It might be time to stop expecting infinite energy to always be available on demand. Just a thought...

Transportation by carrying thousands of pounds of metal with you everywhere you go is extremely energy intensive, and as a civilization, we do not have a way to sustain that without fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are also killing us, by screwing up the climate and environment. That's the reality that a lot of people refuse to accept. We ultimately have to stop using fossil fuels unless we can carbon capture to balance it.

It certainly is not coming for my wallet, because I dont commit tax fraud. I think the increase in IRS funding is a good thing to catch thieves like you. I am not sure why you expect sympathy for committing fraud.

The author doesn't understand the film industry. The reason that movies go from theaters, to rentals, to streaming, to dvd, is to increase the total revenue, especially for the action blockbuster type movies. But then again, he doesn't seem to like that kind of movie.

Going back to the 80's, there has always been a thriving market for straight-to-video content. It continues today with the (usually) lower-budget movies made by streamers like Netflix and Hulu. Without movie theaters as part of the ecosystem to support the overall revenue of a film and injecting their extra billions in, those straight to video movies are exactly the kind of movies that get made.

As with all kinds of markets, the quality of the production along with creating artificial scarcity that comes from limiting how often its licensed, and how much it costs to view, is used to increase total revenue. It is ultimately up to the free market to decide how much they are willing to pay towards movie production, but the original authors suggestion of removing billions of dollars from the film industry will likely not lead to films with a higher production quality.

most people are not tempted to murder by carrying a gun

There is however, an undeniable link between owning a gun, and suicide. People are tempted to kill themselves, it's simply a fact that gun owners are vastly more likely to commit suicide than the general population. 8 times more likely for male owners, 35 times more likely for female gun owners.

That's right, gun ownership comes with anywhere from an 800% to 3500% increased risk of suicide for you and members of your household. Guns are used far more often to kill their owner, or kill their spouse, than protect their owner.

Fun fact: Thus far, not a single instance of Covid transmission has been traced to a cinema, anywhere in the world. It defies logic, since given what we know about its airborne status, we might expect some transmission to occur. It's certainly possible that poor contact tracing has missed some instances. But plenty of countries around the world do extremely thorough contact tracing, and there have been dozens upon dozens of instances of known infected persons being in audiences where the entire audience has been tested, and the number is still holding steady, at zero known instances of spread.

Maybe its because the audiences all face one direction, and don't talk to each other, and all cinemas across the globe can easily enforce strict social distancing, and the audiences are small. Whatever the case, even though movie theaters routinely get listed in the absolute highest risk category, the available scientific evidence indicates a trip to the movies being a relatively low risk activity in general, safer at least than going to church, or the gym, or out to eat, or shopping at a grocery store.

I'd much rather trust an open source browser that I choose, with configuration settings I choose, than trust my ISP. My ISP isn't my first, second, or even third choice, it's my only high speed choice because of their monopoly on my cities geographic region. I know that they spy on my dns requests, and sometimes hijack them when my VPN is off. I know they make money from spying on me, and selling my private info against my wishes. All this talk about "enterprise firewalls" being at risk, and "wont somebody please think of the kids" is pure bullshit, it's only about the money.

People will say they are fake, without specifying WHY they think they are fake.

The scenario requires Hunter Biden to fly 2000 miles away from his home, give his laptop to a blind guy he's never met before, who happens to be a vocal Trump supporter, then not just forget the laptop existed, but abandon it and actively ignore the attempts to reach him, seemingly forgetting that the laptop contains personally incriminating information that he wanted extracted, and he happens to do all this while his father is running for the highest office in the land. Do you really find that plausible? Oh, and also, the laptop contents found its way into the hands of Rudy Guiliani, who was specifically targeted by foreign intelligence agencies according to our own law enforcement experts, and, Rudy also happens to be starring in a Borat movie, where he is show to be extremely gullible and a drunken idiot.

I'm not saying the laptop is for sure fabricted, but when you combine all those facts, with it's totally-by-coincidence late October timeframe, extra scrutiny is warranted.

For the past 20 years, Republicans have been in control of the presidency for 12 years, despite winning the popular vote only once. It's "really frequent" in the sense that for anyone under 40, this imbalanced situation where the loser still wins, has existed for their entire adult life.

Nothing about this makes any sense. There is no reason for Iran to do this.

A) Trump never attacks his supporters, whether they are white supremacists, or countries engaging in election interference for his benefit. He publicly took the word of Putin over the CIA, in a copycat of this scenario 4 years ago.

