I think @TranquilTurbulence pretty neatly established one big different - Americans produce far more waste than any actually impoverished country.
We just live poor in order to afford all those extra landfills.
I think @TranquilTurbulence pretty neatly established one big different - Americans produce far more waste than any actually impoverished country.
We just live poor in order to afford all those extra landfills.
Diamond Straws currently employs 15 people but is anticipating an uptick in business in the wake of President Trump's executive order declaring that the US is "going back to plastic straws" and moving away from paper straws.
You could one day aspire to be the 16th factory worker in the plastic straw factory. Unless, of course, those jobs are automated away by AI.
I have to wonder how many folks who spent the last twenty years screaming "Fuck the CCP!" are going to get the pointy end of the Trump police state on the grounds that they are radical leftists.
streaming content without paying for it
I'm sure I'm missing a few more. But there are so many ways to watch - even without explicit piracy - that the MPAA considers should be deemed illegal because they're not getting paid per viewer.
Map of US Military Bases around the world:
Pretty much every country except France has operated as a satrap of the US since the end of WW2. NATO is the tool by which the US militarily administers the region. You're not going to see it divorce itself from the US because it is a creature of US foreign policy. Might as well have asked the Warsaw Pact to align against Russia.
That's before you get into the contradictions within the EU members themselves, which appear to be tearing the economic union apart from within. Brexit is only the beginning.
Might want to calibrate your use of "liberal" for your audience.
Because one teeny step out-of-line on the left, and you’re labeled right wing
Genuinely trying to figure out what you're referencing. Are we talking "one teeny" Daniel Perry shooting? Or is this "one teeny" mega-millionaire Dave Chappelle not getting a sixth Netflix comedy special because he's become too transphobic? Or is this "my kids won't talk to me anymore because I screamed 'Pull your pants up!' at Kendrick Lamar during the Superbowl Halftime Show"?
I tell people this constantly, and get ignored or chided for the thought.
:-/
I’ve got a previously Trump supporter boss, who I’ve slowly become friends with and have shown him the problems on the right and moved him further to the left.
Doing the yeoman's work of leftism by... checks notes... sucking up to my Trump-loving boss.
The tools that were used to drive Germany to madness are much the same we're seeing today. A lot of that first 1/3 is being bombarded with mass media saying "Black people are trying to kill you! Leftists are trying to rob you! The Evil Biden Government is trying to transgender your children!" over and over and over for decades on end.
This isn't just Americans waking up one morning and deciding to be MAGA chuds. It is a product of two generations of intense right-wing propaganda through every avenue of mass media.
A lot of the cases are... loosely... based on real medical discoveries and treatments. You just pack them all under the arm of one guy to make him some kind of Doctor Genius God.
I'm glad they didn't go full on X-Files with it or inject a bunch of quackery. The show was at its strongest when it was incredible without being unbelievable.
SCOTUS does not enforce policy - it interprets it.
So, in theory, a SCOTUS ruling allows bureaucrats in the various agencies to ignore a Presidential command. But in practice, we've got the Doggy Department stepping in behind the scenes and unhooking any individual disloyal to the President from their security badges and sign-in credentials. Power is being centralized via the mechanism of IT.
This is, incidentally, a strategy Balaji Srinivasan and his friends at Y-Combinator lay out explicitly in "The Network State" which is a favorite book of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
What they're building is a real technical means by which a new kind of technocratic institution can do physically what a judiciary simply orders and hopes is fulfilled. A verdict from Musk has material consequences - access suspended, accounts disabled, money transfers halted - that a judicial appointee cannot physically obstruct.
It’s as out of touch as someone saying “I think Mueller is still going to bring Donny down!”
Mueller laid out the terms by which incoming President Joe Biden could have prosecuted Donald Trump. And Biden's AG Merrick Garland just... didn't do it. This isn't a question of "can" but of "will". Do people in positions of power wish to utilize their authority to change the country?
Elon and Trump are 100% serious about changing the way the federal government functions this time around. President "Nothing will fundamentally change" Biden - the most institutional of the institutionalist Democrats still alive - was not.
I don't even think this is a Donald Trump thing anymore. He's just a vehicle for the Move Fast And Break Things Silicon Valley crowd to take control of the federal bureaucracy. But guys like Srinivasan and Thiel aren't fucking around. They are using the mechanisms of power that the administrations of Biden, Trump, and Obama just kinda sat on. Remove Trump and you'll just get JD Vance who is even more servile and pliant towards the Trillionaire Class.
What does Medicaid Expansion even look like under a Trump Administration?