Allow me to posit the following: we could very well be minding our own business but still strongly influence the rest of the world. For example, if a company wishes to do business in America -- the world's largest and most lucrative commercial market -- they must comply with US laws. This is no different than any other country. You may not like it, but that's how commercial business works, and it'd be no different if someone like North Korea had the market everyone wanted. You'd just be complaining about a different country.

Don't like it? Don't do business in the US and you're free to do whatever you want. You'll be excluding yourself from probably 70% of the available market, but you're free to make that choice.

Don't forget, your argument can be turned around quite easily: you could mind your own business and stop trying to tell the US how to do business according to your wants/needs. Funny how that works.

You're blissfully unaware of how national sovereignty works.

Good luck getting the US to accommodate an Interpol extradition request for 4chan and its personnel. There's no reason the US would agree to it since 4chan has violated no US law. So long as 4chan operates in the US exclusively and violates no US laws, they are effectively beyond the reach of the UK government. They could presumably nab some 4chan executive if they ever visited the UK, but all one has to do to avoid that is just not visit the UK.

This is how international legal disputes have been handled since the dawn of international legal disputes. Don't trust me, look it up, I'm sure chatgpt can fill you in.

It's about time they admitted to something that was obvious to almost everyone: nuclear power is the only effective path to carbon-free base load power generation. Wind and solar make good intermittent sources, but base load has to be utterly reliable regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. That's nuclear.

Getting rid of the nukes was a knee-jerk reaction, not a smart technological decision. The pivot to depending on oil and gas from a potential hostile neighbor just added to the madness.

He financed, produced, starred in, and distributed the film completely independent from the "Hollywood System". For God's sake, how much less "sucked in" can a person be and still have the means to do it at all???

Give the man some credit.

I presume you're referring to the 2008 Chinese Milk Scandal? I'll point out this was something perpetrated by the Chinese industry, not American. It was knowingly covered up with the complicity of the Chinese government to prevent it from embarrassing the ongoing Olympics. Only when the scandal became impossible to cover up did the CCP take any action.

As of December 2025, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and former Mayor London Breed have both expressed praise for China and the relationship between San Francisco and Chinese cities.

You're not missing something. Much like Disney's "Snow White" was called a "success" despite bombing both at the box office and on streaming, the corporate media stooges will blithely state the complete opposite in an attempt to hide abject failure. Ubisoft is no different.

AC fans waited years to get a game with samurai's based in feudal Japan. What they got is a "samurai" game with no actual Japanese samurai protagonist. Ubisoft's reason for this is painfully obvious to everyone. This is why Japanese consumers have largely rejected it and has a lot to do with why sales have tanked overall.

There's a saying for this that ends with "go broke." It's slipping my mind at the moment, but I'm sure it'll come to me eventually.

If more companies would not only put a monetary bounty on these crooks but also specify "dead or alive," perhaps it would start to put a dent in their activities. They're already operating from countries that either look the other way or actively assist them in their activities. Putting a death mark on them ups the stakes considerably and allows the use of...ahem...alternate actors...ahem...that can operate beyond the law to get actual results.

However, if you're a user in certain countries, like France or Canada, opening the app shows a collection of pirated movies, such as Venom: The Last Dance, Joker: Folie a Deux, and Terrifier 3.

So...nothing anyone wants to actually see then.

"Most" is pretty vague. Which ones don't overlap? Do you even know? Have you read both? In full? Project 2025 is 922 pages long. Somehow I doubt you've read it, instead relying on the media to tell you what to think and say and do.

What if "most" of the overlap are things that are relatively mainstream, non-controversial things? What if the only places they don't overlap just happen to be the Big Boogeyman Ideas you're so terrified of? Did you ever consider that enough to bother reviewing both proposals? Or did you simply hear "Trump = Project 2025 and Project 2025 = bad, therefore Trump = bad"?

The sheer lack of curiosity about the stances some people are willing to take is stunning sometimes. Presumably you have a prefrontal cortex. You may wish to use it from time to time to think on your own and come up with your own opinions.

And yet who will build, program, and maintain this AI-controlled fleet? Another AI-controlled facility? Who will build, program, and maintain that? Or is it turtles all the way down?

At some point humans have to be involved, and those humans will be gainfully employed and benefit from their labor. Those who adapt to this new economic reality will prosper. Those who do not, will not.

