i came out at almost 30 and i will regret waiting that long for the rest of my life; but seeing people live with the entirety of their lives in the closet is heart breaking because it defines a life of seclusion due to fear at the same time when teenagers and 20-somethings are coming out and living their lives as they truly are.
What they really want is their base to think “the big bad fda is trying to control them.”
This way, when their party dismantles the fda (in the interest of no longer regulating corporations on animal treatment or food or drug quality) their supporters cheer, as the food they are sold increases in price for continuous drop in quality and safety.
Followed by the unregulated sale of placebo drugs making unrequited claims with with no studies on health or side effects required, the banning of generics, so on and so forth
They ordered an exam, but they cancelled it before it was given.
Their defense could be to describe what behavior the singer had besides stating he was one of the Four Tops that might give them concern about his mental health.
They cancelled the exam after figuring out that he actually was, so presumably it was a significant part of the decision.
It’s mostly Tesla and Twitter that he’s wrecking, but yeah Shotwell does sometimes rescue SpaceX from terrible ideas he has, like canceling Falcon Heavy.
Twitter was wrecked with the purchase, it’s been on borrowed time since. The business is now worth less than the $13bn loan it took out to buy itself on Musk’s behalf. It was a leveraged buyout, just like every business that goes under after “being saddled with debt”.
I think you’re really undervaluing his contributions. Think of it from an employee of space X’s shoes
Having the big boss show up one day and yell “I want to launch my car out of orbit, start building a prototype right now, and everyone is doing overtime until it’s done! I’ll be sleeping in my office and walking around looking for excuses to fire people” is irreplaceable.
Do you think engineers build things just because that’s what they do? Obviously you need to have someone rich yelling at them and threatening to fire people
Dougan, a former Marine and police officer, fled his home in Florida in 2016 to evade criminal charges related to a massive doxxing campaign he was accused of launching against public officials and was given asylum by the Russian government. Most recently, Dougan has posed as a journalist in Ukraine’s Donbas region, testifying at Russian public hearings and making frequent appearances on Russian state TV.
Oh look, an old school traitor. I wish him a swift military drafting by his new home.
The same guy who unilaterally banned bump stocks with an executive order being hosted by the NRA shows how much the NRA actually cares about the second amendment.
Bump stocks and all other focuses on rate of fire are more or less a sacrificial lamb. It provides a strong distinction between “Heh, stupid fucking loser thinking ‘assault rifles’ are actually a thing” and “semi-automatic versions of rifles specifically designed for and used by military forces”
When the reality is that basically every military strong discourages the use of full auto by anyone whose job is not to carry a machine gun of some form. But, because that AR-15 you bought at Walmart doesn’t have full auto, it isn’t a military weapon.
And because it is our god given right to carry an m249 everywhere we go, it is a horrible insult to the gun nuts of the world to lose their full auto capabilities so we should all feel warm and fuzzy and stop trying to stop kids from getting shot.
That’s because full auto rifles*, are typically seen as wasting limited ammunition. A modern military unit isn’t likely to encounter a bunched together group of 30-50 soft targets where a full auto rifle would be most effective…unlike a mass shooter indiscriminately targeting a crowded concert.
*Rifles, not machine guns. I’m well aware of the utility of squad machine gunners, talking guns, etc.
First off: modern militaries DO get some nice mass executions a lot more often than one would expect. Well worth doing some reading up on that.
Second: Automatic fire is still horrible for that. If your bullets have a high degree of penetration then you are, generally mortally, wounding multiple civilians per shot and are better at aimed shots at clusters of women and children. Or your bullets don’t have a high degree of penetration and you mostly just light up one or two kindergartners whose corpses take up most of the shots. At which point you are, again, better off at firing off a bunch of snap shots.
Third: The actual reason militaries have automatic weapons is for situations where aiming is difficult or less important. Machine gunners at the squad level are expected to fire very short controlled bursts (otpimally single shots) to actually suppress a target when trying to “keep some heads down” so that the maneuver group can flank. Or they are engaging at significantly longer ranges (which is why machine guns often have a larger caliber round than the rifles) where a short burst increases the likelihood of hitting a target. And while it is mostly out of favor, many infantry rifles had burst fire capability or even simultaneous fire capability (either with two barrels or a ridiculously high rate of fire burst) to increase the likelihood of infantry hitting a target by spending more on ammo than training (before realizing it significantly increases the cost of the weapons AND requires more training so that the high schoolers can maintain their weapons in the field). But modern optics, and a decade or two of being the only people with NVGs, rendered that obsolete.
This is one of the few oddities of the English language that I struggle with constantly. It seems like, as a native speaker, most of the other ones just “feel” or “sound” right, but I haven’t been able to nail that down with effect/affect for some reason
The trouble is that both words have a verb sense and a noun sense.
The noun sense of affect is something like “mood” or “emotion” and isn’t used often, while the noun sense of effect is “thing that happened (because of some cause)” and is a rather common word.
The verb sense of affect is “to cause something to happen (to something)” and is a pretty common word, while the verb sense of effect is more like “to make something be true” as in “effecting change” above.
