For anyone who cares to watch:
Season 36, episode 15. Air date: Feb 12, 2011. Skit: Livin’ Single.

Over a decade later, it still makes me uncomfortable.

This is also what caused Bush’s infamous “fool me once, shame on–… Shame on you… You fool me– Can’t get fooled again…” clip. He realized halfway into the first sentence that he was about to hand democrats a crystal clear “shame on me” sound bite to use in all of their campaigns. So he did a hard pivot and avoided finishing the phrase. He got dragged for botching the phrase, but that just played into the “Bush is so dumb” stereotype that already existed.

Congress: “Oh hey, they sounded an alarm. Let’s go ahead and add that to the muffled pile of past alarms that have been sounded.”

Exactly this. Any kind of settlement does a massive disservice to the people whose wages were stolen.

When people complain about white collar crime going unpunished, this is exactly what they’re referring to. Wage theft is larger than every other form of theft combined. It literally accounts for more than 51% of all theft. But it largely goes unpunished, and is treated like a civil issue instead of criminal.

If a cashier steals $100 from the cash register, they’ll be leaving their shift in handcuffs. But if that same company routinely and systematically steals $100 from every single employee by rounding their timesheets down, netting them millions of dollars in excess profits by the end of the fiscal year… It’s treated as a civil issue, the business gets fined 10% of the profits they made, and the individual employees see virtually none of it after the lawyers get their take. The company treats it as a cost of doing business, and changes nothing in the future.

Should also go back and check to see if you were unbanned. I was banned during the API purge, for mass editing+deleting my comments. First automod banned me from various pro-Spez subs when I started editing my old comments. Then when I repeated the edit+delete with my second/third/etc accounts, it “permanently” banned them site wide for ban evasion.

Went back a little while later, and all of my accounts were magically unbanned and all of the edits+deletes were undone. The benign explanation is likely that the ban(s) prevented any of the edits from actually committing. But the more tinfoil-hat explanation is that the admins want the site to look more active, so they rolled back bans so old content was still available and their user count appeared higher than reality.

Yeah, lots of folks don’t realize that cat and dog food are required to be fit for human consumption… Not because of accidental “toddler found the bag of dog food” scenarios, but because of the “destitute people on social security can’t afford anything better” scenarios.

Yeah, my parents are hardcore preppers, for all the wrong reasons. For the longest time, it was the “Biden is going to roll tanks down the streets” type of prepping. But now I’m seeing the prepping in a new light, because it could 100% turn into a full blown “nobody can afford soup, and the government is actively dismantling the soup kitchens while forcing people onto the streets” economy.

Honestly, the most effective thing would be a general strike from everyone except the federal workers. Just grind everything to a halt until the oligarchs get Trump back in line.

Hell, the photographer would be dead too.

It’s an extremely common misconception, and why I bothered pointing it out at all. People will get a scratch from rust, and immediately panic about tetanus. In reality, tetanus is basically everywhere. Rust is simply a good carrier because it has lots of rough surface area and is good at poking people.

But also, tetanus is commonly misunderstood. Scapes and scratches are extremely unlikely to result in tetanus, regardless of what causes it. Rust isn’t any more likely to transmit tetanus.

Tetanus is an anaerobic microbe that can only really survive in deep cuts and punctures where air isn’t able to reach the wound. The spores are basically everywhere… But the spores only bloom and become dangerous when they come into contact with blood. Once they bloom, oxygen will kill them. So you don’t need to worry about it for surface-level scratches and scrapes, because the air will kill off any blooms. The only reason it is commonly associated with rust is because one of the more common puncture wounds is from stepping on rusty things.

Accelerationism hasn’t proven to be an effective method of dealing with him so far. There’s no reason to believe that pattern would change because of this.

In America, the reason is basically “religion”. There are architectural standards which designers refer to for guidance, and the dude who did the architectural standard for restrooms was super hardcore religious. His standard called for big gaps in all the seams, to prevent people from masturbating in the stalls. Basically, he wanted people to be able to peek into stalls, as a sort of modesty check. And eventually, it just became accepted as normal, even though everyone (including Americans who were born and raised with them as the standard) hates the huge gaps.

