Yup I remember when i adopted my first dog from the local humane society and they chip every animal that comes through but during the adoption they explained the chip doesn't actually do anything until you pay the database company a yearly(!) fee. I ended up never doing it because that felt like the most scummy thing on earth. Maybe that's just my state but it was an unreal moment and really dashed my ideas of how these things work.

It's very American that we take an idea that rally is a universal public good and declare "there's profit to be made" and effectively ruin it.

I get paying for the chip, it's a piece of hardware but the database should be maintained by your state with free access. It just doesn't make any sense otherwise.

Oh the time where Biden tried to do a thing, the SC said to stop and then he stopped and even when he tried a different way and the courts ruled against it then he respected the court (and said as such) and then stopped it.

Also unlike the tariffs the SC actually stayed the plan until judgement unlike the tariffs where the SC allowed them to just go on. Hmmm, almost like this current court leans a certain way. Hmmm.

Now, I want to be very clear — (applause) — very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology. I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans.

Ohhhhh so divisive you big fat baby.

Ahh yes those BLM of protests of 2021 who could forget.

Motherfucker who was President in the year 2020?!?!

Sorry but it's 2026 and this just means embarrassed conservative.

Biden constantly reached out to conservatives, he made sure to say that it was "not all Republicans", he worked in a bipartisan manner on legislation on the infrastructure bill, he was ready to sign the very conservative Lankford immigration bill. He appointed a very moderate AG who didn't immediately bring the hammer down on Trump (his fatal mistake IMO) and even with the very obviously illegal Mar-A-Lago documents case the National Archives gave Trump over an entire fucking year to just give the shit back and Trump basically forced their hand to go raid to get it.

Sorry but the Biden era was extending a hand of good faith to Republicans to come back from the brink of psychopathy and all they did was slap it and digress into their worst impulses even more.

No more, Republicans want to act like children then they need to be disciplined like children.

Oh they won't give it up willingly and they have every incentive to keep acting authoritarian with Trump-ian rhetoric and actions. That incentive needs to be broken and punishment is exactly what's needed to do that. If Republicans suddenly know that acting like amoral sociopaths will net them prison or political exile than we've created a deterrent.

I mean, DOGE? Also they didn't need to do it, they were able to leverage the existing agencies by gutting them and replacing the leadership with loyalists. The FCC is a perfect example, the current commissioner is threatening entertainers and license holders while wearing Trump lapel pins. The concept of independent agencies is out the windows.

This was all in Project 2025 and our media also failed by letting Trump just lie about it during the campaign when it was clearly transparent he supported the measures in there.

Just like the tariffs they admin does unlawful thing, probably knows it's unlawful and is able to just do it anyway and reap the political benefits (here they were able to smear Anthropic's reputation in the public sphere) and the only consequences they face is "hey, knock it off". The admin got to do their tariffs for over a year even though we all knew it was illegal. No consequences thus far.

God-willing when the new non-GOP admin comes back into power the newly appointed AG will be prosecutor (like Jack Smith) who will investigate and start punishing these people and follow through.

We had a President who tried to unite the nation, put the past behind us, not antagonize the opposition party and his name was Joe Biden. That approach of being the better people, taking the high road obviously did not work so the nice guy approach has to stop. Some people need to go to prison and every member of this cabinet should be barred form holding any future public office.

When the original LOTR films were announced people were extremely skeptical and I mean for good reason, up until then Jackson was known as a horror-comedy-schlock director with one compelling drama movie under his belt. Sounds like a recipe for disaster no?

Very few film scripts make it from a typewriter to the screen without involvement for other people no matter what the credits say. Star Wars 1977 has one credited writer and we all know the story of how much help Lucas had when it came time to actually make the movie.

The thing I will give Colbert is writing comedy for 3 decades gives a good sense of pacing and timing and the importance of characters and he is passionate about the source material and shows an understanding that it's not just elves and magic.

This is on better footing already than the TV show I would say which I could tell from the outset was doomed just from the fact the showrunners were inexperienced all around.

I feel like fitness has been enshittified for decades, OG enshittification. My whole life fitness as a "business" has been rife with scams and pseudo-science, be it sketchy pills or late night infomercials for instant-trash machines.

Gyms are the original scammy subscription service. The supplements industry is effectively an unregulated racket out to profit maximally off false promises. Any forum or congreation of "fitness people" devolves into a hellscape of opinions where noone is ever correct. The whole sector kinda stinks.

Agree totally, the state can focus research on the foundations of long term important technology and reap the payback over the future from the economic productivity generated from the nations leadership in the industry. This can ensure no single company owns foundational patents, allowing a competitive industry to come up and one you can grow in your own nation since you, the public, all of us are at the core of it.

For some reason a lot of people fight this idea but at the same thing acknowledge the reality of what happened with technology in WWII and the Cold War and what that helped lead to in the decades after but the "war" aspect of that not the major factor, it's that during war we were willing to make huge investments. Manhattan Project obvious example but also things like the Heavy Press Program.

Brave of you to out yourself as an eager dupee so freely.

Truth, the Libertarian/Conservative tent pole issue that taxes are evil has been a con the whole time. Generations duped and now those very private business interested that we just had to spare from the devil of taxation and debt support activities and an administration more ager to strip rights than any so called liberals ever dared.

These people will only have themselves to blame when President AOC starts garnishing their assets.

Agriculture and food is highly regulated and subsidized in the United States and most countries. Yes my contention is left to be a "free market" food would be something of a disaster.

Or what I'm really saying whatever competitive market for food we live in today is maintained by subsidy and regulation. State intervention is a necessary part of capitalism.

Publicly traded companies constitute less than 1 percent of all U.S. firms and about one-third of U.S. employment in the non-farm business sector.

This is true but also if we are going to use market principles here we have to accept that there is a form of market failure in labor that has to be accounted for in that people have to work.

Unless you qualify for disability or SS you need a job to survive or its out on the street. A key aspect of a competitive market is the ability for the buyer to walk away from a purchase, not simply to have an alternative. With labor very few people have the option to not work so the power balance is in favor of employers. Two sellers competing for a buyer who is forced to buy from one of them is ripe for perverse incentives and collusion.

This is not realistic for a number of reasons. Those companies will need workers also.

I agree but this is very much related to the second point

This is American's refusing to take responsibility because, ironically, they keep voting for the self-proclaimed "party of personal responsibility" because to American's that means eschewing any sense of social responsibility. One party gives a permission structure to ignore the issue because that is the "personal responsibility" they sell, only to yourself and nobody else.

Actual personal responsibility would be voting for the party who accepts the problem is real and the acceptance of an adult that the solutions may involve some small sacrifice from yourself. Conservative Americans aren't even capable of taking the personal responsibility that they may have been mislead and were wrong about the issue.

Science fiction is a big umbrella category and it itself is inside the fantasy genre depending on how we wanna slice it.

It takes place in space in a future or alternate Earth, that's enough. Sub genre it's probably a space western, thus my comparison to Cowboy Bebop which is also scifi but with minimal tech, it's just a space setting for character stories.

The fact it takes place in space and different planets means production costs will generally be higher just due to the various stories they can tell within such a large world, animation means they can put the characters in a new exotic location without building entire sets, costumes, props, etc.

Firefly is science fiction but it's just not as hard as say The Expanse