Looks can be deceiving, not everyone actually pays that amount up front for luxury items. There are sales, member clubs, outlet stores etc, that can mean the price one pays is a tiny fraction of the list price. There's also a fair amount of people who do fashion "churn" where they buy an item, use it, and then resell it later. That $1200 purse might sell for $800 making the net loss not as ridiculous.

I've ended up with a fair amount of luxury items from thrifting. Coach bags that were under $60, silk dresses that were $15, things that sold for hundreds of dollars new. Now, if someone is explicitly saying they spent a lot of money you have every right to consider that a detractor, but the brand alone doesn't mean they paid big money for it.

For a lot of people fashion is a hobby. How would you feel about spending $80 on a board game? $400 for a new telescope? $1200 for musical equipment? These might seem like extravagant expenditures for someone outside of the hobby, but for someone passionate about it it's justified. I'm sure you will be able to find someone who doesn't care as much about fashion (though they might not have a "hot" profile a dating algorithm would serve you but they're certainly out there in the real world) but it's likely they will still have a passion or hobby you might not relate to, and spend equally "unreasonable" money on that instead.

Joined! I make my own ice cream and I'm looking forward to finding and sharing recipes

My two year old has rotating favorite colors. He knows our favorite colors and he will bring us objects that are those colors, and then we ask what his favorite color is. He'll pick out a marker or point to something or say a color. It changes every few days. Today was "lello", a few days ago it was "bu". He's probably been interested in colorful objects (favoring something in primary colors vs pastels or neutrals) since about 5 months. So at least this kid has been interested in color almost from the beginning.

Not everybody who works for the government is elected. The vast majority of people who work for the government are hired like at any other job, and many of them work their ways up the pay levels with competency and years of experience just like the private sector. Only a very limited number of employees are supposed to cycle in and out with a White House administration, and those are the people the president is supposed to have the ability to get rid of at will. Tens of thousands of government employees keep working regardless of who is in charge and answer to their supervisors, and so can offer some resistance to illegal, immoral or downright stupid decisions from the "top". For instance, if the General Natural Resources Manager of the EPA says "no, there shouldn't be fracking operations here, it's too close to habitation" etc, they can push back enough to possibly cancel that initiative. Unless, of course, you make it so the executive branch can point to any government employee and say "you're fired" for arbitrary reasons and replace them with a sycophantic toady who always says yes to daddy oil.

Hmm I wonder if we know anyone who likes saying "you're fired"...?

He was no less a fascist in 2016, but there were enough checks on his power that he mostly managed to simply be incompetent and chaotic. He bungled Covid response and gave free handouts to billionaires, sold who knows how many state secrets to foreign entities, but there are a lot of positions in government held by actually qualified and competent people who waylaid his whims. Conservatives have been carefully putting the pieces into place to prevent this from happening again, for instance reclassifying higher ranking government employees so that the president would be able to fire/dismiss them without cause. If the leader of the FBI attempts to investigate him again, they could just hire a new one who won't. The supreme court being full of right wing extremists is another purposeful and deliberate step to undermine the checks and balances system. Conservatives want kings, and they weren't prepared the last time Trump was in power. They will be able to do much more damage this time.

"Up!"

He's gotten a lot of mileage out of it. For a while it meant the obvious but also "open", "apple", "out" and "outside" until he figured out how to make more consonant sounds.

How about The Romans in Their Decadence? (Thomas Couture)

We did "Photography Model" for ours lol

I love PG Tips as well for a go-to grocery store black tea, as well as all of Celestial Seasonings hibiscus blends. I used to get tea from Adagio and even made a couple of custom blends but I moved to an area with a decent tea shop and local events that host smaller tea sellers so I try to get loose leaf from them when I get the opportunity.

Still waiting for the Zootopia sequel. Genuinely good and creative movie that used the format to talk about tricky topics with some cushion and then became a cult favorite. They added some extra stuff under Zootopia+, they tee'd up the buddy cop format, did all this world building and then... what, Disney, this is the one IP you're not going to squeeze for all its worth? Where's the next one?

If playfully poking fun at authority by demonstrating how the intended consequences of petty rules can be subverted creatively irks you, you're in the wrong community, hun.

"E pluribus unum", that's the national motto. "In god we trust" is only on the money because of evangelicals doing this exact same kind of thing in the 50's.