In modern day, they’re mostly done to deter drug use. I guess the reasoning is similar, with the large gaps intended to allow people to peek into the stalls and see if someone is doing drugs.

Yeah, newer generations have been raised on tech that “just worked” consistently. They never had to do any deep troubleshooting, because they never encountered any major issues. They grew up in a world where the hard problems were already figured out, so they were insulated from a lot of the issues that allowed millennials to learn.

They never got a BSOD from a faulty USB driver. They never had to reinstall an OS after using Limewire to download “Linkin_Park-Numb.mp3.exe” on the family computer. Or hell, even if they did get tricked by a malicious download, the computer’s anti-virus automatically killed it before they were even able to open it. They never had to manually install OS updates. They never had to figure out how to get their sound card working with a new game. They never had to manually configure their network settings.

All of these things were chances for millennials to learn. But since the younger generations never encountered any issues, they never had to figure their own shit out.

Yeah, Biden’s term was simply quiet. For the most part, the government ran properly and things didn’t break. But he also refused to actually spur the DOJ into action, because he didn’t want it to be seen as a frivolous witch hunt. He was more focused on keeping the peace than he was on actually protecting the country from domestic threats.

New Mexico license plates specifically say “New Mexico USA” because so many New Mexican residents kept getting pulled over for having “foreign” plates when traveling throughout the US.

Basically, Trump’s war team accidentally added the lead editor for The Atlantic to a Signal group chat where they were discussing detailed war plans.

It immediately raised a lot of questions with uncomfortable answers. Why are they using Signal, which doesn’t comply with federal records keeping requirements? Why didn’t anyone notice the massive security breach immediately? What was discussed, and how would it impact national security? Did anyone besides the editor have access to the chat? Was Pete Hegseth (current Secretary of Defense, and a known alcoholic who has been caught drunk at work numerous times) drunk when he added the editor to the chat? Why does one of the chat members’ flight logs show them in Russia during the time that all of the sensitive messages were being sent? Along with a lot of other questions, that are honestly too numerous to list…

Here’s a reminder that packing the 5th circuit with extremist judges was a large part of the Southern Strategy.

It also applies to parts, not just finished vehicles. That’s one of the most impactful parts of it. It’s specifically to stop the “car is 99% built when it is shipped in, and American workers just tighten a few bolts to call it finished” scenario that you described.

I think this may be a “broken clock is right twice a day” scenario, because it seems to actually be targeting the methods that auto manufacturers used to skirt taxes.

The issue is that the US doesn’t have any national ID system aside from passports. Each individual state runs their own ID system, and they set their own requirements for those IDs independently. So IDs in one state may be much easier to get than in a neighboring state.

The US also has a long history of using voting laws to disenfranchise minority voters. Back when black people were given the right to vote, many states enacted laws that required literacy tests or ballot taxes for anyone who didn’t own land. These were designed specifically to prevent black people (mostly former slaves who were never taught to read, who didn’t own land, and who couldn’t afford the tax) from voting. Those were eventually ruled illegal, so states simply pivoted towards requiring tests for IDs instead. Requiring documentation that slaves didn’t have (like birth certificates) and requiring a fee be paid for the ID. This effectively put a gate on the ability to vote, without explicitly requiring a test or tax to vote. Basically, if an ID requires a tax and test, and voting requires an ID, then voting implicitly requires a tax and test. But since it was a step removed from actually testing or taxing the voters, the courts didn’t find it illegal.

So with that history in mind, Americans (at least those who know the history and aren’t racist) tend to get squirmy whenever voter ID laws are brought up. Because voter ID laws are almost always backed by some sort of implied racism. For instance, many minorities need to jump through extra environmental hoops to get an ID. Cities (where many liberal voters live) tend to have inadequate facilities to actually process all of the people trying to get IDs. But rural areas (where conservatives tend to live) often have nearly no wait times because they are properly staffed and funded. If a liberal person in the city wants to get an ID, it often requires taking an entire day off of work for it, because wait times are measured in hours instead of minutes. So by making IDs harder to get for liberals, they effectively gate liberal votes.