That gives a false picture since it only counts legal declared spending.

For instance, what’s the effective value to Trump’s campaign of Elon Musk buying Twitter and using it to explicitly promote right wing views? How much did Russia spend this time to promote Trump? What about Israel, cause I’ll wager Netanyahu prefers having Trump in office, since Kamala might’ve demanded at least some holding back.

Actual spending to promote Republican and right wingers was way higher.

It doesn’t need anyone to convince devs to implement it. I can do it whenever I run an emulator of old console games already, and devs of those games never implemented it.

If Sony wants to add it as a hardware feature they can.

As far as the patent, hopefully it’ll get denied but I doubt it. Once they have it it’ll cost someone time and money to challenge it, even though it should be a slam dunk that it is neither a new idea nor innovative and novel. This is how a lot of these egregious parents continue to stand - the cost of challenging them is high, especially if some blistering idiot of a judge ruled in a farcical manner.

Are they running anyone in elections they might actually win? I might vote for a party like that for mayor or something. But I wouldn’t even vote for them for state house representative unless they were well known enough in my state that they might actually win.

‘Third’ parties in this country can show themselves as serious if they try to establish themselves from the bottom up. If all they do is run for president and occasionally Senate or House, then they show themselves as unserious parties which are probably nothing more than attempts to siphon votes that might have gone to a real candidate.

The “pedophile” thing has always been a front for conservatives to wedge in, from what I’ve seen. They saw a real problem and then, as they always do, fearmongered and inflated it way out of proportion to reality, then started to expand the definition.

I’m old enough to remember when pedophile actually meant people trying to engage in sex with children. As in, actual children. The definition began expanding to older and older people, and expanding into fiction, fictional characters, and more.

They also started getting weird about any men being near children. I am also old enough to remember when fathers, uncles, and generally men, could be in public with kids without a woman around and without being looked at with suspicion. These days we hear countless stories of men stalked, harassed, and threatened when they’re out with kids they have every right to be with.

And that’s just the stuff that affects everyone, not just minorities and marginalized people. How the left ever got on board with this pedophile panic I don’t understand, considering conservatives have been equating LGBT with molestation and pedophilia as long as I can recall. Anyone who didn’t see this coming from the beginning is a blind fool.

I think it was the Catholic Church thing. A real case of pedophilia committed by figures generally considered conservative and right wing, which the left rightfully jumped on attacking…but then kept going when conservatives egged them on further instead of stopping. People got tricked into going nuts on it cause the right was all ‘well if that’s bad then you must condemn this…and this…and this…and this…’ with each step being something less and less real, less egregious, less of a true problem. But they’re good at stoking hate, and once the hate was kindled in people it took less and less to spread it just slightly further each time, until now we have people ostensibly on the left calling for censorship of completely fictional works and punishment of people who produce or consume them, despite no actual harm to any actual people being involved.

And that’s exactly the level of unthinking hate they want, for people to not stop and consider whether any actual harm is being caused, just condemn and punish and don’t argue or dispute the severity of what you’re calling for. Just hate, just view them as monsters, deserving of death. Even as the definition keeps expanding.

After all, what group is othered and made the enemy doesn’t matter that much to them, only that some group is hated to the point of an unexamined desire for violence and death. They can work with that, after all.

Even Trump can occasionally be right!

Don’t feel like a dick for that! That again is management’s fault!

Remember that bagging your groceries used to be part of the service and part of the price, they eliminated that job to increase their profit margins!

At least around here Walmart still bags them for me, except they now have the cashier doing it instead of a dedicated employee for bagging.

Self serve gas was actually lower priced than full service back when the transition was happening, so there was actually a reason to do the work yourself.

If it had been the same price, only I have to do the work of pumping it, damn straight I would have felt the same.

In retrospect it was a bad deal because once full service went away entirely, so did the price difference, so I’m smarter now and wouldn’t use self checkout even if they gave a discount.

Up until the court decided to start ignoring centuries of legal tradition that is the bedrock of our legal system and threw out stare decisis the decision was actually more secure than a specific law.

Any law codifying it can be challenged on many grounds, especially the 10th amendment. It could easily have been struck down as unconstitutional because the federal government has no power to pass a law affecting this issue, since the constitution doesn’t grant it.

Only a constitutional amendment would have been likely to survive a court willing to do what this one has done, and there is zero possibility the Democrats could have passed one.

