The electoral college gives people in shit states more voting power than people in states where people actually want to live.

By design. Or our farming industry would have died off decades ago and we'd be at the mercy of foreign powers for our food. You think a San Francisco avocado toast eater gives two shits about what matters to an Iowan corn farmer? They've probably never even seen a blade of grass in their lives.

Yes, we destroy their economies through colonialism and/or corporatism and then they need someplace to go, and they can see that their wealth has been transferred here. Then America declares that fleeing economic collapse is not a valid reason to be a refugee, and get the fuck out, even though we caused that collapse.

If you think the US is the sole reason for the sustained dysfunction in these countries, you're seriously deluded. There's rampant corruption across all layers of govt and often cartels literally in bed with govt as well. If anything, its the US demand for cheap labor that actually is lifting the countries up, which stands in stark contrast to the corruption holding it down. I don't know a single country with exposure to US labor demand that hasn't come out better on the other hand...it literally _built_ China.

The sad part when it comes to you is that all the information necessary for you to understand all of this is freely available, but you're too busy cheerleading for fascism to even go looking for it, let alone to read it.

Super ironic statement considering your Quora link is literally the only reference source I can find even remotely discussing your claims about "US destroying their economies". Every legit reference I can find chalks up the Latin American debt crisis to world recession and oil price shocks, factors well out of the control of the US.

"there is movement to try to push back on Federal overreach" The more recent issue is state overreach.

That by definition is not a thing. It's literally the 10th amendment. If it's not in the federal govt's purview and it's not inalienable, the states can literally do whatever they want. By constitutional design.

Federal overreach is a thing because the federal government was not meant to have grand sweeping overarching powers, authority, or control.

prices went UIP, again.

Except they didn't. Prices were flat month-over-month. They only went "up" if you're laser focused on the year-over-year number, which is misleading. When it comes to dollars and cents, the price you paid in October is the exact same price you paid in September.

Do you have any recommendations? This looks interesting unless it's pure tower defense.

The Dungeons series. Dungeons 4 is the most recent. But it's effectively a DK clone. Same clever humor, interface, concept. Really good game

People who say "woke" usually use it to complain "How dare anyone's focus be on people that don't look/act/think like I do?"

That's an easy cop out for anyone who wants to label legitimate complaints as RaCiSm. There are plenty of examples where "those who don't look/act/think like I do" succeed on the big screen. Like South Korean Squid Games. Or Miles Morales Spider Man. Complaints of wokism are aimed directly at directors who are more interested in blugeoning you over the head with some kind of PC message rather than putting together a coherent story.

You are a fucking moron. Did you even see the movie? The movie bombed because Marvel has its pattern down so good, that its movies are now feeling generic. It wasn't a bad movie. It wasn't good. It was meh. And none of this "Go woke, go broke" nonsense you racist sexist assholes love to shout when something doesn't feature a white man as the main character.

You do realize that's the entire point of the South Park joke, right? That the movie was "meh" because woke politics is the only focus the producers care about, leading to a far substandard "everything else". I mean, they're literally in the middle of applying the woke filter to Snow White, a movie they're on record as saying is "problematic" through today's lens. So why the hell are you making another one then if not to "Put a chick it in, and make her lame and gay" and then just kinda try to best fit a story around it? That's the entire critique! Disney is not trying for good cinema. They instead start with a base framework of "woke message" as their movie concept and then go from there. They don't start with a good movie premise and then add diversity.

And ignore the trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars we just handed the 1% for nothing.

Dude, it's been over twenty years since the Bush tax cuts. What are you gonna rail over next? The Louisiana Purchase and all its expense? Moreover, literally any administration could have altered the taxes with a swipe of a pen if they wanted to. Tax brackets don't exactly require a constitutional amendment to alter. I mean the Dems held all the branches of govt in 2008, but they seemed pretty content with the tax brackets as is.

A few hundred billion dollars spent supporting working class Americans

A few hundred billion? Inflation Reduction Act costs 740 billion. Build Back Better was 1.85 trillion. American Rescue Act was 1.9 trillion. That's 4.5 trillion dollars, not "a few hundred billion". And thank god Manchin was around or it would have been double that. And that's 4.5 trillion dollars that isn't even helping us. It's supercharging an overheated economy and literally hurting the people it's trying to help by jacking inflation costs. At least the tax cuts, disproportionate they might have been, at least put money into the hands of citizens rather than actively fucking them.

We got about 2.6% out of it tops, and that's in total. It also prevented the entire country from collapsing. So that's nice.

