Fire them all. Replace with Robots. If Starbucks just sells coffee, I might return as a customer.

(Although not sure why I'd abandon the coffee shops that I've meanwhile patronized who never did get distracted from, you know, serving coffee....)

The moment Starbucks employees said "we stand with Hamas" as far as I'm concerned I hope they all have the opportunity to immediately move to Gaza and start helping with the rebuilding of terror-tunnels, rocket factories, and hostage-cells. I problems with things Israel does, says, and stands for (like I do pretty nearly any country) but Hamas is purely a violent terror organization, uninterested in ACTUALLY helping the people of Gaza have better lives.

If Starbucks employees 'stand with' them, then they can stand in the street unemployed and I'll cheer.

I know this is very non-internet-2026 but let's try to look at this with a teensy bit of nuance?

A company can be
a) against its servers unionizing,
AND
b) deeply liberal politically

This is not mindblowing IRL. It is normal.

I know one political side in the US today is very, very 'purist' in its dogma: "if you do not agree entirely with every jot and tittle of every single radical position, you must be an alt-right-fascist"...you know the old thing we all made fun of Bush Jr's simplistic "with us or against us" nonsense? That.

In REAL life, people have all sorts of reasons to believe what they believe, and not everything (!) is informed/guided by politics.

2003 Europe "We don't want to depend on US GPS systems!"
2006: EU mints Galileo collectible coin! (/snort)
(2 decades follow)
Dec 2026: 26 of 30 operational satellites.

So we should expect this new SATCOM program to be operational by...2049... maybe?
Hey, at least we'll probably have a collectible coin for it minted by 2030!

...that TV companies chase down stupid rabbit holes like 8k, 3d tv, UltraSuperMegaHDR, smellovision, or whatever.

Because that almost inevitably pushes the prices for all NORMAL TVs down. I don't know of any industry that's seen as steady price decline as video ?

I know -philes will insist that they can't *bear* to watch anything less than 16k on a 120" screen from the 3 foot distance you'd need to sit at to see the difference, but IRL 99% of consumers truly don't give a shit.
I'm not a luddite: I think there's a legitimate need for 4k / 2160p as screens get bigger (not that most people even need their giganto-screens in a little 12' x 12' room - a 65" screen @ 8' corresponds to the 30-35deg viewing angle around the middle of a small movie theater). And OLED absolutely was a step up in color quality and precision, objectively.

But, yes, Samsung, LG, TCL, Hisense, Sony: please chase all of the silly techs and whatever more you believe you can convince the public they need. Hell, give 3d another swing this year, maybe? In the meanwhile, I'll cheerfully watch as even good quality 65" TVs drop past $500.

Their argument boils down to "well if it's a synthetic actor, we represent them too, so we are entitled to $".

No, no you aren't.

By that logic, if I draw a stick figure, I "owe" someone some $. If I sell it, I owe them some of that.
To be fair, congress has already laid the ground for this, with the idea that if I draw a big stick figure sexing a little stick figure, that (to some in Congress) is borderline kiddy porn.

I'd wager 3/4 millennials and 90% genz couldn't tell you whether the Cuban crisis was before or after WW2, so I'd consider your question moot.

Did they finally actually approve it? AFAIK the sale was approved (which was CRAZY dumb) but since then the UK has come to their senses and basically used local-city-council nonsense to stall any approvals needed. Or?

An objective early warning network? I'd fully agree.

Paying the lion's share to "trust an early warning network that has shown it is entirely subject to control by a clearly inimical power" is indeed one of those 'more stupid things'.

They spent the covid years literally covering for China, parroting and promoting their theories and actively shilling propaganda.
(Along with the Biden admin, but I would concede that the US gov't was complicit in the game to cover their own investment in gain-of-function research, not specifically to help China.)

Did NASA accept o ring leakage?
My understanding was that the o ring performance (failure) surprised engineers, and was determined to be a result of the exceptional (cold) launch conditions.... Or?

To be clear, the fact the o rings even existed was a result of congressional pork barrelling in the first place. The booster construction was originally designed to be one piece but by contracting it to some favored inland congressional district, it needed to be in 2 parts to fit rail transport.

Has this happened?
No?
Are you imagining something just for the sake of arguing against it?
Yes.
That is a strawman.

The WHO showed its value (or lack thereof) kowtowing HARD to Xi and China during the COVID outbreak, cheerfully parroting whatever narrative China wanted to promulgate.

This is even more ironic in the light that the US pays a grossly disproportional share of WHOs budget both in assessed and "voluntary" contributions - MULTIPLES of what China pays.

Sure, I think there should be a world health organization, but why should the US pay the lion's share?
It's funny how at the end of the day, all these organizations ... the US seems to paying the bulk of the tab.

https://www.statista.com/stati...

Historical note: it made PERFECT sense that the US was the overwhelmingly dominant funder of all these sorts of organizations in 1946. Even in 1960, the rest of the world was still rebuilding while we enjoyed the massive economic advantage left us after WW2.
If you noticed: it's NOT "just after WW2" any more.
The US borrows 20-25% of every year's budget against the future, meaning every dollar we pay WHO, every dollar we use to fund the UN, 20-25% is being paid by a loan against future economic performance. That's asinine and needs to change, full stop.

I don't LIKE how Trump has done the things he's done but at the core, in many ways he's not wrong.

Personally, I think the fact that BILL GATES pays 50% more than EUROPE should be humiliating for that particular putative "world power". (To be clear, Germany - separately I believe - pays almost as much as "Europe", lol).

"Anyone describing me in a way that is entirely accurate but makes me sad" I will declare it an epithet and them stupid-heads for making me uncomfortable.

Is that about right, Corky Sherwood? Going to go home and bite your pillow in rage?

Bullshit x 1000.
If I see a painting in a book or a museum, and think, "cool, I could do my own take on that" the artist doesn't get one red cent.

"But" you say, "The museum or the book paid the author for that art".
They likely did.

But whether one argues that
a) the creator was already fully paid already and they get nothing more for later views, or
b) that their payment is backward-rationalized across all the potential viewers in the future (meaning what they're paid per-view asymptotically approaches zero ANYWAY), or
c) that - by posting their creation online where a LLM can get to it - they're VOLUNTARILY conceding free access to their work by human or electronic eyeballs, the distinction in this case being irrelevant ...at the end of the day, no, the author is NOT getting (in a real sense) anything (more) from me taking a look. Which ends up just like an LLM parsing it.

Oh no!
Some AC doesn't like meh posts!

Please someone get me some smelling salts, I think I'm getting the VAPORS.

What's wrong with using a perfectly descriptive and - aside from the people pretending they suddenly don't know what it means - widely understood label that accurately describes the worldview of ones' opponents, to describe those opponents?

If I say "Starfleet Academy is loaded with woke bullshit" that literally, accurately, and precisely describes all the hilariously bad directorial, narrative, casting/character design, and dialogue choices that make it hilariously awful.

If you were to use 'libertarian white male' as an epithet, to you that may be an epithet, to me I'm fine with that description even if it's factually inaccurate to some degree.

It's an adjective/adverb. Feels like it's the accuracy you're complaining about, not the epithet. That or your marshmallow emotional sensitivity.