He doesn’t seem to have much of a plan. He must be dying very fucking fast or something because it looks like he’s just trying to cement a legacy as quickly as possible before he pops his clogs.

The plan appears to be:

1. Bomb Iran
2. Kill the Iranian leadership
3. Wait for new leadership to come along
4. Bomb them too

Rinse repeat until the country collapses. No attempt at stabilisation, no positioning of the opposition so they can take over, just bomb bomb bomb and we’ll think about what to do afterwards when Trump is dead and doesn’t have to think about it anymore.

Kim Jong Un is batshit crazy, but he does know the extent of his power. His power doesn’t reach much further than North Korea itself, and if he tries anything that might piss off China, he backs off. Trump has no such restrictions, he can do whatever the hell he wants, and does.

The general principle in international relations for the past 100 years is that if you kill your own people, nobody really gives a shit. If you start killing other people, well then that’s when other countries start taking notice.

and yet… Marketing is super important. If you’ve got a good idea, people need to know that it’s there, or else that idea won’t exist for much longer.

There’s a product that I knew about, and it was essentially a sprinkler system you fitted to your home radiator. The idea being that if the room got to a certain temperature (like, say, when the room is on fire), the water inside the radiator would get too hot and burst out of this little plastic thing on the end of the radiator as steam, dousing the fire. It wasn’t there to save lives of people in the room, because the room would have to be so hot that everyone inside would be dead, but it would stop the fire spreading to the next room.

They had lots of tests done, video evidence of it working, but nobody would buy it because they insisted on doing all the marketing themselves, and they were shit at it. The guy who invented it spent more time arguing in comment sections than actually advertising the product. If they’d hired a marketing firm to actually sell the product, they might have been able to sell it to more than a single council’s social housing stock. A lot of investor money went down the drain because of that project and because the ego of the inventor couldn’t be kept in check.

I’m a tiny bit worried that “zionist” might change over time to “not sufficiently anti-zionist”, but… Maybe not, maybe I’m just paranoid.

99% of issues people have with Word are because they never bothered to learn how to use it. Remember those IT classes back in school where they taught you how to do a mail merge? Yeah I bet you can’t remember how to do that now.

Technically it can be, since PEMDAS is not an immutable law, it’s convention so we can communicate maths and come to the same answer.

I’m always careful with loud noises, and yet… I’ve had tinnitus ever since I can remember. There’s always been this high pitched whine whenever I’m in dead silence, and it’s always been the case. I used to think I could hear the electricity running through the walls or something.

Norway?

Minimum/Open prisons probably aren’t so bad, or at least are about the same as retirement homes. Abusive prison guards hitting you? You get that from ‘care’ workers every day anyway, except this time you don’t have to pay for it.

Kinda sounds like a win-win for her when you think about it. The state isn’t gonna stick her in high security prison, more like minimum security, so it’s basically just a retirement home but this time she doesn’t have to pay rent, and under the 8th amendment, prisons in the US are required to provide medical care to inmates (it’s not always the best care, but they do get it), which isn’t actually the case with poorly funded or greedy retirement homes.

There comes a point when you’re old enough that going to prison is actually a better alternative to retirement homes, because a retirement home will actually take your assets so you have no wealth to pass down to your kids, but a prison doesn’t do that. if you go into prison as an elderly person, your house is still yours, your bank accounts are still yours, you just can’t access them while you’re in prison.

The whole “Italians reacting to people doing food wrong” thing always seemed so performative.

Remember that the Salvation Army behaves differently depending on the nation they’re in. The US Salvation Army has different policies to the British one, which has different policies to the Australian one.

To Russians, ‘Nazi’ is not a political ideology or a party, it’s simply “Whoever is against Russia right now”. Are you against Russia? You’re a Nazi, it’s as simple as that. If they had to contend with the idea that Nazism is a political ideology, they’d have to start calling themselves Nazis, which doesn’t work in the Russian psyche.

So, when Russians say that Ukrainians are Nazis, what they really mean is “Ukrainians are fighting back when we kill their children. That makes them enemies and therefore Nazis”

Yeah, and Israel can’t pretend they aren’t choosing to bomb hospitals. It’s almost never “Oops we didn’t intend to do that”, it’s “Well there was a Hamas bunker under that. They were using those playing children as sandbags, we simply had to blast through them!”

I’ll be honest, I’d rather the best engineers be there to create weapons that are extremely precise. The weapons are gonna be made regardless, but I’ve seen photos of what happens to cities when bombers are dropping unguided munitions. Back during WW2, if you wanted to hit a factory in London, you didn’t just drop 1-2 bombs, you dropped hundreds of bombs, you flattened absolutely everything in the area because that was the only way you were gonna hit your target.

At least with precision munitions, if you’re doing war ‘nicely’, you only hit what you intend to hit, not your target + everything else even remotely close to said target. With precision munitions, you can’t ‘accidentally’ bomb a hospital, so when you inevitably do bomb a hospital, you don’t get to go “Oh oops no it’s not my fault it’s the bombs’ fault!”. The sights are crystal clear, the plane/drone moves exactly where you want it to, there’s nothing interfering with the guidance, the bomb locked onto the target you wanted to hit, and you dropped it, all thanks to engineers making those systems. You had everything going for you as a bomber to know exactly what that target was, and you dropped the bomb anyway.

9/10 times yeah you’re only really borrowing money from a bank for mortgages and that’s the only loan you NEED to have. Otherwise there’s credit cards, small business loans, car loans etc. You can probably get-by without those though.

It’s not even good oil though! It’s hard to refine.

It was systematically racist before credit scores as well. Before credit scores, whether you got a loan was dependent on the bank manager ‘liking you’, and by that I mean if you stepped into that room with skin any darker than the sheets the bank manager wore at the weekend, you weren’t getting a loan.

I mean it’s basically just declaring war. It’s the US acting unilaterally to attack a foreign nation for no reason at all. Granted that’s nothing new, but at least with Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush got permission from Congress through the Iraq Resolution (and the AUMF Against Terrorists Act in Afghanistan’s case) before he actually invaded. I get the feeling Trump isn’t even going to ask, he’s just going to attack Venezuela, get dragged into a war, and die.

Then again, Obama attacked Libya without congressional approval, and while Congress could have done something about it, they didn’t.

With or without credit scores, banks are going to be assessing you for whether you’re likely to pay back the loans they provide. Even if you deleted all credit scores overnight so everyone had to do individual assessments, you’re still getting assessed and a credit score in all but name will emerge. If you’re a high risk, banks will just put a big mark on your name that says “Don’t lend to this person, they don’t pay their debts” like they do in Austria.

The only real difference between the US Credit Score and the Chinese Social Credit is that the Chinese Social Credit takes other factors into account in whether you are considered worthy enough to have a loan, which isn’t aaaall that different to how it’s done in the UK, where registering to vote makes your credit score go up, but then again lenders in the UK don’t tend to use credit scores for things like mortgages, they use their own checks.