In the southern states, people were getting arrested for handing out water to voters standing in 8+ hour lines that stretched multiple city blocks in 90 to 100 degree F heat (that’s almost 38 Celsius) with no shade in states where Republicans shut down voting centers in and around traditionally leftist areas mere days before the election, forcing multiple voting districts to travel by car to the single open voting center miles away in a Republican district.

Voter suppression in this country is on a scale that most Europeans would think to put countries like Russia on.

That’s also clearly a photo of Luigi Mangione at the time that that healthcare CEO died under mysterious circumstances.

I haven’t watched it in probably 20 years (whenever those episodes came out, time is an illusion and lunch time doubly so), but wasn’t that whole arc about Mr Garrison thinking they had to be a woman because they’re attracted to men and therefore couldn’t just be a gay man? Which seems more about old school homophobia or maybe the transphobic “trans women are just gay men trying to trick straight men into sleeping with them” autogynephelia thing. Plus there were all the usual Republican “I’m not 5ft 11! I’m trans 6 feet!”, trans-species, and trans-race “jokes” that are transphobic. Those were basically 1 step removed from them making an “attack helicopter” joke (if that).

Also, this?

Garrison was trans, then wasn’t

That’s transphobic. Being trans isn’t any more of a choice than being gay. Kissing the homies goodnight with full tongue isn’t you deciding to be gay for a day and then deciding to be straight again, and experimenting with your gender isn’t waking up one morning and deciding to be trans for a day.

You may try it and decide that it isn’t for you, but that doesn’t mean that you were trans or gay and now aren’t anymore. It just means that you ran an experiment that helped you learn more about yourself.

And to go further, breaking gender stereotypes (like femboys do, for example) doesn’t make you trans either, but it does make you cool for being brave enough to give the finger to society by not playing the stereotype they expect you to play. And if you try it and decide you don’t like it? That’s cool too, you were brave enough to step outside your comfort zone and the rules society wants to force you into in order to try something new.

All they know is that they lived through the Red Scare

Are living in the Red Scare. It never ended, even though the Cold War did. They’re still preaching the same anti-USSR propaganda to the kids today that they were in the 60s. You need look no further than the Republicans calling Obama a communist because he took a course on Communism in college. You know, the one that every college student was required to take during the Cold War and that every Republican politician also took.

See, here’s the thing: they made a generalized comment on a screenshot of what looks like an Amazon order. That makes it seem like they’re talking about anybody who orders food online, regardless of whether it’s Door Dash or 5-7 day shipping. There’s no way to tell from that photo whether that’s a single can or a box of 30.

And that timesaving comment has the same levels of sarcasm as any “lazy youth” remark.

Besides, if you’re willing to pay somebody else a decent wage to deliver something for the convenience to you, what’s the issue? At that point it’s no different from ordering at a restaurant or deli - pizza places have had delivery drivers for half a century! Should we be upset with people who don’t cook all of their own meals?

Similar to selling your car privately. There are some forms involved to recognize that you no longer own nor are responsible for the gun in question. It’s probably a little more strict and polished now (maybe not), but it wasn’t that long ago that you kept a copy in case the cops came knocking looking for the gun and a copy got filed away in a drawer somewhere for basically the same reason. I can’t remember if gun stores were in charge of the records for private sales (which wouldn’t make sense) or if they were filed with the town/state, but it was all physical paper in a drawer somewhere regardless. There wasn’t like a system actively tracking ownership - so long as both parties had a LTC, they were okay and third party sales could be done anywhere.

Don’t worry, they want to replace your hardware with a “cloud based computing solution” as well.

When did that absurdity come back? I thought we killed the cloud computer nonsense a decade ago.

True, but it’s the one that I know and up until around the early to mid 2000s, you could buy a shotgun in Wal Mart. They had a whole section dedicated to firearms.

Plus, the whole selling an AR out of the trunk of a car in the Wal Mart parking lot is something that a kid I went to school with actually did in Mass. There’s still plenty of regulation involved (and increasing by the sounds of it based on what you said), but at the time it basically boiled down to signing the paperwork signifying the change in ownership and resale of the firearm. The only time the state would’ve been made aware was if they requested to see the paperwork, AFAIK.

