Dire Wombat

Of course Russian hypersonic missiles are "really a thing" - they fire them at Ukraine all the time. Multiple models, their use & performance well-documented. Really tough to shoot down. Iran doesn't have any b/c they're too valuable for RU to just give away.

Why am I even responding to this shit.

This might suggest that invasion, military occupation, and an incredibly costly forever war don’t actually help anyone. I get that you might need to insist otherwise for your own cognitive dissonance as a participant, but you’re not making a great case for it.

Afghanistan is a very strange example to try & justify this with.

With respect, there’s a big difference between being born into a society & paying legally mandated taxes, & volunteering for an org & paid career primarily designed around violence, which has a long history of unjust wars of choice.

Was the Qatar thing reported? I’m drawing a blank.

I work in an unfashionable neighborhood far from downtown, still have an excellent food cart pod across the street w/Korean, Greek, Vietnamese, Japanese, Burgers, Tacos, Indonesian. Awesome (cheap!) Italian bakery & cafe 2 blocks away. I take it for granted at this point.

For sure. The OP is just odd - it seems to be saying Bibi (who again, is very bad) is just inventing Iran’s efforts to get nukes. They are, it’s in their self interest! They haven’t yet b/c of a relentless campaign by Israel & the US, over decades.

Bibi is an ass, throw him in prison, but what's the point of this video? Does anyone actually think the current Iranian regime *isn't* trying to build nuclear weapons? For better or worse Israel & the US have been sabotaging, killing scientists, & bombing their nuke program over the past 25 years.

Yeah thank you, that makes sense. I just this week started learning about the 1948-49 acts & how long it took them to be fully de jure independent after the war, i.e. a roundabout decades long process! One of those "Woah history is complicated" moments for me.

I found this surprising, especially the Ireland part.

I help low-income families w/employment, so we do a lot of interfacing w/grocery & retail cos, & supporting employees who have those roles. A lot of folks have this misconception unfortunately.

Costco does pay better than competitors, but that "average store wage is $31/hour" is just Costco PR that has been uncritically repeated everywhere. There's no credible on the record source for this. Until the most recent round of negotiations, $31.90 was the *top out* pay for store workers.

In a vacuum yes, but there were quite a few times in school (I’m thinking 1990s) where I procrastinated writing assignments for classes & teachers I didn’t like. I love writing, but can’t honestly say my 16y/o self wouldn’t have tried ChatGPT etc for a paper due in the morning.

I’m a caseworker w/low income families & literally sit at kitchen tables talking about “kitchen table issues” w/hundreds of folks over the years. Politically folks just exist in an alternate reality, often a truly insane one! I try to avoid those conversations at this point.

You got a few total strangers around the world to sing this out loud. The times we live in.

I didn't realize that was controversial!

Yes, thank you!! One of my after you win Powerball vanity projects is to create a USB Smellbox that synthesizes odors for games & vids. Think of the possibilities.

Really? In my field (social services) it's standard practice now at the beginning of every meeting. And everyone's email sigs has it included. Etc. I figured it was common even in less kumbaya type places.

Have you ever had a chance to present these to a legacy/mainstream journalist who might have one or more of those habits?

Yeah, lots of variation. A friend of mine has it, but mostly 'just' movement & non-word vocalizations. FWIW the online awareness/influencers I've seen all sound more like this person, almost like they're leaning into the triggers for their videos.

Even the News Hour PBS show w/Gwen Ifill was decent. They gave guests like 5 minutes, which seems like an eternity now.

Ah yes, that classic gambit - "Create an imaginary politician who talks about pronouns all the time, so you can emphasize you are not like that person, who is imaginary".

As I've said somewhere else in this thread, in my experience as a homeless services worker this is just not true. Homeless people & families are very vocal about feeling unsafe & vulnerable when people do insane things in their space on the bus/train.

Also in my pretty extensive experience w/the subject - homeless folks (especially fams) are the most emphatic about feeling scared, unsafe, etc, when people do things like expose and/or relieve themselves on public transit. It hits them hard, they have no refuge or places of safety.

The thing is (speaking as a homeless services worker/advocate) we *do* have some 'solutions' to at least mitigate some of this, they're usually just small-scale & localized. They need awareness & funding, which polarization actively inhibits.

I feel like my prefs aren't really all that unusual and while I'm getting up there, I'm not *that* old! Just strange to know we're so far outside the mainstream on this.

It sounds like the supremacy of video for news/reporting/commentary is acknowledged by all, but as a consumer it's still baffling to me. Text & reading is superior for like 10 different & very clear reasons, outside of a couple cases where video makes sense. I dunno.

I think most journalists who take their craft seriously are highly valued here.

With respect, I've seen plenty of instances here where good-faith disagreement or pushback against a journalist (to use a current example, for posting classic anti-semitic tropes) gets misrepresented as "hostility" & leads to really bad-faith smugness from other (self-described) journalists.

Really nice! Do you remember which ones the middle two are?