You shouldn’t underestimate people’s tendency to just do what they’re told and not rock the boat. Network head likes Trump interviews because it generates views, which attracts advertisers. Trump is a petulant child and will refuse to do interviews with any network that points out he has the mental capacity of a child. So the network head mandates that nobody is allowed to question Trumps mental state for fear of him refusing future interviews. Since their boss said so, the network talking heads just go along with it.

As for the politicians, they can’t recalibrate to the reality that is Trump. They’re used to playing political chess with their equals and along comes the pigeon known as Trump to walk all over the board knocking pieces over and shitting everywhere. They literally have no playbook to deal with him. Normally this would be where the “referee” steps in which depending on context would be a debate moderator, the Supreme Court, or Congress, but the debate moderators won’t touch him because of the previously mentioned reasons, the Supreme Court has been stuffed with puppets that have a vested interest in protecting him, and Congress is so deadlocked and dysfunctional they can’t even pass legislation with bipartisan support nevermind impeaching him.

Trump is the perfect storm of everything the US political system was never designed to counter. Every single check that was supposed to prevent this sort of thing has either been subverted or just plain failed because the supposition it was built on was faulty. He has highlighted that far too much of the US political apparatus has functioned purely by convention and concepts of fair play and as soon as someone came along that didn’t give a shit about any of that it all crumbled.

Because his supporters don’t care if he’s a gibbering idiot as long as he tells them their particular deplorable -ism is perfectly valid and fine. He gets the racist votes because he tells them that they’re right and all the non-white people are inferior and out to get them. He gets the Christian votes because he tells them that the US has, is, and always will be a Christian nation that should be run by their particular flavor of Christianity and btw all the non-Christians are out to get them. He gets the homophobe and transphobe votes because he tells them yes, LGBTQ+ is a choice, they’re all perverts, and they’re all out to get them and their children.

Basically he tells everyone that’s on the wrong side of history who have been told that they are terrible people for decades that they are in fact not terrible people, that they’ve been right all along, and that it’s all a conspiracy by liberals/democrats/minorities/homosexuals/satanists/whoever to get them, and they eat that shit up. As long as he keeps spouting support for their particular prejudices he’ll keep getting their votes, because they rather elect a gibbering moron who validates them than someone sane and competent that tells them their prejudice is wrong.

He never had it.

Been using a ZSA Voyager as a travel keyboard for work and very satisfied with it. Used a Sofle V2 prior to that but I was concerned about how well it was (or rather wasn’t) holding up to the rigors of travel so I replaced it with something designed for travel and a little more robustly constructed.

I use a Workman layout and a few years ago switched to using homerow mods so I found the modifier keys on the Sofle to be redundant so I decided to downscale to something a little more compact. Because my usage is for work the number keys get used heavily so I wasn’t willing to give those up by going to something like a Corne. On the flip side I wouldn’t use the Voyager for gaming due to those same missing modifier keys since keys like shift and ctrl are used in a non-modifier pattern when gaming.

“If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running,” Biden said at a fundraising event for his 2024 campaign outside of Boston. “We cannot let him win.”

The irony of this is breathtaking. If Biden wasn’t running there’d be much less of a chance of Trump winning. I really wonder what would happen at this point if Biden dropped dead of a heart attack tomorrow. I find it hard to believe anyone else could possibly be doing worse than him. Harris might do just as badly because of guilt by association, but at least she wouldn’t do any worse.

If there’s any justice in the world both Biden and Trump will kick the bucket before the next election, and we’ll actually get a couple candidates that aren’t a few decades past the average life expectancy for once. Maybe get a fresh faced 50 year old for a change. God forbid we get a candidate that we don’t seriously have to worry about if they need a diaper change for once.

The problem is police aren’t treated like civilians.

I still don’t understand how she hasn’t been removed from the bench for her blatant bias and incompetence.

Company should be banned. Nobody should do business with them anymore.

I’m trying to decide if this would be a net positive or negative.

Looking at the congressional districts for Oregon and Idaho it looks like about 5 or 6 districts that are all Republican controlled. Currently Idaho has two congressional districts that both lean heavily Republican. Shifting 5 or 6 Republican congressional seats from Oregon to Idaho I don’t see making a significant difference to Congress.

