Yes and no...

What are you using for the streaming services? Netflix etc? A web browser?

If so, that's a complete non-starter; it fails the ease of use expectations of watching TV of the wife using a remote control to turn it on and make it go. (and honestly it fails my own expectations for that matter too; having to reach for a keyboard or mouse to watch a movie or stream a show is just clunky). It also limits you from watching content in 4k.

At the moment, I've got a RokuHD of some sort on one TV, and an nvidia shield on another one. Plex, netflix, f1tv, and a couple other things on both of them. The TV remote can fairly seamlessly control the TV/soundbar and the attached box and it works well, and passes the usability test, but both devices are still more ad-laden than I want.

I've also got computers and consoles hooked up to TVs for gaming and what not, but i find them utterly miserable to use for streaming. Their is no app for linux that I'm aware of. And even the app for Windows is regularly just complete ass to use, and its a PITA to switch from plex to netflix and back etc, and using them with a remote control is pretty trashy. So I've been using the aforementioned boxes for streaming as the least awful way to run things for some years now.

But if there's a better way now, I'm listening.

No. They are balanced in equal proportion. The fundamental property in question is that which caused the morons to clump in the Unites States. The rest of the world got a much higher proportion of anti-morons as a result.

So the Vietnam War wasn't a war? The Vietnam War Memorial just to the northeast of the Lincoln Memorial is misnamed? 55,000 US military personnel died for a not-war?

The Korean War wasn't a war? The Korean War Memorial just to the southeast of the Lincoln Memorial that the Embassy of the Republic of South Korea puts a wreath at every week since it opened is misnamed?

The Iraq War and War in Afghanistan weren't wars that lasted for 20 years? Pretty sure any of the tens of thousands of US military personnel that were involved in those wars and were shot at would probably disagree. Especially the ones that shot other people and are living with that psychological trauma and PTSD.

Formal declarations of war don't happen any more. You are arguing in bad faith on a ridiculous technicality that hasn't been the case in literally 70 years. US Marines are on the way as we speak, and we're spending billions of dollars per day on munitions and wartime operations for "warfighters" (as this dipshit SecDef... sorry "Secretary of War" likes to call them) to drop those munitions.

The fucking President even calls it a war.

Time to shut the fuck up on this nonsense talking point.

I was against them.

But please go on standing up straw men to knock the hell out of.

I'm not the hypocrite chickenhawk warmonger here.

This sentence alone shows you have no understanding of nuance, and have no understanding of what I'm saying. You are an ignorant rube that cannot logically defend anything happening here, yet you continue trying.

Go back to wearing your MAGA hat and trying to justify anything the cult leader says, no matter if it's contradicting something he said mere minutes before in the same event.

THAT is who you are defending here. And his stupidity is drowning you.

You have a lot of blind faith in 53 Senators to not be self-interested cowards who go along to get along.

You have a lot of blind faith in 218 House members to not be come-to-do-good stay-to-do-well self-enriching hypocrites.

We know that's who these people are, because they're not even interested in holding this administration to account for violating laws that THEY WROTE AND PASSED, AND THIS PRESIDENT SIGNED. See: the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

The system isn't working as intended, because we have 273 bad faith actors at the levers of power in the system. These people are not interested in what's legal, or even what is "right" - they are interested in keeping their jobs and fundraising, not causing a famously vindictive asshole who holds the entire conservative political apparatus in complete control to focus his ire on them.

This isn't governance. It's mass cowardice. And you're trying to put a high-luster shine on that giant pile of shit while telling me that's the way it's supposed to be.

Let me ask you this: if you saw this shit coming from Biden and Democrats, would you be just as zen about it? I think we all know the answer.

I sure as shit wouldn't be, just like I'm not right now. Wake up and stop being an apologist for a regime that routinely breaks the highest laws our government has when it suits them.

So you're a hypocrite in addition to a chickenhawk warmonger. Good to know.

Oh, I complain about those things too, because they are similarly illegal. This is a rogue administration who routinely breaks statutory law, as well as Constitutional law when it suits them. We can agree on that.

I don't know why you can't agree that the Constitution gives Congress war powers to delegate as they choose, as well as the statutory law requirements on the books that Congress put in place after the violations of the Nixon Administration to secretly and illegally bomb Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War - the President can take defensive military action against imminent threats without Congress, but they still have to inform and get post-facto consent.

Where are the congressional hearings? Where are the cabinet members briefing the appropriate committees?

Why aren't you complaining about that, if you care about this lawless administration being lawless? Oh, because you're too busy trying to justify illegal acts because you like them.

You are a hypocrite. QED.

I love how he can openly threaten actual war crimes and nobody even takes notice.

How do you know?

They aren't publicly disclosing the "plan" - they're just saying there is one.

Iran is saying they aren't even talking, and they aren't interested in talking.

For all you know, the 15 points could be completely orthogonal to anything that has been publicly discussed.

Stop making assumptions and arguing them as fact. You have no fucking idea what the hell is in it, because nobody else does either. You can't even say with any kind of certainty that such a plan exists, but I can say with certainty than any multi-point condition for a ceasefire is not "unconditional surrender" as previously stated, so you're already fucked on that.

You done arguing with absolute bullshit yet, anonymous douchebag?

The problem there, is that the whole "are you better off than 4 years ago" question was mutated and destroyed last cycle.

Literally everyone was better off in November 2024 than they were in November 2020, and yet we got what we got.

Arguments of good faith always fail against arguments of bad faith, when the arguments of bad faith are not called out for being bad faith arguments.

You and I are in the same ballpark. I'm an Oregonian "moderate" who cherishes Oregon's long history of sending old-school Republicans that had no problem bucking the party-over-people trend and working with Democrats (Wayne Morse, Mark Hatfield) - because in this state you have to if you want to get anything done.

Republicans have gone absolutely batshit crazy, so anyone that self-identifies there is off my list of who I can vote for. While that party is in total thrall of Trump and spewing his obvious bullshit as party plank, it's a total write-off.

Hard left Democrats are just as off-the-table for me, due to the same reasoning. I'm not interested in purity tests of any kind, left or right. If you want my vote, come meet me where I am and convince me. And if you're saying shit that's crazy, you better come with enough evidence and facts to convince me or I'm showing you the door.

I thought we did that 6 months ago when we "obliterated" their nuclear program?

Are you saying Trump lied? And why would this bombing campaign work out any different? Because of larger scale?

They still have the uranium hexaflouride gas because they moved it before the previous bombing that "obliterated" their physical plant. It's still at whatever level it was enriched to. And they still know how to enrich it further. You cannot bomb knowledge.

They still know how to make long range missiles. You cannot bomb knowledge.

When are you going to wake up and realize that everything you've been told about this war is excuse making and lies?

The fact that you are pointing to this as that particular watershed moment just shows that people are not paying enough attention. We've had many of these moments already, where this administration continues to show their incredibly bad judgement, and that their values do not align with the vast majority of the country, much less humanity.

I'll leave this horseshit as a previous example - we taxpayers are paying dipshits in the White House to make "sick video memes" glorifying war footage of people being killed, mixed with video game characters, Hollywood characters, and professional sports clips as some kind of public campaign to increase support.

War is not fucking entertainment. Watching people die in an illegal war is not "awesome." It's ghoulish, and the people who thought (and continue to think) that this is a good idea should be given an involuntary opportunity to go write their memoirs.

Because when the billionaires control how people communicate, they can control communication.

face-to-face meetings are uncontrollable.