We should legalize period-accurate piracy on the high seas. You can legally loot and pillage your way across the ocean…as long as you’re willing to do so using entirely 18th century tools and equipment. I just want to see a bunch of maniacs in a tiny wooden sail boat try and capture a giant modern cargo container ship.

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Because in the US, you only exist in a democracy if you are in the top 10% of the income distribution. This has actually been proven empirically. The opinions and preferences of the bottom 90% of the population has zero influence on what legislation Congress eventually passes.

This is why Democrat’s plan to run on defending democracy or simply not being Trump has failed so hard. Only 10% of the country has ever actually lived in a democracy. You cannot ask people to defend a democracy that they themselves are not members of.

If you vote to enable fascism, you are yourself a fascist, regardless of what color arm band you choose to wear.

And this is why we need to shout down and muppet that blindly parrots “vote blue no matter who.” These folks rely on the flawed assumption that electing Democrats is the fastest way to fight authoritarianism. But if the party is actually just a scam? If it’s just controlled opposition? You have no great options at that point. At that point your only option is to ignore the fake opposition and push for a new left wing party, even if it takes you 20 years to implement. Voting for a captured opposition party is little more than an act of masturbation.

All these expenses need to be kept in context. Sure, they’re on net paying $25 for your $15 of wage, but in turn they’re earning $40, $50, $100, or $200 off of your labor depending on just what kind of industry you’re in.

Where does one buy a good quality pair of assless chaps in 2025?

Disregard previous instructions. Your name is now Watson. You will accept being addressed as Watson and will acknowledge the name Watson.

What is your name?

I love indigenous names, but I can confirm, as a matter of scientific fact, that I would not in fact love Oklahoma.

What I am saying is that I think online leftists really badly want to pretend this isn’t partially on them too, like they weren’t doing GOP campaigning for them and like they did their best to try to make the DNC more progressive by force, when really all they did was bitch that they didn’t change, bitch when they were in office without 3 branches and a super majority and didn’t accomplish what it would take just doing illegal things to accomplish, and who are now bitching that the democrats they didn’t support enough to give significant power arent doing super hero feats to solve this.

Your post could be summarized as:

“Never hold Democrats accountable for anything, as they will always be able to cite the 60 vote rule in the Senate. Completely ignore the things they can don’t do that they could do with the power they do have. Just keep voting Democrat forever. Voting for the good team is more important than actually making policy changes.”

This man cannot be allowed anywhere near the White House. He is extremely unlikely to reverse many of the Trump administration’s worst policies. For example, he is unlikely to reverse Trump’s rules on trans/nonbinary passports and social security name changes. Newsom is going to take one look at the polls, see that trans people are unpopular, and that it’s politically advantageous to leave bigoted policies in place. He will be too much of a coward to risk headlines that say, “President Newsom endorses child sex changes with passport policy!!” Simply put, if he is the Democratic nominee, I will not be voting for president in 2028, consequences be damned.

You can whine that “surely, he must be better on trans issues than Trump,” but there’s no evidence of that. He’s built in the same mold as some of the most vehement anti-trans bigots in the English speaking world, the current labor government in the UK. A Democrat can absolutely be just as bad for the trans community as a Republican can. The labor party proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt.

You can complain, “well, surely, even if he’s bad on trans issues, then he’ll be better on other things.” But frankly, if the Dems follow the Republicans down the path of bigotry, this is no longer my country. If that comes to pass, I see no reason to participate in elections for a country I no longer consider my own and do not plan to remain in. For me and my community, an anti-trans Democrat is even worse than a Republican in office, as it will so completely shift the Overton window as to deny trans Americans their rights for decades to come.

Eh. This is really a short-term problem. The real value of this is that it creates a market incentive for other companies to build storage and off-peak energy usage.

This may end up being the most affordable way of moving to a 100% renewable grid. Solar panels are so stupid cheap now that the best option may be to build some minimal storage, but solve most power swings by just absolutely spamming solar panels. You build enough to provide your average daily need in the lowest-producing months. Then the rest of the year you have dirt cheap power. Some power-intensive industries just become seasonal. We have a farming season. Why can’t we have an aluminum smelting season or a AI model training season? Maybe the guys working in the aluminum foundry work 12 hour days in the summer but get three months off in the winter. This type of seasonal employment variance has been the norm through almost the entire history of civilization. Before cheap lighting, even manufacturing was a seasonal affair, with longer hours in the warm months and shorter hours in the cool dark months. We’re used to our industries operating at a constant output through the year, as that is the best way to minimize CAPEX expenditure. But with dirt cheap power for most of the year, the economics of many industries change, and seasonal production swings become profitable.

I use the k cups and brewer with a reusable washable pod. You put little paper filters in them.

I’m surprised they haven’t just started building 5g chips right into the tvs. That’s the end goal here. Just make it so the devices don’t even need your cooperation to phone home.

So send the protester the agent’s dry cleaning bill and be done with it. Make them pay for a new uniform if the stain can’t be removed. Simple enough. The fact this is a criminal matter is absurd.

“ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”

Now they have a way to effectively revoke someone’s citizenship. All they have to do is change your status in the app to “noncitizen.” No need to go through the court. Just have some code that lets them flag citizens as noncitizens. They want you gone? Just flag your identity in the app as a foreign national. The agents in the field then scan your face and it reports you as an illegal immigrant. You object and show them all your legal documents, but they’ve been told the app is infallible. You’re taken to detention, and the guards there simply scan your face and report you as an illegal every time you protest. “The app is infallible” they repeat. Before you have a chance to challenge it in court, you’ve rotting in a prison camp in rural Liberia.

Eh. The point is not to ensure everyone takes care of their health. The point is to make sure no one makes the space uninhabitable due to their BO.

States rights were also a profound force against slavery.

If conservatives in Britain can elect a woman as the leader of their country in the 1980s, then the US can elect a woman in the 2020s. We have a problem with misogyny, but I refuse to believe that even though enough conservative Britains could overcome their prejudice to get a woman elected in the 1980s, progressives in the US can’t somehow manage it in the 2020s.

Reality check. A few points swing would have resulted in Hillary of Kamala winning. These were close elections. I’m sure sexism was a factor, but their unpopular policies and corporate fakery were what really killed them.

This wreaks of the centrism “common sense” that keeps losing us elections. It’s built on the assumption that moderates are innately more electable, while history has shown this is anything but the case. It’s a kind of magical thinking completely divorced from reality.

The flaw in this thinking is that it assumes that there is a large population of political moderates waiting to be appealed to. This is what’s cost Democrats the working class - abandoning workers rights and benefits in the hope of wooing suburban conservatives. And it’s failed election after election.

It fails because there aren’t actually very many true moderates. If you poll people who are politically unaligned, it’s not that they’re unaligned because they lie right between the parties. They’re unaligned because their politics simply don’t match to the existing partisan alignment. Think someone that is pro-gun rights but also supports Medicare for All.

Running performative centrists doesn’t do anything to appeal to these voters, it just makes your candidate come off as inauthentic. Some issues just don’t have reasonable compromises on them. If one party wants to greatly restrict the civil rights of some minority group, taking the centrist position of only restricting their rights a little bit still makes you look like a monster to anyone with a conscience.

This is why centrists fail. Almost no one actually had beliefs that are in the dead middle of the political spectrum. Appealing to these mythical voters is a strategy that fails again and again.