Having a gun on your person while opening the door is not brandishing. Also, there are countless other examples of people getting shot by the police simply for possessing a weapon.
There is also zero reason to believe that this man was aware the people at his house were police.
You do not have to wave or aim it in a threatening manner for it to be brandishing. It doesn’t even have to be in your hand. Stop looking up legal definitions on Merriam Webster.
Oh my God, is there no end to the mental gymnastics? What do you think someone’s intention is when they open the door with a gun in their hand? Were they using it as a fucking door handle?
Seriously dude, it’s okay to be wrong sometimes. Just give it up.
The Republicans are falling in line with disgraced ex-president Donald Trump’s personal hatred of Ukraine—and equally personal fondness for authoritarian Russia. The Republicans’ allegiance to Trump—and therefore to dictators and military aggressors—wasn’t an issue for Ukraine until they narrowly gained control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the November 2022 elections. When earlier funding for Ukraine ran out in late December, Rep. Mike Johnson—the extremist House speaker—refused to put additional aid to a vote.
The direct language is a pleasant surprise, and honestly more than I expected from FORBES. Have they always been this willing to call out Trump and his enablers?
Years ago when my Gen Z nephew was turning 16 (minimum driving age in USA), the conversation went like this:
“Are you excited to start driving and do you want car?”
“Nah, not interested”
“Why not?”
“Where would I go?”
“Wherever you want!”
“Everything I want is right here at home”
I thought about my own Gen X early driving experience with the freedom to go to the mall or the movie theater whenever I wanted and to drive to school or work.
His school (and eventually job) were both within walking bicycling distance.
He had streaming services I never dreamed of when I was his age piping a flood of big budget movies right to his TV whenever he wants
malls are dead
I couldn’t really argue with his logic. Years later he did get a car when he moved out and lived farther away from work. However, it was many years after the minimum driving age which was a big departure from generations prior.
Doesn’t mean it doesn’t make it easier, or make sure that when your friends are smoking you are there getting free hits and your gas money. Between the free beer, weed, and gas my shit box might have paid for itself.
The only reason my kids want to learn to drive is to go on road trips to visit their friends across the country. Which sounds awesome and I want to buy a couple beaters so we can do the trip together.
My son is about to turn 18 and is of much the same mind. We pushed him a bit to get his license but he rarely drives and has about zero interest in owning his own car. He just doesn’t have anywhere he needs/wants to go. I imagine it’s a little different for kids with more activities outside the home. Sports, clubs, jobs… He doesn’t have any of that going on at this point. I’m admittedly a little sad about that, but I can’t really force him to be interested.
Part of it comes down to that we killed a lot of the other places to go and do things along the way (called Third Places - not home or work, but a secret third thing). Kids don’t have malls or something to hang out at anymore. If they’re not hanging out online, then they’re probably at somebody’s house. It costs money to be anywhere else. Plus, gas and cars are expensive. So there’s no desire to just go out driving for the fun of it. Instead of being an expression of personal freedom, cars are just about getting you from point A to point B. When I turned 16 almost 20 years ago, this was how I and the older sister of a friend of mine felt, too. There was nowhere to go really in a vacation town where traffic is so bad in the summer that you don’t want to drive and everything is closed the rest of the year. So a car was just a way to get to school/work and back home again.
The whole expression of personal freedom thing feels like older people parrotting something they heard on a TV commercial. It makes sense considering that a generation or two would go television commercials were highly effective method of brainwashing and statements like that have little bearing on reality
I completely agree, as I’m pretty sure it was a line fed to Americans by the government and car companies as part of selling the suburban American Dream to them while they bulldozed entire neighborhoods to put up a highway overpass.
that makes sense. were the past couple of generations just stupid or was the media environment just so limited they had no way of knowing they were being lied to? or was it a bit of both?
Definitely the second one mixed with the specifics of the time period and the fact that nobody knew where this would lead combined with corporate greed. This was a time when we didn’t even know that putting lead in gasoline was a bad idea and having a TV in your house was a futuristic idea. Before the TV became common, they barely had a way to know what was happening across the country, and they definitely had no idea what would happen to end up where we are today.