First of all, it's not 2.6% of inflation, it's 2.6% percentage points of the ~8-9% in total year-over-year inflation (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/stimulus-money-boosted-inflation-2-194200420.html), so something like just under a third of it. And you do realize that spending didn't stop, right? The American Rescue Plan, the infrastructure bill, and the "Inflation Reduction Act" (cue laughing) all added to inflation as well. That's trillions in additional spending continuing for the next half decade or so, creating jobs at a time when the fed is trying desperately to reduce jobs. The amount of spending the govt injected into a booming inflationary economy was immensely irresponsible and absolutely made things worse.

Nope. They said at the beginning that the masks were needed by the medical professionals. When there was enough supply, they said that now everybody should wear them. No "180" at all, but I guess you are too stupid to understand a situation _this_ extremely complex.

That's some revisionist bullshit. All the pre-April 2020 messaging was not only that masks should be saved for professionals, but also that they were not effective in protecting a healthy person from getting COVID:
https://www.newsweek.com/fauci...
https://kutv.com/news/coronavi...
https://time.com/5794729/coron... says Dr. William Schaffner, professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University. The only problem: thatâ(TM)s not likely to be effective against respiratory illnesses like the flu and COVID-19. If it were, âoethe CDC would have recommended it years ago,â he says. âoeIt doesnâ(TM)t, because it makes science-based recommendations.â
https://www.latimes.com/scienc... U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams tweets that wearing a face mask will not prevent the public from contracting the novel coronavirus. âoeSeriously people â" STOP BUYING MASKS!â he wrote in a tweet that was later deleted. âoeThey are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers canâ(TM)t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!â

This was the same messaging told when they were telling everyone all they need to do is sterilize all surfaces and wash their hands because COVID supposedly "wasn't airborne": https://www.facebook.com/WHO/p...

They had no fucking clue how the virus worked at that time, and were literally guessing. And in guessing, they gave people who wanted to wear masks bad advice, namely to "just wash your hands and you'll be ok".

The idea was that if you tie Russia's economy to the EU's, then it greatly reduces the chances of war. Nobody wants to kill the goose that lays golden eggs. It's a good plan, assuming everyone behaves rationally.

That's not how it works. Oil is fungible. If you tied your energy dependency to another country, they lose nothing by cutting you off because they can just sell to someone else. It's just dumb to put your country's entire energy security in someone else's hands. Full stop.

No. Nine republicans in the house. You forgot to include the one who was the incumbent speaker at the time and specifically told democrats he doesn't want their help.

They didn't offer their help free of charge. They basically wanted a laundry list of stuff for their support. Secondly, I didn't say it was caused by democrats. I said it was caused by both. 8 republicans triggered it, and then 212 dems joined them. All 220 feel that playing political games and behaving in a strict partisan no-compromise manner is more important than having a functional government.

Republicans in the House. You know, the ones who didn't even want to fund the basic operation of the government and when someone in their party dared to strike a bipartisan deal to keep even basic funding going they backstabbed him.

Umm, let me fix that for you: EIGHT Republicans in the House plus ALL 212 Democrats . You know, the ones who didn't even want to fund the basic operation of the government and when someone in their party dared to strike a bipartisan deal to keep even basic funding going they backstabbed him.

Yes, I agree -- all 220 of those people are total assholes for rewarding a bipartisan house speaker with a vote that will assuredly lead to someone far less bipartisan or reasonable.

No we really cannot create and modify viruses without leaving obvious traces behind

Yes, we can. Incredibly easily. Put them in an unfavorable environment. Harvest the ones that survive and put them back into the unfavorable environment. Repeat enough times and you've modified the virus. It's the same freakin process as evolution, only hand directed by a lab researcher.

The problem with methods like serial passage is that they don't last in progressive generations.

Huh? That doesn't make sense at all. The entire point of serial passage is to iterate until some desired trait is retained. Why would this trait "fade away"? Do you have any link to a study claiming why this would occur?

But this is patently ridiculous because the virus does not spread well by a touch. You can literally avoid getting it by just lightly washing your hands.

Again, huh? This thing is wildly contagious and is airborne. You can wash your hands a billion times and still catch it by just breathing the air in the room as the virus.

Okay? Why do you care? It's better than if they're out committing crimes. Or just being homeless because they can't afford the rent. And then committing crimes.

I don't believe paying people a stipend to simply not commit crimes is a valid and sustainable business strategy. To say nothing of personal responsibility.

Military is a huge fraction of the budget

The 1960s want their talking point back. You are simply wrong. Defense is a very small fraction of our total expenses. And moreover, it actually contributes to GDP, unlikely many of our other expenses (such as interest payments or mandatory spending): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I know you people won't be happy until defense spending is at zero, but claiming defense is someone the driver of our debt is disingenuous to say the least.