The mnemonic I use is from dungeons and dragons, some spells are “mind-affecting effects” meaning they change minds and they’re caused by the spell being cast.
To “affect” a change would be to alter the change itself, for example if the university had already been reviewing its portfolio then the protesters might be affecting the change by making it happen more quickly.
To “effect” a change would be to cause the change in the first place.
The vast, vast majority of 18 year olds are not in the military, and it’s really weird to consider all 18 year olds adults because a tiny fraction of them are soldiers
I never once said they all were in the military or that them being in the military made them adults. I said if we consider them adult enough to be able to do that, then we need to just consider them adults in general.
Yeah, and I think that’s stupid. It doesn’t match reality. Just because 18 happens to be the age at which some policy says you’re allowed to be a solider, doesn’t magically make it the age that teens become adults.
I greeted my fellow 20-ish-year-olds with “what’s up kids” at that age as a way of saying we were still young party machines. I am not disrespecting these folks.
The students being allowed to peacefully protest at all is a nice change, and hearing about it could encourage other peaceful protesters, who could enact more direct change
Jewish Federation Los Angeles meanwhile blamed the university’s chancellor for allowing “an environment to be created over many months that has made students feel unsafe”.
The group demanded that the encampment be cleared and that UCLA meet leaders of the Jewish community.
Fucking hell, this is such a callous response. In any other situation, the group representing the side that just had masked vigilantes attack peaceful demonstrators would make amends. “These people don’t represent our movement. We disavow them and what they stand for.” And so on.
I see they’re taking a page from Israel’s book: refuse to apologize, defend unprovoked violence, and blame the victims on top of everything else.
Your school’s protests against violence is making the school unsafe and therefore it’s the schools fault for the violence that falls upon it. That’s basically what they said.
Long history of innocent poor people dying in jail because they couldn’t afford hundred(s), or thousand(s), dollar bail. Yet this proven rapist, fraudster, piece of crap gets his bond dropped by over 1/2 just because? His credit rating has to be shit. Fucking hell. What is the point of keeping this broken system?
The system is working as intended again by the people who paid for it. Who knows, he might even end up as President of the United States of America once again. What a horrifying thought.
I live here and it sucks. Most of these hospitals are small and there’s only a few large ones that handle everything. My friend had a heart attack a few weeks ago and was in the ER hallway almost 24 hours before a room opened up and she could be admitted. The staff itself was great but UGH yes the wait times are awful at the main hospitals.
The weird thing is this is the exact argument many people give for socialized medicine: the wait times. “Imagine if the hospitals were run with the efficiency of the DMV. A,trak, or the Post Office,” meant as a negative slant. “Imagine if FedEx was the only game in town, and to mail letter was $10, and to receive mail and packages was a $25/mo service charge, plus fees for every item delivered.”
God I wish hospitals were as good as those. You either make an appointment online or walk in, depending on what you need, get it done, pay a small fee, and go home. And with those services all the fees are published for you to review ahead of time. You go to the hospital, you’re going to get hit with mystery fees from seven different directions. The room you sat in, the RN that took your vitals, the MD you saw, the machine that took your x-ray, and the radiologist to look at the picture are all going to get billed separately.
The last time I was at the DMV a few months ago I set up my appointment online and didn’t wait at all. I’d grabbed the wrong document type so the clerk scheduled me for 30 minutes out and I drove home and back again and got my license updated with no waiting involved despite having made an error on my part.
My parents still live in this area and have emailed me non stop about this since the beginning.
They live in a county that HAD two large hospitals. Both got absorbed by this cancer. One got shutdown.
All their ‘old’ reputable doctors took retirement when Ballad took over. Any younger doctors were forced to join Ballad or GTFO of town. Ballad had not only a monopoly on the heath care but if you were in any sort of field related (say you were an eye doctor) and you had your own practice but you occasionally went to the hospital to see patients - you were no longer allowed in the hospital unless you joined Ballad.
Basically you were blackmailed to joined these assholes or else. I found this out from some friends who stayed in the area and joined the medical field.
Seriously, the fact TN allowed this shit to pass just irritants me to no end.
“…what we have worried about is a boys team is losing to a girls team (especially in a year end tourney) they may get frustrated and retaliate against a girl,” a text allegedly sent by the tournament directors reads.
“Throughout the season we had a few teams come to us about this and raise concerns about it. Because of this we decided to keep them out of the tournament,” another text reads.
Oh, so the teams were threatening to commit violence against the girls. Why not just kick those teams out?
I don’t want to be an old man, but if you hit a girl when I was in 6th grade, you were an instant social pariah. Everyone would beat your ass.
Kicking them out doesn’t solve the problem. They’d just blame the girls instead of being introspective. Let one of these loser little boys throw hands and learn really fucking fast that the meanest, hardest hitting monster on this planet is a pissed off 12 year old girl. When he’s getting his hair ripped out a fistful at a time, he’ll understand why he lost.
Yeah a lot of boys forget that girls don’t fight “fair”. Due to societal pressures on women to surpress heir emotions, when it comes time to fight that’s it. Boys are taught by society fighting is normal and even is encouraged in how they play.