The suburbs and cars were sold to the post WW2 American public as these symbols of the burgeoning wealth of the new middle class (plus the suburbs meant that white people didn’t have to look at black and poor people). The idea that everybody could own their own house and drive across the entire country on the newly created international highway system (just ignore all the stuff paved over to make it happen, it was mostly just poor people’s houses anyways). They were sold the dream that you didn’t have to live within walking distance of the factory anymore, you could live in a nice house with a white picket fence, and drive to your fancy office job in a skyscraper.
Life sentence for growing some pot. Meanwhile the Jan 6th insurrectionists are getting maybe 2 years, or if you’re a card carrying proud boy terrorist you might be looking at up to 20 years.
Some guy beat someone so bad they need 24hr supervision, and he got 7 years. Cops get of with paid vacation for shooting or running over: dogs, unarmed adults and children, flash bang babies, drunk driving, beating their SO, planting drugs on innocent people. Did I miss anything?
War on drugs, no, it’s a war on personal freedoms.
It’s not even just a war on personal freedoms. It’s a war on anyone the people running the system don’t like. The US has been at war with its own citizens longer than I’ve been alive.
There are actual recordings from the Nixon Whitehouse where they decided that since they could no longer legally discriminate against people based on race, they’d have to find another way and drugs was it.
The Jan 6 people made the one critical mistake that a revolutionary must never make: they failed to win. Every other mistake they made was recoverable, but that one damned them.
not sure if your comment was meant with sarcasm, but you're 100% correct. you have to set every other concern aside and understand that you do whatever it takes to win. whatever. it. takes. if you weren't prepared to do that, you should have never tried in the first place.
the J6 people were idiots. they thought that there was some magical lever that, if pulled, would grant them their wishes - kinda like some moron sovereign citizen that thinks magic words will get them out of jail or consequences.
it just doesn't work like that. you can't just capture the capitol and think that wins the game. it's much deeper. the real revolutionaries will fight thousands of unseen battles in clandestine ways using different tools than torches and pitchforks.
I hate this “I got mine”/“I’ll get mine” attitude. If I were wealthy, I’d gladly pay higher taxes to support social programs. Shouldn’t that be the whole point of accumulating wealth - to be able to give back? It should be hard-coded into the very structure of society.
Yes, you are wrong. Wikipedia can both be divisive and be deceptively edited. It also has articles about subjects. A dictionary just lets a person know what a word (like ‘divisive’) means. Dictionaries are pretty important to education, especially for a child who likely has a smaller vocabulary than most adults.
Edit: Am I really being downvoted for touting the importance of dictionaries in education?
I would guess that people think that dictionaries play a secondary role compared to that of teachers and adults in explaining the meaning of words. Or maybe some think Wiki is without bias and flaw
But then again, this is just a guess, and I agree with your point to a degree, even if I think dictionaries are not that important in school
A secondary role, sure, but still a role. A teacher is not always around or may not know the answer, but if a dictionary is right there, the kid can look it up.
Ya, I get it… But now they’re actively participating in making the students education worse.
No doubt, it’s a lose/lose situation. But I find it quite sad for the innocent kids getting caught up in stupid adult stuff. And believe me… I use “adult” strictly to define age/authority position, not mental or maturity level.
Brother, we have this fancy new invention called “the internet”. You can literally go to any search engine and type “define: whatever word here” and boom, the definition and hundreds of online dictionaries will be RIGHT THERE.
When the first question you are asked for decades when meeting someone is "What do you do?" it gets ingrained that your only value is what you do.
Add in the fact that men hitting that age now have basically never received any positive reaction for expressing any emotions or vulnerability and usually outright been mocked for doing so and it is no wonder they are are hard group to reach...
As with most things, the hardest part is the first step: you have to find a community to join. It can be anything, but senior centers are greater resources for older people that they unfortunately don’t take enough advantage of. My parents found a seniors’ program at a local college and started taking classes with people their age, which created an entirely new friend group for them. You just have to find a group of people doing something you enjoy and the relationships will likely form without much effort after that, provided you don’t have crippling social anxiety or something else that makes social interaction difficult. Point is, once you get the ball rolling, momentum takes over; the hardest part is getting it (i.e. yourself) moving.
And where do you even go? Civic centers, bowling alleys etc are dead. Moderate churches are disappearing. Car centric everything means if you have a disability or not much money you’re screwed.
You need a group that’s small enough to allow for personal interaction, but large enough that there’s enough people that you’re more likely to find ones you click with. It’s easy enough to do online - a lot of people meet in games like MMOs and on social media sites. You already share a common interest, and if you click you can expand your friendship outside of that immediate context. Even within the context, you get friends and community.
