A little of this. A lot more of, truck manufacturers are now either uninterested or incapable of making vehicles that exist inside of legal emissions restrictions, so they blow up the wheelbase to class it up to SUV class. The bigger the vehicle the less restrictive emissions laws are.

https://newrepublic.com/article/180263/epa-tailpipe-emissions-loophole

Whoever tries to tell Manhattan he isn't allowed to hang dong anywhere better be prepared to back that up with some pretty overwhelming force.

By which I mean,

"I'd like to see you try to do something about it."

The dub is better, IMO. FMA is also a slow burn. There are 64 episodes instead of a standard 50 and they do take their time ramping it up. Once it did get properly cooking it held my attention in a vise grip and became one of my very favorite animes.

Hah, I bet its southsamurai, I've also seen him around talking about his chicken(s?). I've never considered having a chicken before but now it's on my mind.

Part of me wants to try and adopt a raccoon but I know I wouldn't be a good parent to such a mischievous little gremlin. A regular puppy is enough for me.

[...] that feels like the internet of old.

But this shit, this hatred, does not belong here.

Buddy I got some bad news for you about the internet of old, flame wars are some of the first things we ever got up to on the internet.

To be clear, I agree with you, fuck that noise - but I don't think this is a hill you want to get too comfortable on. It's best to just ignore them, or block them if you feel strongly about it. People have been and will continue to call each other stupid assholes on forums from the beginning until the end of the internet era.

I used this as a strategy for nested parenthesis when I was writing in school but my teachers always told me to just break things into more sentences. Which was honestly probably the correct move. At this point my favorite method for dealing with this has become footnotes, we need more footnotes in novels and casual reading. The only time I've ever seen that done is in The Bartimaeus Sequence by Jonathan Stroud, in which he greatly overuses them, and I absolutely loved it.

Local speech to text has been easy to do for at least a decade and then you're just firing off a text file to HQ to add keywords to a user file. These days an AI will likely parse the text to find recommendable products, ten years ago you'd have just had a gigantic list of all your partners' brand names and desired key trigger phrases in a database and run the conversation text against the database and look for matches. Super easy to accomplish. Updating someone's ad preferences 15-30 minutes after they talk about a product may as well be considered real time.

I think you and I might have different definitions of "convincingly"

Faraday cage should cover that no? Styro even mentions in the linked video that he needed to encapsulate his workshop in one in order to not get angry visits from the FCC. I'm sure for something scaled up like this you might want to nest a couple of them together.

Again, not an engineer, I could be (and likely am) wildly off base here. Not sure what makes it such a terrible idea though. I am pretty certain that a MW-scale Tesla coil probably wouldn't blow out a larger area of communications than, say, nuclear testing would, and we do that all the time in the Midwest.

Not an engineer but I sometimes watch them on YouTube.

Could you not just set up a breakout point and have it arc to ground? If the power source is renewable then wasting a little when you have a full grid shouldn't be a big issue. I'm thinking something along the lines of StyroPyro's arcing plasma flamethrower should chew up plenty of excess power if you scale it up. As you ramp your total storage up toward 100% capacity I'd start shutting off inputs (disconnecting solars, etc) and then have what's basically a big old Tesla coil to vent excess power over 95% capacity.

• Conservatives are doing [X]
• They pre-emptively go on TV and loudly blame democrats for [X] before it becomes a major story
• When it comes to light that [X] is in fact happening the public is already primed to blame their opponents for it

It's the sort of thing a 5 year old might do to try and blame the cat for a broken cookie jar, it's baby's first con, it's stupendously obvious what's going on, but, here we are.

How tf did this ever become a thing

Like I know obviously it's just a funny excuse to punch your friend the same way a VW Beetle is but like,

"make a ring with your fingers and hold it near your dick and then call for your friend's attention and then when he gives you attention, proving that he's a good friend that listens to you, laugh at him and then punch him in the kidney"

Does this not seem insane to anyone else, I have to know the etymology of this but I don't know how to look it up

“Voters have not been voting for progressives."

What this actually means is "we have not allowed the voters any progressives to cast votes for". The people who really most care about voting for progressives are doing so, and are voting third party. This is by design. If the DNC fielded any actual progressives they'd likely receive such a flood of record voter turnout that the Dems would then have their hands forced into actually accomplishing something to the detriment of their campaign donors. This can't be allowed to happen because then the money faucet turns off. They've been controlled opposition, running on a platform of "at least I'm not that guy", for as long as I've been alive and I can only assume several decades prior. The momentum of the two-party system blocking out viable third party candidates is what safely allows this for them.

Implement ranked choice voting now and we can rip this entire ugly weed up by the roots. Making the two-party megalith vulnerable will light a whole lot of fires underneath a whole lot of asses in the existing structure, as well as actually enable more than two political parties to exist in America.

Unfortunately this change must come from the bottom up, because the DNC from the top down benefits from the status quo and won't shoot themselves in the foot with this. This can't happen until a suitable number of leftist/independent/third-party representatives are already elected for local and state office to successfully make the push for this in congress, which puts us in a fine catch-22 where we probably need RCV in order to elect independents but we probably need to elect independents to implement RCV.

I hate it here.

I have never, ever in my entire life aspired to any sort of political office. I figured I wasn't well suited to that, I don't have a law degree, it's just not for me.

These days that opinion is now "well I couldn't possibly do a worse job than the ones actually getting elected for this", so....

Fuck around, and y'all might catch me running for local office soon.

Is this a normal thing that normal people do when their fascist government is looking to have them bagged off the street and dropped at an offshore blacksite?

We no longer live in a normal world. Nothing can be assumed anymore. The Wikimedia foundation is in real danger.

The "evidence" here is pretty sketchy, but I believe it, for two reasons.

1. It's extremely on brand for a Trump to do this. Decrying [X] publicly while getting it for yourself is basically all he has ever done. Look to the covid vaccines for a convenient example. In addition, Trump thinks being tall = being important (just look at the six inch lifts he wears in his shoes) and I have no problem at all believing that he doped up his son with a bunch of drugs to try and turn him into some kind of superhuman.
2. They've been making up stories about everyone else for their entire lives. So even if this one is completely made up, what does it matter? What goes around comes around. They're lucky it's something as relatively legal and safe as HGH. If we were really going tit for tat on Trump misinformation, we should have mainstream media telling everyone that Barron Trump was raised on an IV drip feed of stem cells, crack cocaine and blended up white babies. That would be closer to actually tasting some of their own medicine.

Alas(?) lefties don't really want to play that game. They generally find misinformation to be distasteful. Which I don't blame anyone for. I'm just tired of one "team" being bound by rules and one "team" just doing whatever the fuck they want constantly with zero oversight. If we aren't going to implement oversight then we'll both end up in the mud together.

Not since his mom died.

You can see a very tangible drop in cognition around the production and release of The Life of Pablo. Pretty sure he's been unmedicated since then.

I've watched every one of my friends grow dumber by the day for the last 20 years. Propaganda or just outright misinformation for no reason other than "it's funny" is rampant, both from individuals and from corporations or political groups.

The internet at large has been compressed into six websites and if you want to buy or sell things on the internet anymore you have to do it through Facebook.

Every single village idiot that used to be safely ignored now has a global voice with 12,000 other idiots backing them up, and they're dragging all the rest of us down into the mud with them.

Social media has been a huge net negative for everyone involved. End of story. For a very brief time it was pretty cool and then it very swiftly became a societal disease. We really, really fucked this one, majorly.

Oh don't worry we were still hearing that well into the 90s and early 2000s. It hasn't been true since the 80s but every single parent and teacher I ever interacted with all said that.