Stop huffing trumps farts. If you want to know what bad policy looks like, it's the current administration. It's objectively awful. Project 2025 was awful before the election, and it still is awful, and it's what trump is doing. Runaway inflation? You mean like what we have now? And war? You're a fucking dipshit to even attempt to bring any of this up as if somehow Democrats are bad. What is happening how is the "this is fine" meme come to life, and you're the dog in that picture.

Why do you think I support anything this administration is doing? Why do you even assume I'm a Republican? I can assure you what Trump is doing is absolutely worse than what Biden did. I can also assure you that you didn't lose because your candidate had a vagina. Believe it or not, both can be true.

They lost their fucking minds because Democrats put up a woman to vote for (twice), and apparently America is very misogynistic.

Ah yes, this old chestnut. Any excuse to not accept any bad policy responsibility. That election result was stupid obvious. Biden was an unpopular president due to a number of bad policies (the most glaringly obvious being a failed border policy) + runaway inflation. Republicans jumped on it and Harris did nothing to distance herself from Biden, even when asked point blank what her policy differences were. Stop kidding yourself -- gender didn't matter at all, and you continue to keep thinking in these terms, you're going to lose again when you run another shitty candidate "of the correct gender" and wonder why you lost again.

Have you even seen the original series? Racism, bigotry, classism, human rights, ethics, not to mention nationalism, were all dealt with. TNG went further, particularly with Riker's penchant for rather open sexual interests, and of course DS9 dealt with everything from war crimes to the undermining of civil society. Voyager and Enterprise in their turn covered similar issues, though perhaps not always as ably as the first three series did.

I've never seen TOS, but I've seen all the rest. And in the end, it's an issue of subtlety and focus (which all comes down to writing). It's something the modern day PC/woke generation seems to woefully not understand (or just not care about...there's writers on record out there as going out of their way to put these issues centerstage, which wasn't the original Star Trek focus, which was telling a good story while sprinkling in progressivism). The perfect analogue of this is the "do better" speech from the Captain America TV show, where he basically rants at the audience -- that kind of thing didn't exist in 90s star trek. Like I've seen people try to compare the fact a biracial kiss exists in less than a minute of an hour long episode that had nothing to do with race be comparable to full modern day episodes that sledge you over the head with messaging for like 70% of the episode. And there's really no comparison. Modern day Star Trek writing has become so obvious, it's drifted into somewhere between "cringe" and "annoying". It'd be like if a liberal could actually read Atlas Shrugged (which is actually a great book) without getting an "ick" factor from Rand's political soapboxing (particularly in the final chapter). I don't blame them if they can't -- Rand only knows how to sledgehammer.

Your argument all rests on absolute average wages ($7 vs $30) and ignores that the overall purchasing power for Americans hasn't increased for decades (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/).

You'll note that all the articles making this claim come from 2018. Things have changed alot since then: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se...

Wage inflation is also currently still outpacing nominal inflation, and has been since mid 2023: https://usafacts.org/answers/a...

I had VERY SPECIFIC requirements and I wanted the extended warranty. I would have paid 2x at a dealer. I know what I was doing.

I bought a used 2020 XC90 from CarMax last week. I did everything online from shipping it from Texas to Minnesota to financing the extended warranty. I walked in the door, gave them a cashier's check, and drove away within 10 minutes.

That's how it should be.

the screenwriters really tone down his campy dialog and cut out the slow parts perfectly.

Toned down? If anything, they added camp. Like turning Rocky into some kind of overly excited dog. And the ludicrously long and stupid posing scene in the airlock? Was that even in the book? A lot of the science in the book got chopped out as well. The movie felt dumbed down. I preferred the book.

This is an incredibly superficial view of graphical fidelity. Most games do not just push for realism in the sense that it looks just like real life. Instead they pursue artistic realism

I'd be careful throwing the word "most" around there, because personally I think it's highly genre dependent. In a horror game, I'd likely agree with you, particularly in regard to something like lighting. But in something like an FPS, I guarantee realism is likely higher on their list. The "can it run Crysis?" meme didn't come from nowhere...that whole genre was all-in on pushing the edge of photorealism while maintaining frames per second.

WW2 was already won by the time the USA officially joined in.

What? WW2 started in September 1939 and ended in September 1945. The US was already assisting the Allies with cash and carry purchases as early as November 1939 and joined the war December of 1941. For a war that was "already won", why did it last 4 more years? Also, this timelapse doesn't show the Allies making any real counter-gains until mid-November 1942 in North Africa. Most importantly, the reason history says the US was critical to the war effort is because they not only opened up a second front with Japan (If that wasn't present, Germany and Japan together could have taken Russia), but also supplied critical materiel for the war effort via the Lend-Lease Act. The US spent about as much as all the other allies combined, paying for nearly half the war.

You're deluded if you don't think the US had a critical role in ending that war.

Just modify the AI generated content slightly in some way and you can claim full copyright. It's that simple. You have rights. The AI does not.

Funny thing is Claude is pretty much the only AI I regularily use for coding, because unlike the other models it produces acceptable results which after review and fixes actually can be used!

The only one of your responses that applies specifically to blue states, is "Ideological and political reasons." The other hinderances apply equally to red states. So what is it about blue-state ideology and politics, that hinders expansion of green energy? They *say* they want it and that it's important, so why is it not happening? Texas, by contrast, has a governor who is openly against green energy. And yet, Texas has *3x* more wind power than *any* other state, and is #1 in solar and soon, #1 in battery storage. What gives?

I mean it's not rocket science...it's not politics. Red states have the most wind. And the most sun.

https://www.google.com/search?...

https://www.google.com/search?...

It's almost as if there's an invisible hand at work...

https://archive.is/uyPhk

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Anthropic is prepared to loosen its current terms of use, but wants to ensure its tools aren't used to spy on Americans en masse, or to develop weapons that fire with no human involvement.

The Pentagon claims that's unduly restrictive, and that there are all sorts of gray areas that would make it unworkable to operate on such terms. Pentagon officials are insisting in negotiations with Anthropic and three other big AI labs â" OpenAI, Google and xAI â" that the military be able to use their tools for "all lawful purposes."

https://livingwage.mit.edu/met...

Typical annual salary, according to MIT's Living Wage Calculator for the NYC Metro, is $84,860.

Poverty wage is $7.52/hr (no kids) and minimum wage is $15.50 which, according to the calculator, should cover 1 adult with 3 kids.

The Brearley School, regarded as the best private school for girls in the nation and charging around $70K, is a non-profit.

What shareholders?