It really was.

What, a cheap car that is perfect for commutes and milk-runs, gets stellar mileage, zero unnecessary frills, with no over-engineered electronic crap? I can’t even get a new car w/o a crappy electronic center console if I throw money at the dealership. Who cares if it’s like driving a mail truck: sign us up!

Many of us want these, but cannot obtain them new or even register them in our home state(s).

That said, ending the Chicken Tax might turn companies like Ford inside-out in the process. It’s an economic Jenga tower of automotive suck over here.

1984: Brand-new Megatron transformer was wrapped and under the tree. Unwrapping that and seeing the box, then pulling the toy out, was a level of joy unrivaled for a long time to come.

I broke that shit in 45 minutes. (so did a lot of other kids)

Zero regrets.

And that’s the right thing to do. I once worked for someone who drew the line at “I’ll wait for a court summons in the mail.”

This is all well and good, but have you tried multiplayer Overcooked or Plate Up? You may want a marriage counselor’s contact info handy if you do.

Considering that a poor grade would just result in re-taking the class next semester, foul play would probably be worth the cost of those credit-hours.

Or Twitter users: Twits.

Windows, with it’s numerable AI and cloud integrations, has morphed itself into a “Sloperating System” and I refuse to call it anything else.

GERD sufferer here. Only 3, 4, 5, 8, and 9 are viable. Back-sleeping is doable, but only if reclined. The othes equal poor rest and a painful day to follow.

I get the approach here, but unfortunately, this is impressively hard to do without a (fiscal) safety net.

I agree that it is wise to push out panic-inducing thoughts; mindfulness and all that. That’s not always possible when professional failure equates unemployment and the possible crippling poverty that follows. In my experience, employers do a garbage job at pointing out where the guardrails are, and what the bar is for dismissal, going as far as refusing to put anyone on a PIP before letting them go. Many people are in countless pressure-cookers like this, perpetually on the edge of their seats if they’re paying any attention at all.

From all that I take this advice to boil down to: Practice mindfulness, ease, and inner-peace, especially when the shit hits the fan. You can’t control the consequences, but you’ll recover better if you keep your head.

Goddamn. That might actually be worth it.

I think it’s here, but the tactics are a little different.

What I’m seeing are political posts that stand a good chance of rallying people, uniting a front of some kind, and yielding fruit that could very well be positive action.

Trolls/state-actors/whoever see this and sow dissent and start pointless arguments, tying up over 50% of the visible space for discussion under the post. These cats are incredibly good at crafting troll-bait and it shows: the chaos crowds out everything good going on. And this happens every, single, time. It’s hard to see this and not think that it’s orchestrated somehow.

Also, if you keep a tally of the flavor of troll-bait being put out there, patterns emerge. Nudging people to start a US civil war is a very common one.

I think all mods would have to do is disallow changes of topic under threads, forcing them out to the top-level. That may cure any toxic piggybacking, letting the trollbait languish further down the page or get down-voted appropriately.

Stamets, it’s cool, I know you’re putting this out there to illustrate some obviously bad takes.

<rant>

Personally, I’ve kind of had it with these think-tank, astro-turfing, menaces to social media and society writ-large. I think it’s high time that we all start getting a little louder about who’s behind these things when we spot them here, and elsewhere. Lex (in the post) has the right take, but it’s probably even better to get the word out about the source of this blame-shifting crap.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/big-think/

The Big Think is privately owned through Freethink Media. Some of the initial investors in the project were Peter Thiel from PayPal, Tom Scott of Nantucket Nectars, television producer Gary David Goldberg, lead investor and venture capitalist David Frankel, and former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers. Revenue is generated through advertising, sponsored content, and subscriptions to the website’s E-learning platform.

If that isn’t enough to get really fucking mad about this slow-creeping horseshit, I don’t know what is.

Well, now I wanna know. How much money is worth life-altering injuries, including a concussion?

Yeah, all I know are the occasional bits and pieces that wash up here on Lemmy. I knew he was bad news, but I didn’t know he was a trumper. Wow.

By itself no, but employment absolutely is compatible with infiltration. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be a foreign-state actor, or even a witting party (e.g. clicking on stuff in spam mail). See: insider threat, and data exfiltration.

society would at least partially collapse.

I don’t know who is saying these things, but I find that highly unlikely. At worst, this would require the arrest of a good chunk of aristocracy, the wealthy, politically well-connected… basically people on top. There’s always people willing to take their place, good, bad, and ugly. So it’s not like everyone would be stuck without functioning government or social services, at any point here.

Considering where the world is right now, I’m okay with rolling those dice.

I’ve seen this. You’ll get a video recommendation that is technically on two channels at once, and you may be subscribed to only one of them. This may be particularly annoying if you’ve deliberately not subscribed to the other guy featured in the video.

Not only that, but the US Military runs on state-of-the-art logistics. This means that military equipment can, and often is, incredibly high maintenance because you’re never far from a base that always has everything you need to keep it operational. In this environment, there’s no need to make anything super robust and reliable, so… they don’t.

How state-of-the-art are we talking? Well, let me introduce you to forward-deployed Burger King.

Every time.