Conspiracy theories generally only work when they are vague enough about who did it, how they did it, and exactly why they did it. Mysterious groups, such as the MIC, the CIA, people with monetary interests and so on are a lot more ominous than Bob Boberson, CFO, who is putting out contracts on whistleblowers via a network of international assassins that he became a part of while auditing financial statements for U.S. GAAP compliance.

I have no particular love for Donald Trump (or Barack Obama, for that matter), but it's hardly an apples-to-apples comparison when you account for base effects. Obama's presidency began near the bottom of the Global Financial Crisis. Trump's presidency began during a period of general prosperity and ended during a global pandemic. One can argue, of course, that Obama caused the prosperity that Trump stepped into, and that Trump exacerbated the effects of the pandemic, but Obama certainly did not cause the GFC that gave him a good starting point.

By the same logic, if Trump died of COVID in April 2020 and Pence became president and followed Trump's policies to the letter, he would have been the greatest job creator in American history.

Unemployment rate and start of presidency (Obama - red, Trump - green, Biden - purple): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/gr...

Alabama is the second largest GDP contributor, has the second largest population and has the highest GDP per capita among non-city states? Persuasive.

You don’t know that Tesla’s can’t complete the Nuremberg Ring without overheating, do you?

Man, I sure got a lot of practice answering those kind of questions in RPGs.

You defeat the orcs and storm the outpost. All the fighters are all dead. At the far end, you see only a group of orc children. What do you do?

1. I leave them be, because slaughtering children is wrong.
2. I slaughter them, because their alignment is evil and letting evil get stronger is wrong.
3. I leave them be, because they are not part of my contract and I could earn more by killing them once they grow up and become a problem.
4. I toss a coin and let fate decide.

Just get over it already. “They” is perfectly acceptable as a singular when gender is unclear. Nobody uses “it” for that purpose and the other much less elegant alternative is alternating between “he” and “she” between sentences. If autism just won’t let you go, think of it as a different “they” from the plural “they”, just as the “banks” where you keep your savings at are different from the “banks” of the Mississippi River.

You are very safe as a pedestrian, but that’s mostly because the speed limits are lower than in the U.S. and Europe. You should have a look at how many people watch TV while driving though. Also I don’t know where it was that people stopped at a zebra. I lived in Japan for years and I can’t remember a single time someone stopped to let me pass on a zebra crossing, even though it is explicitly taught at driving schools. Not even going to get into little things like stopping your car and turning on the emergency lights because you need somewhere to park.

The expats are all discussing it and hopefully this is something that will rub off on the regulators. It would not be the first time.

Damnit, you got me!

You actually can’t tell in Japanese who was doing the stealing from whom. For all we know, this asshole could have been annoyed that they “stole” something from some other fandom. Not trying to virtue signal or anything like that, but it is kind of fucked to speculate that a guy who just murdered 33 people may be some kind of partial victim because of the unsubstantiated nonsense he was shouting. KyoAni was actually one of the better studios in terms of how they treated their employees.

You must not have lived in Japan. I love that country, but it was also the only place where I was accidentally locked in an office and had to look for someone who knew someone else who knew where the exit was. It’s a super safe country, but fire regulations and following traffic rules is really not its forte.

Nobody actually knows what exactly he was claiming. He is alleged to have been repeating “they stole it”, but that was after he was already in a state when they had to rush him to the hospital. Some discussion on Japanese boards linked him to some kind of railroad collecting group and claimed that he was allegedly upset that they stole some phrase from someone or something like that. The only places I have seen discussion of work relations was on Kotaku where people were blatantly speculating that he may have been a disgruntled employee. Japanese news sources state that he had no known relationship with the company though.

tl;dr: Nobody knows anything and all this stuff about someone being ripped off is pure speculation based on context-free words of an injured lunatic who is now in a medically-induced coma.

His team is a bunch of clowns. Let’s first touch on the obvious matter of him thinking that UBI is better than the system we have now. Here is the consensus of the leading economists on the matter: http://www.igmchicago.org/surv...

Furthermore, enjoy more taxes on the middle class. The lower your income, the more of it is consumed and the less saved. Since it distributes money equally among individuals, some of the lower income families will be taxed more on consumption, but also receive more in UBI subsidies. The x% on the top are largely unaffected by this, because they don’t consume nearly as much relative to their income anyway and from here on would be incentivized to make more expensive purchases abroad. This leaves some poor sods in the middle class paying for the working class, which is now being incentivized to work less.

This is such a laughable idea based entirely on the idea that “this time everything will be different” and robots will take away most of our jobs. Great story, it’s not like we’ve been hearing it since the industrial revolution.

That’s utter nonsense: https://digiconomist.net/renew...

This article was written when bitcoin was close to $20k and at that point it already used half as much energy as the entirety of the global banking sector. If it ever hits $40k, arbitrage will lead to it using as much energy as the banking sector, while offering none of its services. It’s loan services for Microsoft, your mortgage, your pension accounts, your credit card, anti-money laundering, etc etc, whereas all bitcoin does is move “money” back and forth. What’s more, these banking services will become more efficient as time progresses, especially once ATMs begin phasing out in favor of digital payments, whereas the success of bitcoin would make it LESS efficient.

This is such a pants on the head thing to so. At least you could go with the Lightning Network excuse, that may or may not work due to the routing problem.

“Humanities” in high school are probably more useful than physics to most people. Not knowing enough history will make you look like an idiot, so would not being able to spell well because you didn’t write enough essays for English. Geography at higher levels is often akin to industrial organization courses, which is probably as close as you’ll get to “how do our supply chains work”. If you go into any kind of business role, this is vastly more useful to you than knowing how friction works. It also teaches you what other people do.

Second and third language I think most Americans can really do just fine without; it’s kind of useful for Europeans who need English to work internationally, but learning French in Alabama for hours and hours to just completely forget all about it three years after graduation is a waste of time. I have learnt a good number of other languages after high school that I use on a daily basis, but French is just completely gone because it turned out that I simply didn’t need that one.