ShittyBeatlesFCPres

The Blackberry era was my favorite. You could do all the important stuff and even check sports scores or breaking news or whatever. You couldn’t really doomscroll because no one had done that yet. Even Facebook — which was just for college students at that point and was legit useful. You could find people in a class you were taking and lived in your dorm and get notes from them if you missed class. And you could just download any song you wanted on Kazaa or whatever. No one’s boss emailed them outside of work hours and expected a response.

Probably 2003ish? I don’t know what year it all went to shit. But the Internet seemed like a world of possibilities then.

I’d have also advocated to heavily restrict tlds. Like .org only for real, recognized non-profit organizations.

There should probably be a tax on anything that can be described as “ultra-orthodox” of any kind. I’m not a theologian but I’m pretty sure the concept of “plastic” isn’t banned in any faith tradition’s holy book.

It’s really frustrating. I live in South Louisiana. Even my most conservative relatives know climate change is real. We can fucking see it happening and if you don’t, your insurance company does. Even oil rig construction companies were getting offshore wind construction contracts because we have loads of expertise in offshore construction projects. We had the first “climate refugees” in the U.S. that had to relocate.

And people outside of New Orleans and Baton Rouge still voted for Trump. Connect the dots, motherfuckers.

Even while embracing cryptocurrencies?

They had a screening of Free Willy and changed their minds.

Tariffs basically never help except in a few select situations. For instance, “infant industry” situations where a country needs time to scale up some industry and there’s real promise that once they do, it’ll be competitive. If a country is trying to corner some critical market by dumping, targeted tariffs can be smart. But mostly, tariffs are stupid.

There’s a legit national security argument for steel and probably aluminum but a better solution for materials used to make things would be to just subsidize those companies for domestic sales so you don’t screw over every industry that uses them. Steel definitely isn’t an infant industry. We have the technology.

An even better solution is to not piss off all your most reliable allies and trading partners. But I guess that cat’s out the bag.

I’m not saying they’re not an annoyance sometimes. But they’ve been in Louisiana (possibly a different species as ours are fully black in color with the same big orange noses). But we have termites, mosquitos, and probably everything else. And the birds, lizards, frogs, etc. have learned to eat them so they probably keep the population in better balance than if they were new to town.

They’re pollinators that don’t sting, bite, or eat your house. They’re not locusts that ruin the harvest or whatever. And in Spring/Summer, it rains basically every day here around 4pm. That probably mostly cleans them off cars and stuff. They’re just part of the ecosystem. If you want birds, you need bugs.

For real. Love bugs are harmless and kind of cute. The main problem is that if you drove anywhere when it was mating season, you had to get a car wash. As bugs go, they were amongst the least annoying. I don’t want to call them “the best” bugs because some butterflies and lightning bugs are pretty cool but love bugs don’t care about us and we don’t care about them. They don’t bite or try to get in your house and birds and other animals have a feast.

They might be the best behaved bugs. They’re just trying to get their freak on.

I think it requires 60 votes to overrule the parliamentarian. They just want to make a show of it.

Not anywhere close, in my opinion. People have these ideas that only right wingers have guns and red state vs. blue state but my conservative relatives who live in the country and hunt are afraid to go to cities. They ask me all the time if I’m nervous living in one and there’s a school bus stop by my house where kids get dropped off.

A related point is that in the last Civil War, there was a somewhat blurry but pretty clear regional divide. Now, it’s an urban vs. rural divide. I live in Orleans Parish (aka county) in Louisiana and we went 82% for Harris/Waltz, roughly the same as Manhattan. I’m pretty sure California had more Trump voters than Texas. If a gun brawl breaks out, it’s going be local and contained.

Also, what’s Meal Team Six gonna do in a real battle? Most Trump voters are like 60+ years old and watch Fox News all day. Nobody wants the smoke.

The sterilization part is what I was concerned about. People who make jam the first time don’t necessarily know how critical that is. You really cannot take shortcuts and be like, “I just washed it. It’s fine.”

It’s just WeChat. It’s basically like Venmo. It’s been that way for awhile. Even rural farmer’s markets and street vendors and stuff took WeChat last time I went and that was 7 or so years ago. It’s not a digital currency.

It should be noted that WeChat is very much more expansive in China than in the West where it’s just a chat app. An American friend lived there for awhile for work reasons so I’d go visit her. My WeChat was just a chat app and hers was the “everything app” Elon Musk dreams of making X into. (Which I seriously doubt will work in America because we have different apps that do all that. China didn’t and WeChat filled the void.)