Then literally Web 2.0 is the problem. All social media stops existing if we go back from Web 2.0.

“I’m glad you changed your last name, you sonuvabitch!”

I don’t know if I fully agree. After 9/11, the conservative movement was attempting to change the consensus(Evil brown foreigners are coming to kill you and your family). The fact that a black man won the Presidency not once, but twice speaks to a failure to meaningfully change it.

“Blind box” in the tech context is an algorithm that hides its operations from everyone, even its own creators. You give it an input, and then it produces an output, without showing you how it arrived to that output.

Yeah, George would think he’s spotted some slick NFT grift or crypto rug pull that it turns out he was the one getting rug pulled, by Newman.

Yes, just like how tax preparation companies lobby to keep the IRS from just telling people what they owe in taxes. It keeps the tax prep companies in business.

Well, the show has been off the air for a long time, but I absolutely could see Kramer having an AI chatbot girlfriend, or George Costanza trying to get people suckered into an NFT grift/cryptocurrency side hustle.

Was PayPal always evil, though? The concept of it wasn’t. People wanted an easier way to conduct transactions electronically. Something faster and more convenient than, say, a Western Union money transfer order.

To go a little more in-depth, if a product would simplify certain aspects of life, make them more straightforward and less prone to a chain of comedic errors, then it’s a good product.

If a product makes things more complex, has more things to go wrong, and more corners and edge cases for some weirdo like Kramer or George to think they’ve spotted a killer side hustle, then it’s a bad product.

Now, I’m not saying that smartphones and computers and the Internet aren’t complicated, but they are far simpler to how things were done before. Read old hobbyist magazines to get a sense of the complex system of self-addressed stamped envelopes and hand-compiled mailing lists it used to take to get info on your hobby. Meeting a friend in a nearby town to go see a movie at a theater you haven’t been to before required a shocking number of cross-referenced paper resources.

I, for one, would love to make friends with a White House staffer or intern, perhaps make friends with a couple. Not to pump them for anything as droll as classified Intel or state secrets. No, I want the hot goss, the tea, the interpersonal drama.

Trump’s Cabinet secretaries all hate each other. This, I know to be true. Their interns must see and hear a lot of it, I’d love to be in on it.

I don’t know if you know this, but if the US falls, the whole world falls with it. There will be no turning back, no one will be spared. Who knows, maybe evolution will start over with another species, and they’ll do the same shit, over and over again until the sun burns out.

Because it comes down to the Presidential pardon powers. They can defy a blatantly illegal order, be dishonorably discharged, lose their pensions, healthcare benefits, pay, etc. or, they can follow a blatantly illegal order, and receive a pardon for it later.

I ask you, which one would you pick?

This. I don’t think Miller knows just how much his own side doesn’t like him. He does have people over him with more power who keep him around because he’s useful, and they protect him because he’s useful, but once he’s outlived his usefulness, they’ll wash their hands of him.

There are approx 45,000 denominations of Christianity

Well, obviously that’s where the US Dept of Faith comes in and starts whittling that number down a little, by their denomination declaring the other 44,999 to be heretical. And because they’re with the government, they’ve got authority to stamp out heresy, violently, if need be. As for how it’s funded? Well, since we got rid of the IRS, taxes aren’t collected, but tithes are mandatory!

Oh, it’s not that they think those things are bad, just that they want to be the arbiters of who deserves those things. They’re not against social programs, they just want to put their churches in charge of them so they can police behavior.

I’m enjoying it. It feels like the game that Obsidian wanted the first one to be, but couldn’t quite get there, for whatever reason.

I know you’re being sarcastic. It would absolutely destroy their chances of ever holding office, but if Dems don’t win the midterms, that’s it. They may as well close up the Party HQs, retire from politics and IDK, take up knitting or something.

It would make sense, wouldn’t it? It would be hilarious to see how fast the entire Republican party would spin if Democrats started taking credit for all the terrible shit Republicans have done with their power.

But now, I wonder if supersonic flight could work today. We know a lot more now than we did when the first Concordes were built. There have been numerous advances in the fields of engineering, materials science, avionics, and such since the last Concorde jet was grounded.

As Mark Twain once remarked, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.”