Real world kinds of places can include things like a men’s choir or a community theater group if that’s your demographic. Those can lead to Saturday brunches and such. There’s also places like dog parks where you can hang out with other dog owners, and sports groups like bowling and ultimate that have various levels of serious vs fun. There’s also a lot of volunteering opportunities.
Some groups can be cliques that can make it harder to get into at first, and just like in dating you can’t let a negative experience turn you off from the whole scene.
I’ve seen a few people complain about the question “what do you do?” over the years, and I think it’s pretty telling that most people seem to interpret that as “what is your job?”
For me, my job is a footnote to my life, it’s not something I’m overly proud of, if I woke up rich tomorrow I’d never go back to work, it’s just how I fund the rest of my lifestyle.
I tend to answer that question with my hobbies, things I’m working on, trips I’m planning, etc
Sort of a double-edged sword is that I do actually work a pretty interesting job that people really want to hear about when they find out what I do, and I’d really rather talk about the other things I do. Probably the one thing I miss about when I was a random schmuck working a shitty warehouse job, I didn’t have to talk about work outside of work as much
Sort of a double-edged sword is that I do actually work a pretty interesting job that people really want to hear about when they find out what I do, and I’d really rather talk about the other things I do.
Right? Don’t get me wrong, I have some cool stories, and I don’t blame people for being more interested in those than tales from my hiking trips or D&D game or hearing about my latest attempt at woodworking or whatever, but I’d rather talk about those.
Oof, I feel that, my group hasn’t been able to get our shit together to have a proper session in months.
A while back I played in my friend’s home-brew setting as Lotor the All-Beard, a raccoon pirate, known as the All-beard because he was covered in fur, so he was all beard.
Lotor was a dirty, chaotic, moron, and throughout the entire campaign the dice gods smiled upon him, and nearly every harebrained scheme he came up with somehow managed to work out somehow.
He did not speak the common tongue, and was also illiterate (but a master of forgery somehow, he couldn’t read the documents he forged, but with a handwriting sample and someone else to put the words together for him he made it work) so the main way he communicated with the rest of the world was with the aid of his talking parrot, Polly, acting as a translator (and also his accountant, secretary, and numerous other roles that Lotor lacked the smarts to do himself.) Polly was a very intelligent bird who didn’t much care for his idiot master, and although it was brought up numerous times, it never stuck Lotor as strange that polly could actually talk and not just mimic speech, he always just shrugged it off as “parrots can talk.” Many hints were dropped over the course of the game that there was more to Polly than met the eye, like a magic lantern that made Polly cast a human-shaped shadow, and every last hint went straight over Lotor’s head. At the end of the campaign it was revealed that Polly was a long-missing archmage who’s absence was fairly central to the overarching lore of the world, he’d had his memories erased and transformed into a parrot by the big bad, and through a series of unlikely events had eventually found his way to a curio shop where Lotor purchased him because he thought it was neat.
Fantastic. That had to be so painful for the rest of the party to watch.
May I also have a D&D story and/or perhaps a picture of some woodworking about which you are proud? Or one which you have at least failed at hard enough to be funny?
I love listening to people talk about their hobbies. I may not understand a third of it, but the passionate energy someone gets when they're all excited is contagious
Here’s 2 thing im particularly proud of, even if they’re a bit simple. My wife took up book binding during the pandemic (who didn’t pick up some new hobbies then?) And she needed a book press and sewing frame, so I made them for her
I apologize for the janky image host, imgur didn’t want to work for me today and this was my first Google result for free image hosting.
Ignore the trash and such scattered around on the desk in the background.
I learned a lot making the sewing frame in particular, mostly how much I suck at using a router, and after botching it a couple times I actually ended up chiseling out that slot in the front by hand.
I’d do some things differently if I were remaking them today, I’d probably make the press shorter, it doesn’t really need to be as tall as it is, and I had some big ideas for the sewing frame like some moveable fences to make sure the book is square that I ended up abandoning
How people make money is often the most boring thing about them. A whole lot of the prestigious jobs that make big bucks that people like to brag about boil down to a whole lot of paperwork, emails, and phone calls, I don’t want to hear about that, that’s the kind of stuff I make any excuse I can to avoid thinking about.