Besides, the vast majority of people 3d printing guns are people with an LTC anyway, and the most frequently printed things are furniture and accessories. 3d printed guns are still largely a novelty, despite how much they’ve improved over the years. Even the much feared gun that Luigi Mangione supposedly used was bought legally, and any 3d printed parts were merely aftermarket grips or the like. The only large scale use of them that I’m aware of is in Myanmar, where they’re using 3d printed guns to fight against a genocidal regime largely because they can get 3d printers and ammo, but no country is willing to support the resistance and so they can’t get any actual firearms. You’re much more likely to see a Garage Gun like the one used to kill Shinzo Abe, and those are completely legal by federal law - largely because it would be impossible to prevent somebody from just gluing a PVC pipe to a 2x4 and using a nail as a firing pin.

But firearms are so easy to obtain in so many states that it’s much easier to buy one than to build one from scratch (whether that’s buy one in the state or one with more lax laws nearby). There used to be a ban on gun stores within the city limits of Chicago, but Republicans got elected into office for like a decade and not only repealed that ban but also took the bite out of the gun laws, and now they claim that Chicago is proof that gun laws don’t work when the city used to have some of the lowest rates of gun violence in the country. When they’re not being bought right in the city/state, they’re being smuggled in from the next state over with little concern for punishment.

No, but if the laws are anything like Massachusetts, then you can buy an AR-15 out of the trunk of the car of a dude who was selling it on Facebook.

Completely legal resale so long as you both sign off on the ownership paperwork.

Were arguing. This happened about 10 years ago, so keep the quality and variance of computer monitors at the time in mind. That, and the average person doesn’t know what color balance/contrast is. Plenty of people don’t even realize that the same image can look different on two different monitors.

Artistic? I see nothing in their posts to prove that they haven’t been reposting from other sources or straight up posting slop. Not that post history is everything, I’m not one to post myself, but based on the pro-AI stance, I am fully willing to believe the latter.

That photo makes him look like a used mattress salesman.

The point that they’re making though is that you don’t see the military hanging around public transportation terminals in the US. That’s a level of militarized police state that not even the US has.

You should hang onto it. They dug up some of the ones that were buried a few years back as part of a documentary and sold some of them at auction while the rest were donated to museums for preservation.

The “crisis now” part is the economic downturn. People aren’t spending as much on games as they were, especially after all these companies bet big on the idea that people would continue to spend money on games like they did during COVID forever. So now it affects the C Suite, and things only matter when they affect them personally.

I think we also experienced a few unusually high number of school shootings for a few years around 2016, and the media probably reports them less because Trump has taken up all of the media spotlight.

I seem to remember noting about a decade ago that we had a very high number of school shootings in the first 6 months of a year, and doing the math out it was something like 1.5 a month. I definitely remember talking to people about how crazy it was that we had one basically every few weeks.

This is similar to how many of the big names in the video game industry were built. Disgruntled designers leaving companies like Atari to start their own company. It’s how Blizzard got their start, and I believe Ubisoft, EA, and at least a couple of the other big names were founded the same way.

Then, of course, the bean counters started taking over and it all went downhill from there once they went from keeping the designers on task with realistic goals to maximizing profits.

If anybody wants to know just how bad the crash was, Atari buried about 700,000 game cartridges and consoles in a landfill in New Mexico after the release of the infamously bad ET game for the Atari. A game that supposedly had more cartridges manufactured than there were existing consoles for them to be played on at the time.

It was so bad that the home console effectively disappeared from the US market as investors and customers believed that the fad had run its course and companies went back to focusing exclusively on arcade cabinets until Nintendo came in about 3 years later and proved that there was still a market for home consoles. It was so bad that Nintendo changed the name of the NES for the Japanese market to the Famicom - advertising it as a “family computer” system, not a game console.

Not necessarily owned by Amazon, but plenty of websites are running on Amazon systems on the back end for stuff like payment processing and web hosting, or the business uses Amazon to ship their products. There are plenty of Amazon affiliate companies out there as well, but sometimes buying from an independent business still gives money to Amazon through delivery or processing fees or something.