B) As a fallback, they know Russia controls Trump and would halt any new sanctions or invasion plans

C) Getting Trump re-elected would really tear the country apart if it can be done with obvious public interference that contributes to large swaths of the population doubting the legitimacy of the results. Trump has already attacked the legitimacy of the outcome to his supporters. It's a win-win scenario for Iran no matter the outcome.

D) There is no appetite or budget for yet another war in the middle east under Biden, as a proxy war against Russia.

However, I fully understand that the personality of the president matters very little compared to the policies they are enacting and support.

That is simply not true. The office of president plays the primary role in conducting foreign policy for the nation. His history of insulting allies with personal attacks, name calling, trying to overpower other world leaders with firm handshakes or creeping behind them, nationalist & racist attacks by calling other places shitholes, and repeated submissive behavior to anything Russia does, are all driven first and foremost by his personality.

Meanwhile his ambassadors, who work to repair this damage to foreign policy, mostly come from the ranks of unqualified campaign donors, rather than career diplomats. Both parties abuse this system, but prior presidents would give away donor rewards to places like a tiny tropical island, while the current administrations donor reward system surpasses all previous presidents. Half of the countries in the world have an American ambassador who bought the position. Never before has effectively half of America's foreign policy been for sale to the highest bidder. I think it's fair to ask what these various people are hoping to achieve with the ambassadorship that in some cases, they specifically requested and paid for? Does their personal agenda differ from what a career diplomat would do in advancing Americas agenda?

I think "America First", is a poor foreign policy message to other countries, that makes them far less likely to enter into partnerships and cooperation with us, and far more likely to raise overall costs and ultimately make the deals worse, because of human nature. I also think that NATO has been a useful organization, and believe our foreign policy plays an important role in our wealth, and safety.

Sadly many don't see they are being manipulated, and most of those don't react well to being shown this truth.

On this point, we agree. Tribalism makes it far to easy for people to dismiss valid criticisms.

However they are so stuck in the old ways, that they cannot adapt to what will be needed.

You are commenting on an article explicitly detailing the ways cinemas are adapting, by targetting smaller groups of people you trust, instead of traditional crowds of random people.

I'm not sure if you go out anywhere aside from your church, but almost all businesses are enforcing social distancing, requiring contact tracing info, requiring masks and offering free hand sanitizer. Signing a deposition, and requiring witnesses is a little, uh... less common?

A transactional sale requires an agreement between two parties and doesn't quite fit. How about a car analogy instead. What if I had made a public statement, HUNDREDS of times, that I wanted a red car, but that Henry Ford would only sell me a black car. Would it be totally uncalled for and illegal if someone painted my car the exact shade of red I wanted? Or maybe I made a campaign promise that I would paint my car red, but then made a fake excuse that the dealership needs to sign a waiver, and wouldn't do it?

It would be absurd to say that I want a specific outcome, and make that statement hundreds upon hundreds of times to millions of people, and then act outraged when that exact outcome happens.

Now remember that Trump's personal tax information was leaked by the New York Times. This was indeed illegal, as courts have ruled that Trump is still a private citizen, and as such was not forced to release this private and personal information.

But, he has said, over and over and over, including in the past 24 hours, that he wants to release his tax returns and show the American people what they contain, but that he was unable to due to audit. So, the New York Times is helping him by releasing those documents, and offering exactly what he said he wants. Unless you think, he was really lying, each time he made that statement about his taxes?

I mean, like you said, a laptop was abandoned after being dropped off for service.

To be more precise, a Macbook was dropped off at an independent repair shop, that had been immersed in water and was nonfunctional except for the hard drive.
It was dropped off by a man who left NO contact information, and made no efforts to get his laptop back. (Does the shop regularly have customers drop computers off with only paper records? A computer shop... that doesn't keep electronic records?)

Instead, the customer conveniently forgot about his laptop existing and never returned.

Despite Biden's overseas work that is subject to foreign espionage, and built-in Apple encryption being an option, the laptop itself was completely unencrypted and unprotected.

After waiting "long enough", the shop owner snooped through the contents of the customers hard drive, loaded the customers mailbox, and discovered his customer was Hunter Biden who lives 2,000 miles away, and lo and behold, he also discovered emails from 2015 indicating a conspiracy. (Does the shop owner usually snoop through customer emails?)

The shopkeep then contacted Rudy Guiliani as his first stop, and gave him a cloned copy of the customers hard drive.

And now recently, the shop owner has given a long interview where his story changes and he contradicts himself.

... Does none of that seem fishy to you?