I think it's just cultural although that's a problem. Even their language emphasizes hierarchy and otherness with the honorifics and how they work.

But they've been doing right wing economics and policies since the 90s and have been in a permanent recession since then. It's the definition of insanity.

And they basically just elected Trump in a dress.

I know the Yakuza there are used as Union busters. I used to wonder why they didn't have any push for unions like we did here and that's why. In America the unions cuddled up with organized crime to get the muscle they needed to push back against the Epstein class but Japan didn't have that because the upper crust got to the organized crime first.

In America we use racism and homophobia to divide the working class along with certain religious divides but I don't quite get what does it in Japan. They are ridiculously homogeneous. Then again I sometimes meet people from Maine who are racist against black folk and I know that they come from towns where the only time they see a black guy is when a new Michael Jackson album came out

I don't see the point in launching a rescue mission that would catch up to, and re-power, a very distant spacecraft with 1970s-era technology. Better to devote that effort to a brand new spacecraft with updated instruments.

Politicians are like toilets. You're not supposed to like them, just pick the least gross one. YOU ARE THE PROBLEM. Sorry, princess, you don't get a everything you want AND a pony. You need to pick the least worst candidate. Even in the primaries. As you admitted, you don't like Joe Biden, but agreed things were better. He was never my favorite, either....but it's him or Trump.

So stop complaining. Pick the least worst candidate and encourage those who will listen to you to pick the rational, sensible decision. Do I like the Democrats? Eh...nope, not really. However, Clinton's record is the best in my lifetime. He entered with a record deficit and left with a record surplus. Bush Jr did the polar opposite. I even think GWB was a cool guy. I'd totally have a beer with him and probably laugh the whole time...would I want him to be president again?...hell no, I thought he ruined the country with his reckless spending and pointless war + that whole patriot act thing....but if he was running against Trump?...OK...GWB it is.

So grow the fuck up, and stop being a democracy pillow princess. Vote with your mind and not your heart. Does AOC/Mamdami inspire me? Nope...not at all. But if it were them or Trump 2.0?...I'd vote for them and not complain.

Democrats are like chemotherapy. It's a miserable shitty experience, but it's far better than letting the cancer spread. This whole liberal vs conservative narrative is a hoax. Nothing about Trumpism is conservative. Similarly, Democrats are not liberal, unless your mind is stuck in the 1950s, back when you could use the N-word freely in most circles.

Modern politics are about adults vs children. The children are fun...build the wall, Mexico will pay for it!...I'll solve all our financial problems with tariffs and China and someone else (China/retailers) will pay it...not you!!!....hey, don't notice our FAILING economy and how your financial prospects are getting worse...look at all the "illegals" we're rounding up like the big tough guys we are!!!. That's fucking fun, but it's a lie and a fantasy. Democrats are boring adults that balance the budget and respect you rights A LOT MORE than Republicans. And I get it, it's a drag....paying for shit in a sustainable way is a buzz kill.

However, the Democrats have no room or freedom to be liberals or chase their ideals because we have this shitty cycle where a Republican breaks the economy (or technically it breaks because through a combination of easily predictable economic phenomena, their reckless laws and tax cuts, and they fail to mitigate the harm through the many obvious solutions available), Bush Sr did, Bush Jr did, and Trump did...and then a Democrat comes in...battles with child like Republican congresspeople who post about Jewish Space Lasers and talk about Pizzagate....fixes the economy...things are boring and stable...and people like you complain about the stupidest shit imaginable, forgetting what we endured...and then a new child gets nominated, makes bold promises...and gets elected...and predictably tanks the economy. Who was the last Republican that left the economy in a better state than it was when he was elected?

It's easy to remember Mexico will pay for this wall....but also, don't forget GWB telling you he'll privatize social security...and how he took a record surplus and blew it on tax cuts that only benefited the wealthy, like repealing the estate tax....so rich assholes can pass more of their money to their worthless offspring while starving you of basic gov functions.

Grow the fuck up. You sound like some asshole who nearly died of COVID complaining about a sore throat from having a doctors save his life with a ventilator.

You're not learning anything from an instrument that is shut off. Those instruments that are still operating on both spacecraft are the Magnetometer (MAG) and the Plasma Wave Susbsystem (PWS). Voyager 2 also still has its Cosmic Ray Subsystem (CRS) operating. These all provide information about the heliospheric and interstellar space environments.

About $5 million USD per year for everything. And that includes the "pings" transferred and processed by the Deep Space Network of radio telescopes. Cheap, considering the frontier science that can be delivered, and the value of assets in that region of space.

Are we having a barely educated moron contest? Bold of you two to come out swinging like that.

