throw an Indian router, an Israeli router and a Turkish router into the chain for extra security

aka Maga Meghan

Member of party whose ideology is centred around the inherent rightness of power and domination discovered to be true to this ideology in a socially unacceptable way.

Are they still allowed into the Schengen zone? If so, the German government will have some tough questions to answer regarding its Staatsräson obligations.

You know that, and I know that, but the average MAGAt doesn’t*. Zelenskyy’s audience is them, specifically the ones who see Putin as a champion of the conservative values they identify with.

* they would know that Godless Communism is Bad, but they’d identify that more with Mamdani and AOC and coastal liberals and solar panels and public health care and queer people with colourful hair than with the Kremlin.

New Morrissey just dropped

To borrow a tenet from another abrahamic religion, trust in God, but tie up your camel.

President Donkey Kong lobs a few more flaming barrels

“Well, if it isn’t the consequences of my actions”

The Shah’s Amish now?

This guy would disagree

It’s a race to the singularity, and whoever gets there first will create and control God. So we need to sacrifice everything to get there before the Red Chinese, or we’ll be living under a Communist Gangster Computer God. After all, sacrificing consumer goods, clean water and basic survival needs is a small price to pay for your only hope for a future.

This is fine.

After you return it, they shred it. It’s too hard to sanitise (both physically and in terms of configuration, not to mention indelible per-device flags apps can set to block scammers using the same device to make multiple accounts), and destroying it helps to maintain scarcity and keep prices up.

I’m not so sure about abolishing the Senate: a unicameral legislature would have one less check/balance than a bicameral one.

I understand that the Senate as it currently stands rigs the system in favour of red states (of which there are more, with two Dakotas and DC not being a state), though perhaps a better solution would be some kind of weighting of states by population (as is done with the Australian Senate, which is also a state-based house of review), or else replacing it with a new upper house (though wholesale replacements are a greater change than adjustments).

In my opinion, the US electoral system could be greatly improved by establishing a nonpartisan professional body to administer it, including running elections, redrawing district boundaries by impartial criteria and maintaining electoral rolls, with strict taboos (as in other democracies) against any sort of partisan meddling. Though the idea that the party that controls the state legislature/supreme court is entitled to put its thumb on the scale seems too deeply entrenched to be easily changed.

I’m annoyed that Ninajirachi licensed one of her songs for the ads. That sounds like the Holly-Herndon-shilling-NFTs of the 2020s.

It’s fun to laugh at the worst people taking Ls, until one realises that the insiders got to sell up early, leaving retail investors holding the bag, and that these involve not just eminently punchable Musk-idolising incel chuds or even FOXNews grandpas but ordinary working stiffs with pension funds and savings. Chances are everything went exactly to plan and even as Musk lost his very brief trillionaire status, he managed to cash out a lot of his virtual wealth.

Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is also a piece of shit

It was even worse at the start of the 20th century. There were no national standards, and different companies came up with their own plug/socket systems to save early adopters from having to wire everything in directly. If your house came with electrical sockets, their type often depended on what the builder could get cheaply. National standards arose when governments and standards bodies picked winners. (The US ended up choosing one American manufacturer’s flat-pinned system, though another one, with the pins rotated at a 45° angle, ended up being adopted in Australia, New Zealand and Argentina.)

Occasionally you see odd-looking sockets on old buildings, often with a distinctly early 20th century styling. Some places keep them for distinct uses (in railway stations in Britain you sometimes see sockets that look like the normal British ones only with the pins rotated, presumably reserved for cleaning equipment).

There have been moves to establish a unified international standard (which looks like a more compact version of the Swiss plug), though only Brazil has adopted it (and South Africa is transitioning gradually to it from the old British system it inherited).

“Surely, this!”