jayrot

Where's the BG copypasta quote about why soldiers shouldn't be police

I'd imagine you could but enough people just don't bother that it still ends up worth it.

> it's sort of like a graffiti artist complaining about someone defacing their work.

"bomb condos not murals"

Purely devil's advocate would be someone along the lines of -- just because it isn't for sale now doesn't mean it might never be. Pirating it now deprives the owner of some amount of ability to make money from it in the future.

Pretty flimsy, imo.

"BOMB" in this context is slang for graffiti tag, right?

> leaving each state making their own decisions for covid-19

It's so infuriating that this BS would pass for some sort of Trump accolade. The country is in full-blown crisis, the likes of which we haven't seen in a century. Why should the president do anything? He let the states handle it. What a great leader!

Cowardly no matter how you slice it. But I think there are two perspectives here:

* Doing it only now to curry favor with the groups newly in power

* Not doing it earlier because of pretty certain retribution from the group (man) who was in power.

> Of course you will never get to the truth of anything if you don't have both sides of a topic in the same room.

Fair enough, in this case, but the both-sides-ism is responsible for some horrible stuff, from climate change denial to anti-vax.

It is absolutely a fallacy that you always need "both sides of a topic" to be reported / given a platform.

Also the death rate as a catchall metric completely ignores people who here in absolutely critical, life-or-death condition but were only saved from death by incredible medical intervention and/or just pure luck.

Yeah this pandemic has been described as the perfect middle ground for politicization, denialism, and just laissez-faire attitudes.

Any more deadly (like Ebola) it becomes incredibly scary and people likely do whatever it takes when they see people around them dropping like flies (especially in horrific ways).

Any less deadly (basically the yearly flu) and it becomes easy to ignore and just becomes part of the background process.

COVID is somewhere in between. Deadly enough that hundreds of thousands of people are dying unnecessarily. But can still feel a million miles away for so many people.

This was not a good "training pandemic".

> My credit card company (in the UK) has blocked AliExpress

That's completely outrageous. What could their rationale possibly be?

> My dad was able to get a quality DSLR for $50.

No he wasn't.

Not sure if you came up with this or heard it elsewhere, but that statement really resonates with me.

> Way too many financial interests are involved in keeping the status quo.

Indeed. With any major system (voting, healthcare, etc) if you find yourself saying "This system is completely broken", you need to understand that, no, the system is working exactly as intended.

I agree that IFTTT isn't useful enough for me to warrant the cost (I need another monthly subscription like a need an arrow in the knee).

That said, it seems they did handle it in a much classier way than Wink who really pissed people off when they moved to a subscription model. Likewise, that was a good nudge for a lot of people to move off the "easy" platform and figure out something better.

I wonder why companies don't use a boil-the-frog approach to try to avoid this "nudge". Like, if they started off by charging, say, $1 a year I'm sure everyone would stay and just go "OK". Then start increasing the price slowly until you find the sweet spot.

> Lots of politicians have long tenures because they've won re-election.

Like Kim Jong-un? Who wins every re-election with 100% of the vote?

When the dude has been in power for 26 years, that's somewhat of a distinction without a difference.

While that's true, since the current topic of this conversation is about emergency preparedness, I think having potable water (in ice form) would be much preferable to salted water.

As far as an actual road trip, no other all-electric comes close to Tesla simply due to the supercharger network. That said, it can't compare (and probably won't for a while) to an ICE road trip.

Imagine that thing just fucking bumping into everything over and over to navigate....

Super interesting that a member of the supreme court is in line for succession. It's not the worst idea. Say what you want about various members of the SCOTUS and their individual values -- but every single one of them at least has a sense of logic and rationality by nature of their work.

Trump gets tested every day. Every person he is in contact with is testing before being given an audience. He knows how it works but it seems like he just DGAF about everyone else.

I'm guessing you already know, but for everyone who may not -- that's a line from Futurama.

Actually redirects their Google search to the 8th page of Bing, which is even more hilarious.

Uhh, maybe? Shark attacks are quite rare, but I think you might be underestimating how many bites just result in stitches. Talking about "shark attacks" here. Not "Great White shark attacks". Likewise you're certainly underestimating how many airplane "accidents" don't result in any injury (again, not talking about "commercial airline accidents").

I know it's not the point you were trying to make but

> Any human interaction with a shark in its environment, shark wins.

this is straight-up wrong. Humans and sharks interact all. the. time. They're not killing machines.

I imagine you probably know that, so I'm not trying to patronize you (honestly). But this is really important.

SHARKS KILLED 4 HUMANS IN 2018. HUMANS KILLED 100 MILLION SHARKS IN 2018.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/01/28/shark-a...

One of them told me so.

Not necessarily. There are different styles and reasons for money laundering. Selling overpriced items (and colluding with buyers) is a good way to "launder" the provenance of money. Works perfectly fine in online, electronic transactions. The clean money comes from legitimate sales.

Claiming "they don't care about..." is specious. It would be more accurate to say "they haven't been able to stop..."