal. If it went all the way to SCOTUS, or even some appeals court with a crooked judge, that might not go so well for the defendant.

We’re going back

Awesome. Another high-quality graphical Rogue spinoff? I’m there.

In the meantime, check out Torchlight 1&2 if you need something to tide you over. They’re on the old side, but IMO scratch that itch.

Not to come off as a raging cynic, but I for one am not.

All one needs to do is work retail or food service on Sundays. Moral licensing is absolutely a thing, and it’s awful. Such interactions can leave one with the impression that there’s a huge mob of people out there that are more concerned with narrowly avoiding hell than ensuring their place in heaven. Nevermind trying to be good people.