I get what you’re saying but instilling fucked up religious values in a kid is a completely different thing than marrying off a sixteen year old to a middle aged man.

Honestly this is sort of ridiculous.

• Biden is a Washington insider now, but that’s because he had a lifetime to make something of himself. He grew up in the middle class
• I think we can all agree Obama was an outsider without any sort of elaboration
• Bill Clinton grew up dirt poor in a state that basically only makes the news when something stupid happens.

All three had to climb the ladder in a huge way, that simply wouldn’t have been possible in a lot of other countries.

I also feel like Trump embodies the whole “anyone can be president” in his own sort of fucked up way. Trump obviously was born into immense wealth and enjoyed tremendous status, but he was in no way ever considered leadership material by America’s political elite. His election was a complete “wtf” moment and wouldn’t have happened in most countries. In a more rigid system we’d probably have had something like a Hillary Clinton v Jeb Bush election, which strictly speaking would have been better than what we got but also let’s be real we would have all hated it.

I’m not saying America is some pure meritocracy. Bush was a third generation political dynasty member. His opponents were also pretty well connected. It’s just that he’s only one of several presidents to get elected in the past 30 years.

I want to offer another perspective.

I knew someone who got married at 16. The groom was 18, they both came from religious families, and they ended up divorcing at like 22, which was basically a few months after they moved to a liberal area on the west coast.

I don’t think any sane person would call this grooming. At no point was I given the impression that the husband in this situation was abusive. However the situation was fundamentally fucked in a way that was unfair for both parties. My friend felt pressured to be a homemaker while still in high school, while her ex felt even more pressure to be a provider despite having no real emotional or financial capacity for doing so. They also both tried to make it work much longer than they should have, which inflicted a further set of scars.

We live in a world fundamentally more complex than what the average person had to experience 100 years ago. We don’t let teenagers do things like buy alcohol or smoke cigarettes. It is almost expected that 18 - 21 year olds in the US will be on some major level dependent on their parents.

Even in cases where there isn’t abuse, we shouldn’t be letting minors get married. It is just an unfair position to put both parties in.

I get everyone hates Elon but SpaceX is primarily run by someone extremely competent who does a good job at keeping him out of most of it.

It’s frustrating seeing the dichotomy between how the FAA handles Boeing versus SpaceX.

The FAA more or less rubber stamped Boeing for years. A lot of “FAA inspections” were just Boeing inspections that the FAA signed off on at the end. They’ve made some moves to fix that after the 737 Max debacle, but are still dragging their feet. For example reports came out that Boeing managers were rushing planes to completion before the strike, and the FAA didn’t really do shit about it.

Meanwhile with SpaceX they seem to have this “leave no stone unturned” mentality.

From an outsiders perspective, the FAA’s willingness to do their job seems to be very variable in a way that makes me wonder if there aren’t ulterior motives.

I love how every major bank came together to create an alternative to Venmo, but somehow it’s objectively worse. It’s not like Venmo is this grand fountain of quality either.

I’m pretty sure the subtitle of this article was altered since the initial release. The first one was something like “I feel worse now that I’m not being catcalled, and I hate the patriarchy for making me feel that way”.

Her articles generally consisted of some valid points on feminism mixed with absolutely outrageous statements and claims. The latter was intentionally designed to offend, because the mid 2010s was the peak ragebait era for news.

As a sidenote I think a huge portion of toxicity in the culture war is just bad faith actors trying to use it to make a profit.

The uncomfortable truths I was referring to was a culture of anti male sexism in parts of the democratic party, as well as a consistent minimization of issues affecting young men.x

Yeah but that ends up making everything worse. There’s a whole industry of people who feed off of outrage to grift and push radical opinions. The biggest offenses aren’t even related to gender. As a society we aren’t even able to have a nuanced conversation about benign issues like gas stoves. I don’t know how we’re ever really supposed to tackle bigger issues such as gender when shit like that causes mass outrage.

Yeah. One of the lowkey things I’m hoping in a Trump loss is a more nuanced discussion. I feel like you can’t criticize certain things without being called some far right maga incel. It’s exhausting.

Honestly after watching DS9 I think O’Brien is the best engineer in the entire series.

Almost every other engineer we see works on some flagship federation starship. O’Brien has had to deal with:

• DS9, a hodgepodge of three different alien technologies and the occasional booby trap
• The Defiant, which was half baked to such an extent he had to design and implement a complete overhaul of major systems
• The dominion war alliance fleet, where he had to oversee repairs for the ships of three major alien races. Even if he didn’t do the repairs himself, he probably had to have significant working knowledge.

I feel like the only person you could compares is Scotty, and that’s mostly based on his feats in that one TNG episode and SNW.