This is nothing new. When mass production put artisans out of work, the same hue and cry was raised. The human race as a whole is incalculably better off today than it was when that happened. Those who try to stand against the march of technology to maintain the status quo will always get steamrollered. And we should not weep for them, for we all benefit from the march of progress. If you truly believe in the betterment of humanity, you cannot allow the creation of a society where stagnation is rewarded.

Two things I think are frequently lost in these discussions:

1. When Fauci made his statement about people not needing to wear masks, people tend to forget the context of the situation. At the time, mask manufacturers were caught off-guard and there was a huge run on masks. They were extremely hard to find to buy. Hospitals were running out and having a very hard time procuring the masks that they needed to perform operations. They were actively trying to discourage people from hoarding masks so that medical providers could have "dibs" on acquiring them first.

Once the supply line caught up with demand and they were more easily obtainable, they changed their position—but not because the facts or evidence of their effectiveness changed.

It wasn't just masks to which this flawed logic was applied. When the COVID vaccines first became available, people who were over the age of 65 were given priority on getting them. A bunch of people willfully ignorantly took that to mean that people who were younger just plain didn't benefit from having the vaccine. Nothing could be further from the truth; it benefits them greatly. But with a highly limited supply, we necessarily had to prioritize who got the shots first.

2. When you wear a mask, it isn't particularly effective in protecting you from COVID. Its purpose is to protect everyone else if you have COVID, especially since in the initial stage of infection many people were asymptomatic. As mentioned in comments above, it prevents a 10-foot plume of aerosolized infected saliva from projecting forth from your sneezes, coughs, and even just breathing. The idea is that if everyone is wearing a mask to protect everyone else, then you'll have a much higher level of protection also.

Living in the South of the US, I can't count the number of times I heard chuckleheads explain to me how those masks still let particles through. They couldn't wrap their brains around the point being that those particles for the most part won't be there if everyone is wearing masks. And it's not just COVID that controlled by masks. Did anyone notice that cases of the flu dropped to a fraction of its normal rate of infection where people consistently masked up?

Because of huge sums of money involved if he can hit this hail mary. It sounds like he doesn't give a shit what Doctor Who fans think about him, so why not take the shot?

(Note that I'm not endorsing that mentality, it's asshattery. But I certainly understand why he's doing it, and why others in his position might also take a shot at it even if deep down they know it's not right.)

Why would your battery be drained? Leading up to an outage, you would be using utility power to run your heating and other stuff, not the battery. The battery would only need enough juice to stay charged at full. And because of the way modern battery packs work, that means that it would only charge up at periodic intervals, never letting the capacity get below maybe 80% to 85%. (But could be set arbitrarily high, depending on need given outage frequency and average length.) And that charging would happen during non-peak hours, so there's no extra load on the grid. I have an EV, and that's how I have my car set up today to charge; in the middle of the night when the grid is nowhere near peak load. This "problem" has been solved long ago.

The availability of solar or wind power has nothing to do with this conversation. We were talking about load distribution and how much the grid would be taxed with batteries at people's houses, not energy sources. But just to counter the FUD...

Wind turbines work fine during bad weather if they're properly maintained. Plenty of countries with more bad weather than we have generate plenty of wind and solar power, including places like Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Germany.

What you're likely thinking of is the problems that Texas had in 2021 due to a freak ice storm. A bunch of right-wing nitwits got all over television and the internet to decry how unreliable wind power is, when in fact, it was natural gas that took the heaviest hit in failing to supply enough power. Windmills actually worked much more reliably during that snowstorm. (Citation)

As for solar, it can be impacted, but it's rather unusual for it to be. It has to be really cold or a really heavy snowfall, because the surface of solar panels generally are warmer than the surrounding area, meaning that snow generally melts off of it quickly. Also, solar panels are typically mounted at an angle, which induces snow to slide off of them. And even panels that are partially obstructed generate decent amounts of power. (Citation) Again, in practical use, this is a non-issue.

The total demand, yes. But if everyone has on-premises batteries, the peak demand can be spread throughout all 24 hours of the day, making the load that the grid has to handle much less.

So the moral of the story is early buyers will pay full price while getting a buggy, unbalanced, unfinished product. Meanwhile, those who wait will generally get discounts, see fewer bugs, and more polished content.

This is why I almost never buy anything as soon as it's released.