Take your weak attempt at trolling somewhere else.

It’s a needle in a haystack, but that’s a really valuable needle. It might actually be worth it.

Thank you. I’m wishing the same for myself and my fellow not-pants-on-head-crazy people in this madhouse.

Yours,

• Your downstairs, and trapped in a failed meth-lab of a country, neighbor

Here’s my resignation.

Either it’s your fault, it’s going to be your fault, or you’re cleaning this up. Bottom line: there’s a damn-near lethal amount of incompetence in the building and it’s time to part ways.

Same. I’ve got a real bad feeling about this.

Good point.

Now that you mention it, eggs fit the right conditions for this kind of scheme. They’re experiencing an abnormal spike in value, are highly perishable (somewhat inelastic demand), and probably are stored under low security since they were (recently) cheap. Just the right commodity for arbitrage before everyone involved wises up or things normalize.

People don’t realize what constraints props departments are under, or for that matter, how little it takes to impress a camera.

IMO, everyone should binge-watch Adam Savage’s YT channel before putting down serious money on a movie prop. A shocking amount of this stuff is basically made to survive the production time-frame, and little else.

Also: congrats with that brief brush with stardom. That’s hilarious. Next time, you should seriously lead with “I threw up on Matthew Broderick once.”

WASHINGTON, Feb 4 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said the U.S. would take over the war-ravaged Gaza Strip and develop it economically

The scope of this statement is a shock, but the motivation that led to it, isn’t. That said, I hate everything about this.

I’m not the first to bring this up, but it bears repeating. This is colonialism, plain and simple. That, in turn, is an outcome of unchecked capitalism. Practiced ideologically (i.e. as the guiding light in one’s life), it holds up “exploitation at all costs” as a virtue. Second to that is “give your competition no quarter.” Combined, that explains the current state of affairs.

We all may be used to thinking of colonialism as some thing that ended on one more more independence days in the last 300 years or so. In reality, the engines of commerce and industry that made that happen kept right on running. Since nation-state-sized real-estate deals like this don’t come along very often anymore, these animals are quick to react and pounce before someone else figures out how to exploit the situation.

As an aside: the attitudes and values that enabled things like the US westward expansion, slavery, classism, eradication of indigenous peoples, environmental destruction in the pursuit of minerals, pollution and litter from energy extraction, etc., are still alive and well in the population. Being this kind of evil is insanely profitable under the right conditions, which confers an outsized advantage to reproduction and social influence. Which is to say that it’s not the ideology of capitalism that propels these values to stay with us, but rather the other way around. It’s as though those colonists with exploitation in their hearts are still very much with us, and that’s something to keep an eye on.

I dumped that into ChatGPT to figure out what that would mean:

“Gold-progressing”: If “oro-” means gold, then “orogressive” could describe something advancing toward wealth, golden standards, or prosperity.

“Mountain-moving” or “Mountain-progressing”: If we go with the geological meaning, “orogressive” could mean progressing through or overcoming mountains—maybe symbolizing overcoming big challenges.

“Speech-advancing”: If “oro-” is tied to oral communication, “orogressive” might mean someone who is progressive in speech, rhetoric, or persuasion.

Honestly, all of those are ironically far more aspirational than “progressive”. I give it 4/5 stars for your newly-minted neologism.

Not sure where you’re from, but we have some problems that stand in the way of coordinating any kind of resistance. At least, not proactively.

In short: we have no living memory of domestic war, famine, epidemic, or wholesale financial hardship lasting longer than a few years. We’ve had tastes of those things, but they always effect people disproportionately, usually along class lines. So being proactive by taking up arms, or preparing for economic catastrophe, is literally unthinkable for most.

Meanwhile, the usual kind of political corruption that we’re accustomed to just came to an end, and is changing shape before our very eyes. Nobody knows what to do with that, yet.

you might be surprised how quickly the 90-million non-voters come around.

Good. I’d rather know what the score is with the actual, entire, electorate than left to yet another situation where a huge number of people just stood by.

A valid concern.

I strongly recommend looking at what the Polish did. We can have multiple movements all trying to influence outcomes. They don’t even need their own candidates, they just have to endorse ones that party elsewhere or have a chance of being picked up by a major coalition (e.g. Sanders, AOC). Over time, that movement gains traction and notoriety, further influencing elections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Initiative

At this rate, I’d happily vote for Nixon’s undead shambling corpse. Or maybe Taft.

I’ve been in “I’m tired boss” territory since November. I wanna be sedated until this is over.

Those people are tied.

Old, young, we can debate this all day. But anyone around here (USA) in the 30-and-over bracket almost certainly feels tired as fuck this week.

This does make me wonder: do municipalities with a large number of roundabouts have stats for how these things foil drunk drivers? I feel like there’s a serious possibility of reducing fatalities if we just replace the center of these circles with ponds and/or sand traps.

It’s that. It’s been a hot minute, but (IIRC) for me it was the less-than-great UI/UX that really adds up to a high friction experience. Especially when compared with software like Slack or Discord.

That almost makes sense.

I recently tried one of those god-awful “idle clicker” style games, and my first thought was: “This is such a grind… I could write software to automate this.” Then I realized that Factorio is right there.

WRT to Babylon 5 - the Spanish Flu pandemic had anti-maskers and deniers too. I think it’s less prescient and more “this is what humanity actually looks like”, which is a core theme for a lot of episodic sci-fi.

I mean, even Jesse Eisenberg played both Zuck and Luthor on-screen. Can’t get more on the nose than that.