It’s possible to. Are they? Correct me if I’m wrong, but they’re not. They’re going after Microsoft and not Google.

Not that it makes any difference since Edge is just reskinned Chrome now anyway. If it was still it’s own thing I’d be rooting for Microsoft, at least up until they start to become bigger, then I’d turn on them.

Yeah, this. I don’t understand it. Why does anyone not in the MAGA cult do anything for this man if not fully paid up front? It’s been decades since he was well known for not paying his debts and stalling as much as legally possible if taken to court to make him pay. There shouldn’t be a single person who is in a position to provide services to him that doesn’t know this!

I can’t think of a single thing built in the last century that will still be there in a thousand years. We may still build some cool stuff, but none of it is durable anymore it seems.

Is this meant to be sung to the cadence of one of Tom Bombadil’s songs? I dunno why that’s just what felt right when I read it.

The funny thing is he might be the one in the right, if we examine with logic.

A mayor probably has no particular skills or abilities to help personally in that sort of situation, and if he was doing his job correctly in the past, then everything in his power to do would already have been done. The appropriate experts are ready. Emergency plans are in place. There’s backup plans, and backup plans for the backups, all carefully considered and planned by the best people the mayor could get to do them in the past.

But humans are weird and have stupid ideas, so we want to see the mayor in his office, giving interviews, or even better, at the site of the disaster, helping. Except the most the average mayor is likely to do in an emergency situation is get in the way and be a distraction.

That’s the sad thing - your city’s mayor may or may not have done a good job, I have no idea, but the average mayor will definitely be attacked if this happens and he doesn’t make a show of ‘helping’.

Contingency plans. Yeah. Sure. I don’t think there are any that most of us can make. There aren’t any countries I could move to that would be any better I don’t think. I’m too old, I don’t have degrees, my only job qualifications aren’t particularly in demand because the training for them is fast, and the only family connection to citizenship elsewhere I had is insufficient because it’s too many generations removed from me.

I suspect the cast majority of people who would be even worse off than me under another Trump/Republican administration are in just as bad if not worse a position.

To be fair I’m not as smart as Data, so I doubt it would need that much to outwit me.

When the technology gets there, this will be amazing. I’ll be able to sit down at the computer and say “make me a mystery detective RPG in the style of Sherlock Holmes but set on a cyberpunk styled city on a space station like the Citadel from Mass Effect” and I’ll get just that, generated exclusively for me with a brand new story that fits the themes I asked for.

But that is gonna be a couple decades or more I expect. I dearly hope it happens quickly so I can live to see it, but it’s not going to be in the next ten years, that’s for damn sure.

It’s really just about what markets well. Come up with a catchy name and that name will stick.

The Democrats didn’t go far enough accepting the Obamacare name. Obama was all ‘sounds good to me, yes, I care’ or something along those lines when he was asked once, but the Democrats should have officially renamed the bill to Obamacare. Because there’s people who support the ACA but are against Obamacare and don’t realize they’re the same thing. If they’d changed the name there would only be Obamacare and a few of those people, a very slim amount, might realize that the bill thats helping them is Obamacare.

There is a place for actual conservatives, people who want to change things slowly and make sure we aren’t breaking shit with our changes.

But what calls themselves conservatives these days would be more accurately referred to as reactionaries, who want to reverse many changes that have been made and go back to some old time they preferred.

I am not sure if the relabeling of reactionaries into conservatives was always a global phenomenon, I think in many countries, at least until recently, conservatives were really just conservative and not reactionary. But I can’t say for sure.

Counterpoint: toaster 1 looks like Hitler. Use toaster 1.

Moron is no longer enough. Republican voters at this point are malicious, not stupid, not poor gullible fools, they are malicious people who actively seek to harm others, no matter how ‘nice’ they may seem.

I am not interested in hearing about how someone knows a Republican who is such a nice pleasant person, willing to help just about anyone, kind, caring, etc. It is a mask, like that of…I forget the precise medical term, either psychopath or sociopath. But the irony is they are worse because they do have the capacity for empathy, but they choose not to.

And this is, and always has been, who they are. This is not new. This is exactly who they have always been, people who, if they lived in a different time, would happily own slaves, or watch someone tortured for the evening’s entertainment at the coliseum, or any number of such things.

That’s the people we’re dealing with, and they are a significant portion of the population as they always have been.