Yes, super hero fatigue is real.

The success of the recent Superman appears to prove you wrong. Tell a good story and people will go to see it. It's not super hero fatigue that's real...it's that the storywriting has suffered, and they're pulling from deeper B and C list superheroes that don't have the same kind of appeal.

I mean, did a million people really search out Velvet Sundown, or did Spotify just inject the songs into a million people's streams? The article doesn't really say, one way or the other.

Likely a combination of both. Initial injection followed by viral search out. I know Spotify has injected AI bands into my "Discover Weekly" stream. I went searching for the artists of new music I enjoyed just to discover they were computer generated

Something like 80% of all causalities in the war right now are coming from drones.

Source? That's a bold claim.

Take your pick -- all sources on google have the number somewhere between 60 and 80%: https://www.google.com/search?...

NPR is pretty legit: https://www.npr.org/2025/06/07... Or NYT? https://www.nytimes.com/intera...

Meanwhile, some reports from the frontlines indicate that while drones are ubiquituous, they aren't the game-changer the tech-industry wants them to be. tl;dr essential bits: a) most drone strikes could have been done by other, cheaper weapons. b) drones are an unreliable weapon due to jamming, dependency on weather and light and many technical failures.

I'm pretty sure that's untrue. Something like 80% of all causalities in the war right now are coming from drones. There are many ways around jamming (band jumping, fiber optics, AI, GPS, piggybacking on cell networks, etc), and those improve every day. And locating and targeting remote drone operators is far harder than targeting a nearby mortar or artillery crew (unsure which "cheaper" weapons you believe exist...drones are dirt cheap)

Tell me then. I was informed from a reasonable Independent that as a Democrat, I tend to "demonize" MAGAs. It does seem easy. So, tell me what you love about the "Big Beautiful Bill"? Honestly, let us talk. I tried before to talk with MAGAs, and in the end it always boils down to a MAGA doing personal, six grader types of attacks.

I wasn't intending to defend the merits of the bill. I personally hate deficit spending. I'm also not a MAGA. I was saying it was a very poor and misleading title. It's a 900 page bill, and climate is a handful of line items on a laundry list of changes: https://www.crfb.org/blogs/bre...

That said, there are some things in it I do like. Like no tax on tips, and alot of senior assistance. But that's neither here nor there. The bill itself overall is poorly designed, as it's yet another example of modern day deficit spending both sides have egregiously acquiesced to making the status quo

House Passes Bill That Slashes Solar, Wind and EV Tax Credits

What a terrible spin-laden uninformative title. That bill includes a ton more provisions than just that. That title makes it seem like it's exclusively a climate bill

Capitalism has failure modes where "Private property" makes "Competition" and "Freedom of choice" irrelevant. Some of these failure modes are called monopoly and cartel.

Monopolies/cartels are not a facet of capitalism. Antitrust is a basic tenet of capitalism. Adam Smith, the inventor of capitalism, was very clear on this. So if monopolies are allowed to happen, it's not a failure of the system, it's a failure of the people implementing it (i.e., what they're doing isn't capitalism, it's something else, probably cronyism)

Fuck you for such a lazy effort. Yes, let's increase transportation costs for people that can't fucking afford transportation to begin with. Go away

Man, if this ain't the truth. It's like when they want to ban natural gas for cooking. Rather than actually make the green thing cheaper and more desirable, just ban the competition and make everyone's lives more expensive and more miserable. Go away indeed. No wonder the green movement is so hated

You're not complaining about pandering, you're complaining about pandering targeted at someone who isn't yourself and who you don't empathize with

This is where you're mistaken. I do empathize with those groups, and even I find the writing cringeworthy. Like the Falcon/Winter Soldier "do better" speech. That kind of thing never happened before, doesn't help the cause, and is all levels of icky.

There are plenty of old series which did their preaching in unsubtle ways, and they sucked

Legitimately curious. Which ones? I'm be surprised if you could produce anything mainstream. In modern day cinema, this kind of shitty messaging has penetrated everything, even blockbusters like Marvel and classics like Disney. I'd be willing to admit wrongness, but I certainly never saw this level of pandering in the mainstream before. And nowhere near the scale it is today (something like ~60-80% of Disney content?)

High interest rates are designed to cause layoffs. That's how they fight inflation

That's not a given. And we haven't seen that in the current labor market. High interest rates suppress business growth by raising the cost of borrowing. This doesn't necessitate layoffs, although it can cause layoffs. In the current economy, we've generally seen reductions in job openings and reduced expansion plans. However, we've seen subdued growth nonetheless, coupled with maximum employment.

Hollywood has been woke and pandering throughout all of its existence. The problem has nothing to do with woke, it's got to do with bad writing and bad acting

Huh? This is a matter of scale and focused intent. For instance, if you don't see a difference in levels of pandering between say the 1989 Little Mermaid and the modern day one, you're being deliberately blind. They literally changed lyrics in the most popular classic songs purely on pandering grounds. The writing is bad as well, but that's because the focus is on the pandering rather than just telling a good story. You have writers going "so how do we shoehorn in a good message about the environment/racism/patriarchy/etc here" instead of going "what would make a good character arc and a satisfying story?"

As a second example, Doctor Who was always woke to some degree, but it's utterly jumped the shark at this point. Again, compare current day Doctor Who to ~20 years ago. If you think the level of wokeness is the same, you're deluding yourself. You have characters literally soapboxing/diatribing to the audience Atlas Shrugged style. That kind of thing never happened back in the day. Writers knew of "show, don't tell". Modern writers are "preach the message through all means possible."

There are only three resolutions to a constitutional crisis. The first is President becomes king. The second is Congress agrees with the president and changes the law. And the third is Congress impeaches the president. The Democrats aren't going to accept #1.

I wish I knew this for sure. I have seen many inklings that would lead me to believe they'd be perfectly content if it was their king. They've already pitched packing the courts, eliminating the filibuster, and rewriting the laws to favor their party (ala electoral college elimination). They've shown a sustained desire to work around Congress rather than with it.

If a popular Democratic president started doing illegal things broadly popular with their base, I'm not certain Congress would hold them to task with an impeachment. Say a president declared a national emergency, saying we can't have another fascist regime take over, so they start taking away everyone's guns, and they ban "misinformation and fake news" (meaning anything that doesn't support their dogma). Then they declare a climate emergency and start going wholesale destruction on the fossil fuel sector -- say they ban coal and natural gas nationwide. Can you legitimately tell me for certain that Democrats would rise up and impeach their leader? Again, I'd like to hope. But in today's day and age, I can't say that for certain.

But up until then Twitter was a great place for independent journalism without corporate propaganda

Hardly. It was just a different brand of censorship. Shadow banning was rampant, particularly on politically sensitive issues like COVID or the Biden laptop. The whole reason Musk bought it in the first place was in response to the fact it was a carefully groomed left-leaning stovepipe. In fact, I remember the common quip from the left when the right would complain about Twitter censorship was "then why don't you start your own social media platform? we don't have to give you a megaphone"

They will get impeached.

That's not a guarantee. The only historical precedent we have (Clinton) only had 5 Democrats vote in favor of impeachment even when he very clearly perjured himself. Now to be fair, that's a far lesser offense than what we're seeing now. But in today's hyperpartisan times, I legit don't know what Democrats would do if put in a similar situation. They sure as hell defended Hillary to death with the email server, even though that was roughly on par with Signalgate.

Human mucking about with nature has a bad track record, and many creatures depend on mosquitoes for food. It would be a terrible idea to mess with ecosystems on that level.

Disagree: https://cr.usembassy.gov/secti...