When you radically increase the number of interactions with police you slightly reduce crime and you greatly increase the risk of innocent people being killed and the incidence of them being killed.

This is just a fact. If you want to reduce crime you fight it with social solutions like fixing the economy and fixing wealth inequality and more education not by sending more cops to beat the shit out of people.

All more cops do is broken windows policing which is where the cops constantly bust people from minor infractions which cause them problems in society leading to more problems and more crime. It's like the whole thing where Batman is creating his own villains.

You need a handful of police to stop crazy people with guns and they need training in de-escalation not military assault. You also need a handful of police to prevent people from doing dumb things in cars because public transportation is for weenies.

The basic problem we are all dancing around is that we heavily militarized police and then we trained them to believe they're in a war zone. Seriously go look up some cop training especially the stuff they get after the academy and it's basically military training but more ridiculous and extreme. The cops view themselves as an occupying force in constant danger. They are trained to think of themselves like soldiers in Vietnam surrounded by Charlie...

So since we can't reduce the number of police and fix all the social problems because voters won't go for that people have been trying to reduce the number of times police interact with the public. It's an incredibly stupid way to solve a problem but as the saying goes America will always do the right thing after it's tried everything else

Outside of measuring the effects of long-term exposure to the space environment throughout the solar system, I'm not sure there's a scientific case for retrieving the Voyagers.

Apollo 12 did harvest parts of Surveyor 3 for that purpose, although the latter had been on the moon for only two and a half years. And there have been other unmanned return-missions to near(ish)-earth space. But the Voyagers were never designed to collect anything physical that could be examined later in situ.

They have a massive database with social credit scores for everybody. So the cops can check that and find out if you're wealthy or not. That way they only kill the right people.

So check your bank account if you've got at least 10 million in there you're probably okay. Although you probably need to multiply that by a factor of 10 if you've got the wrong skin color

I didn't realize it was so heavy.

Elsewhere in this discussion, I have called attention to the distinction between insider trading and trading on insider information. The former can be legal, the latter is not. Company employees trade in their stock all the time, perfectly legally, by announcing their trades in advance if they are privy to insider information. That way they don't have an advantage over other traders. But let's follow your use of the term for this post.

SCOTUS said the President is completely immune for core acts, and presumptively immune for official acts. Insider trading strikes me as being nether a core nor an official act of the President. So, we'll see.

I don't recall SCOTUS saying anything about what immunity lower elected officials enjoy.

Again, we'll see. I predict not many investigations will be started into trading on insider information by elected officials in this administration. Unless perhaps your name has a (D) after it.

Every piece of information that people have gleaned from you goes into a database that a private company maintains with your name on it.

Police have access to this database and when they pull you over they run your plates, pull up your name and check the database to determine how dangerous they think you might be.

So far I don't think there have been any death because of it but realistically it's only a matter of time and statistics.

One of the things I've noticed is that when it comes to threads like this you never see the right wing show up and comment. They avoid these threads like the plague. Because a mass surveillance Network run by the people at the top of the hierarchy who they worship for being at the top of the hierarchy doesn't gel with their worldview.

That's kind of the problem with being a right winger. It's the old joke, reality has a left wing bias. So if you're going to be all right winger you've got to stay in safe spaces and avoid threads like this where your ideas might be challenged by reality and facts. Basically go back to Ben Shapiro who tells you that you have the facts after all.

You know this would probably be more true if the Republican's had come to their senses and nominatoed Nikki Haley or even DeSantis instead of Trump in 2024 but there's an ever-increasing possibility that Trump's absolutely inability to govern is going to turn the public against those policies.

Immigration for example, the concept of "abolish-ICE" was fringe lefty shit 2 years ago and now it's going mainstream. Also on that topic for all the circus of mass deportations have American's seen positive results from that? Is the job market better? Is inflation going down? Is crime going down faster than it was already? The answer to all that is no and people are starting to see that and some, (definitely not all because for many this was always just a bigotry based position) are realizing that the "your problems are immigrants" people were selling them a lie, and it's always been a lie.

The Republicans have also pretty much bled away all their gains with minority voters because they just can't stop being racist.

The truth about the immigration issue was never a lack of enforcement dollars but enough funding for the legal system around it, judges and courts along with reforms to the refugee process, which is exactly what the Lankford bill would have improved and what Harris would have signed so we'd have ended up with basically the same or better result.

Same with climate change, same with taxes, same with the courts where we now have more mainstream politicians talking about SC expansion and the public being more open to it.

The silver lining of Trump may be that he ushers in an era of a second New Deal because he managed to be such a colossal fuck-up.

About as likely as it was for him to go to Vietnam back then.

No it's not a coincidence. Only blatant parental abuse can cause this.

Wow is the US ever going to shit!