Almost every time I read an article from a liberally coded publication of how gender affects political affiliation, it comes off as both hopelessly out of touch and extremely patronizing.

I feel like this article fundamentally misunderstands the issues it is trying to claim expertise on. There was no discussion of the very real struggles men face today. There was also extremely limited discussion on how young men vs older men view gender in politics, a genuine answer on why conservative claims of masculinity under attack resonate with Gen Z men in particular, or a discussion of how some liberals behave in a sexist way themselves.

The part about “benevolent sexism” was downright insulting. A huge complaint among younger conservative men is “benevolent sexism” towards women in the democratic party. Even a lot of liberals will admit that there’s way too much of the “women are wonderful” effect going around without any real checks on biases.

This is all of course coming from the guardian, which has had some of the most insufferable takes on gender over the past decade. It’s frustrating enough when some op ed shames every single man for the actions of a few, like the guardian did with catcalling. It’s on another level when they then publish another article by the same author where she complains about not being catcalled after 30 somehow blames men for that too.

I personally think Trump will underperform with men. I specifically think he himself doesn’t understand the issues young men have, a small minority of his older base have his tuned out without telling anyone, his surrogates focus on the wrong things, and his turnout machine is gonna end up being trash. However I think that going forward democrats will have to put in real genuine work to win over male voters, and that will require acknowledging some uncomfortable truths that they are unable to do.

As a sidenote, I encourage everyone to read Christine Emba’s op-ed in the Washington Post. It provides a lot better a framework on what’s happening.

You guys aren’t gonna like to hear this, but being super wealthy and successful is always going to confer some degree of cool.

That being said it doesn’t sound like they are doing this because they think it’s fun/sexy. The users in this article all seem to frame their usage in the context of mental health. While the merits are questionable, it’s objectively better than some Wall Street exec doing coke or slamming booze. I feel like a better article would be questioning government policy that allows billionaires to experiment with psychedelics, but ensures that an actual FDA approved treatment that the average joe could access will never happen.

I can’t help but notice these authors all exclusively focus on tech, while giving other high compensation and influential industries a pass. It really feels like a ton of journalists have a personal vendetta against tech that goes beyond the substance of any of their actions.

I’m actually in favor of the death penalty in theory, there’s just no way I trust the government to not inadvertently execute an innocent.

Case in point, this week.

Exactly. The problem isn’t diversity. The problem is soulless corporations who put out mediocre games, and then try to shoehorn diversity in a fairly surface level and lazy fashion as a distraction.

It would have been weird if AC1 didn’t star an individual of MENA descent, because the game was set in the middle east. Origins had minority protagonists for similar reasons Connor being Native American in AC3 added a lot of depth when it came to the concept of freedom and how it relates to the American revolution.

I feel like I’ve seen the same story a million times. Mediocre IP, lazy forced diversity, culture war commentary, undeserved stellar reviews, underperformance with audiences due to fundamental issues.

I’m railing about corporate making a mediocre game and then jamming some culture war shit into it in a blantant attempt to distract from the fact that the game is mediocre.

Also AC has had “more than just white guys” featured since the first game.

I feel like a lot of companies that put the most emphasis on making diverse IP make the worst products. I don’t think that the lack of quality is due to diversity. Rather, I think that companies with soulless corporate leadership have a habit of producing mediocre content and attempting to obfuscate said mediocrity by making an otherwise uninspiring game a referendum on the culture war.

I’m willing to bet that there are developers who can make a game that is more organically diverse and genuinely fun, but that they don’t get an honest shot due to the state of modern gaming.

Anyway this game is gonna be crap, IGN is gonna give it a 10/10, and Polygon is gonna go on a tirade when it underperforms in the same way every AC game since black flag has underperformed.

How old are you?

Kamala Harris was already middle aged when the DOCX standard was released or the workflow of converting a word to pdf became common. All of that stuff really didn’t hit mainstream until the Obama administration. It would have probably even been longer for a legal office to adopt it.

I think it’s safe to say she knows how to use Microsoft Word (or something like Lotus Notes), print a document, and even scan something to a pdf. I bet you could also teach her how to use ether “print to PDF” function fairly quickly. However if you just plop her in front of a computer and tell her to go at it I think the most likely result is Kamala swearing at the ribbon interface…

Nurses also have a reputation of being former high school mean girls, for whatever that’s worth.

That’s generally how progressive tax brackets work, yes. Technically speaking if I rich person wants to take out a 30k HELOC they’d also not get taxed on it.

Okay but you can just apply the same logic to a HELOC. If you get a 30k HELOC for a bedroom renovation then it does not count towards capital gains tax.

Even normal capital gains taxes have brackets.