Looking at things in the Senate both Idaho senators are Republican and adding more Republican districts won’t really change that in any meaningful way. On the flip side both of Oregon’s Senators are currently Democrats and I can’t imagine removing a bunch of Republican voters from the state would do anything but reduce the chances of one of those Senate seats getting flipped.

I’m not really seeing any way in which this would help Republicans or hurt Democrats other than just by generally strengthening each party’s hold on its respective state.

So the crux of it is the definition of wet. A couple definitions: “covered or soaked with a liquid such as water” or “Not yet dry or firm”. While you could maybe argue water is “not yet dry”, that also implies the expectation that it will at some point be which it won’t, because if it’s “dry” it’s not water anymore. Similarly water is not “covered or soaked in a liquid” as it is a liquid. It’s a subtle point but highlights a quirk of English. A liquid almost by definition can’t be “wet” unless it also has a dry state (E.G. paint).

“We allege that Live Nation relies on unlawful, anticompetitive conduct to exercise its monopolistic control over the live events industry in the United States at the cost of fans, artists, smaller promoters, and venue operators,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland in a statement. “The result is that fans pay more in fees, artists have fewer opportunities to play concerts, smaller promoters get squeezed out, and venues have fewer real choices for ticketing services. It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster.”

Oh look, they finally discovered the thing anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together knew 20 years ago.

Stop fucking approving corporate mergers and acquisitions you utter fucking dumbasses.

While I totally agree with you, fun semantic question, is water wet, or does it only make other things wet?

Trump is like a walking Onion article. It’s impossible to parody him because he’s already stranger than fiction.

It’s really a variant of the tragedy of the commons, but yes it does have parallels with prisoners dilemma.

It’s a commons dilemma, by moving out you’re prioritizing your short term self interest over the long term group interest. If you leave a conservative state for a liberal one for the immediate future your quality of life will be greatly improved, but if enough people do so in the long term everyone’s quality of life will be worse.

So standard projection from the GOP. Nice of them to confirm that they consider the KKK to be their military wing, not that that’s a surprise to anyone.

Advertising is what happened, and it mostly started with Google. Pretty much the only reason tech companies are so obsessed with hoovering up every scrap of info they can about their customers is to feed it into a model that can be used for targeted advertising. Advertising is in a very literal sense what the modern Internet is built on, for, and financed by. You can pretty much divide the history of the internet into pre-Google when advertising was all about user impressions (the era of page view counters), and the post-Googe era when advertising was all about user data (the era when every website wants you to login using your google or facebook account to better correlate your behavior).

The good news such as it is, is that they’re not really malicious about it. This isn’t the US style “we don’t like your kind around these parts”, so much as it is “how cute, the silly foreigner thinks he’s people”. They probably won’t even say anything negative to you, they’ll just side eye you and bad mouth you behind your back, maybe pretend not to understand what you’re saying even if you’re speaking perfect Japanese. Not that everyone in Japan is that way of course, but it’s very common there.

If you’re just visiting, particularly if you stick to the touristy parts, you probably won’t have any problems at all. It’s really only once you try to stay for more than a week or two and start having to do normal day to day stuff like trying to establish a bank account, or taking a daily commute that the xenophobia really kicks in.

Yeah, I read the headline and my first thought was “and? Japan is practically legendary for xenophobia”. Talk with literally anyone who doesn’t look Japanese who has spent any time in Japan and they’ll have at least one story of a time they were discriminated against for not “being Japanese” even if they’ve lived there their entire lives. They’re usually fairly polite about it, but they’re absolutely xenophobic (with a healthy dose of low key racism).

I think currently they’re not. They’re registered to their state as they’re still technically illegal at the federal level. The DEA has taken kind of a don’t ask don’t tell approach to marijuana and is currently relying on a patchwork of state regulations to manage it because for a variety of (terrible) reasons they haven’t taken the sane step of reclassifying it. It honestly shouldn’t be a scheduled drug or at worst a schedule 4. Moving it from schedule 1 to 3 is better than nothing, but it’s still a chicken shit maneuver.