They’re probably taller than the boys, too which plays into them beating them at basketball since height is such a big advantage and girls tend to hit their growth spurts earlier.
but if you hit a girl when I was in 6th grade, you were an instant social pariah. Everyone would beat your ass.
And this is why male violence against women is non-existent, children.
There is a whole world out there to pay attention to and you’ve taken the performative utterances of tweenage boys desperately trying to become men as evidence to deny everything else. WTF?
FWIW, the ones who were shouting the loudest are absolutely the most likely to be dominating, coercing, and hitting their female partners now. They’re performing masculinity because they don’t know what it is and that terrifies them.
And because the world is dominated by these frightened little boys, we punish girls and women for the violence of men and boys. This story is not an outlier, it is the fucking story.
“I had to sign a permission slip for my child who could drive himself to see it in a movie theater,” Judi Hayes told the outlet.
Parents like Hayes said they must sign a new permission slip for after-school programs and events almost every week.
“It seems like it’s just it’s out of control. It’s every single activity. And it’s burdensome on the staff because they have to chase down permission slips. The club’s sponsors are getting frustrated and giving up because it’s too much work,” Hayes said.
Hayes added that she even had to sign a form so her child could receive pre-calculus tutoring with their teacher after school. The teacher referenced the Parental Rights in Education law in notes to parents explaining why they were being asked to sign a permission slip.
Just apart from this being a completely irrational way to go about things, can you imagine how much time this takes up for everyone involved?
Exactly. The party of small government has one goal. To make government buearacracy so big and slow you throw your hands up in frustration and not participate. So then they can come in and saw only they can fix the mess they created and only make it bigger.
Which then contracts out the service to the gov’t for the same price, cuts the service down to the easiest bare minimum, manages to screw that up while gov’t takes the blame, requires double the money from the gov’t to hire a ton of labor since the service is vital, gets huge profits from taxpayer money while providing nothing, gets service barely operational, calls it a success, charges gov’t more, fires most of workforce, starts charging taxpayers monthly separately on top of gov’t contract, adds fees, never touches service again, uses ill-gotten double-dipped tax payer money to lobby gov’t for anti-competitive regulations so no other companies can “innovate” and provide features that existed for a century when the service wasrun by the gov’t.
Yet another reason I’m glad this state has a public online school program that I could put my daughter in. No permission slips ever. Even if they do have an (always optional) “field trip,” it involves a parent taking them to a location and staying there with them.
Specifically, the point is to create so much dysfunction in the public school system that it eventually collapses. Then, they can instead fund Christian Madrasas instead.
Think of it in terms of staff salaries versus the taxes used to pay them. If you can get people to consider that, they’ll suddenly want to be the party of small government again.
Sandy Hook families holding about $1.5 billion in defamation judgments [...] a competing plan submitted by Jones that would allow him to reorganize by preserving parts of his media empire and paying the group at least $5.5 million a year over 10 years
Literally pennies on the dollar.
His house in Austin, that he bought for a couple million dollars, he sold to his wife in 2022 for the grand total of ten dollars. They're going to claw that back from him for trying to hide it. And then they're going to force him to sell it because Texas bankruptcy law only keeps your house in a city or town safe from bankruptcy seizure if it's one acre or less. And the lot his house is on is 1.089 acres - such a shame!
Also there may be state specific differences, but the transfer of his assets to his wife only is called a “fraudulent conveyance” and is still able to be obtained to the debtors. Also it was a dick move and requires more lawyers.
Sandy Hook families holding about $1.5 billion in defamation judgments […] a competing plan submitted by Jones that would allow him to reorganize by preserving parts of his media empire and paying the group at least $5.5 million a year over 10 years
What’s the difference between 1.5 billion and 5.5 million? About 1.5 billion.
Sandy Hook families holding about $1.5 billion in defamation judgments […] a competing plan submitted by Jones that would allow him to reorganize by preserving parts of his media empire and paying the group at least $5.5 million a year over 10 years
Why did you omit the part where they didn’t accept that plan? Those ellipses did some heavy lifting.
It really is the best part, because he’s trying to weasel out of it saying “if you want money I’ve got to keep the machine running to make more” but the families holding him accountable are setting his everything on fire telling him it was never about the money, and that’s awesome. He was hoping greed would save his ass but here he is in the hands of people who want real justice - the dismantling of the very machine he used to do harm.
I wonder if his assets include infowars? Would be another nail in coffin of his hopes if the families gave it to the knowledge fight guys. Funny as fuck, too.
I’m gonna go with: don’t send cops on welfare checks. Send somebody competent to respond to mental health challenges, preferably someone not wearing a police uniform (after all, at this point a lot of folks think “unaccountable killer” when they see that uniform and there’s honestly reason for that).
Maybe they should have borrowed corporate lingo to call for right-sizing police, or restructure community resources.
“Defund the police” is such obviously bad marketing that it makes you wonder if the people who coined the phrase were trying to help or hinder reform efforts.
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