If they’re making big bucks though, hopefully they’re doing something cool with it, they can tell me about their ski trips, or yacht trips to private islands or whatever rich people do these days, that’s what I want to hear about it. If the only thing they can come up with to say that they “do” is a job doing the boring shit I try to avoid, that’s their own fault. They’re free to judge me, I’m judging them right back, they’re wasting their lives.
And most of the time my current job is far more interesting than theirs anyway even if it’s not as prestigious.
It sounds like you’re hanging out with the wrong kind of people if they are asking that question to judge you. I find most people ask that question as its a baseline question on getting to know someone, so hobbies would be a perfectly acceptable response
I’ve always taken that question as a form of trying to find common interests. If you answered it with your hobbies, it would fulfill the same purpose which is getting conversation started.
If you asked me “well, how much do you make?” that would be way more pointed towards “productivity”.
Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.
The studios didn’t lose jack shit and are gonna be fine. They’re just upset that the humans who make up their workforce will no longer accept having the studios spit in their mouths when they’re thirsty.
Make no mistake, the true talent of Hollywood only just barely upgraded to the execs now pissing in their mouths. Sure, they’re less likely to die from thirst, but they still don’t get to drink water from the studio fountain.
After law school, candidates will spend 675 hours working under the supervision of an experienced attorney and create a portfolio of legal work that bar officials will grade as an alternative to the traditional bar exam.
So, still basically a test, but now more like 4 months of underpaid/free labor.
The bar I took cost something like $2000 including two months of prep classes on top of law school. Then more money for a hotel stay so I could take a two day test. I would have preferred 4 months apprenticeship paid or no.
I gave you my opinion, from my experience . If you’ve taken a bar and that’s your opinion, fine.
The primary barrier to entry into the legal profession is law school, not the licensing exam.
4 months of legal apprenticeship with a side gig isn’t bad. However, I would imagine that most applicants will be doing 4 months of paid clerkship with enough extra unpaid hours to meet the bar’s criteria.
A practicum is required for some professions, like professional engineering. The standard for engineering is four years with a bachelor’s degree and passing two tests. You can read engineering in a couple of states without going to college, but it takes 15 years experience and you still need to pass one of the tests.
If you’re referring to the FE and PE tests as being required. They are required to be able to get the extra cert, but not to be am engineer. Most engineers are not PEs, and you don’t have to pass the FE exam to be an engineer.
That’s still lower than what’s required to do hair/nails here in Oregon. My buddy had to drop $25k on some shitty for-profit school to become a barber.
Come to the UK where it’s now going to be two years of qualifying experience on top of exams in a highly competitive field working for minimum wage if you manage to work 40 hours and not more.
To get to that point that you actually start on the qualification can take a few years post law degree and nowhere near all law graduates get to that point.
I know it’s sexier to paint this as a nightmare tenant story, but there’s way more to the story. She didn’t just move in after an AirBnB stay decide to live there rent free. She had a lease, and there were repairs required in the unit that the landlord refused to do. So she sued him and stopped paying rent to cover the cost of repairs.
Then it turned out the landlord didn’t have a license to rent the unit, so the lease was void.
I don’t know either of the parties personally, so maybe the tenant was being unreasonable. But if you want to be a landlord, you absolutely need to have all of your paperwork in order, and you need to keep the unit in good working order. We should not have any sympathy for an owner who illegally leases a property with mold and unpermitted improvements when his tenant takes advantage of the situation.
During the original 6 month lease, the owner saw mold and water damage around a sink and wanted to repair it. He offered to pay for a hotel for a few days to allow for the repair. Tenant refused to allow the repair, and apparently the issue kept getting worse. Tenant didn’t want to allow for the repair until their lease was up. When the lease ended tenant let them stay for a few additional weeks, which was probably their big mistake here. Then when they still wouldn’t leave he called the housing inspector to start eviction proceedings. The housing inspector noted the lack of occupancy license, and an out of code shower. At that point the owner ended up in a catch 22. He could not file for eviction until place was up to code, but the tenant prevented any attempts to access the shower to bring it up to code.
Maybe there’s more to this too, that’s all just from the article above, but it sounds like there’s multiple sides to the story.
Honestly, I don’t have any skin in this, so I don’t really care which side is the truth because it doesn’t matter. The landlord fucked up either way, making a series of rookie mistakes.
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