mic_check_one_two

Congress: “Oh hey, they sounded an alarm. Let’s go ahead and add that to the muffled pile of past alarms that have been sounded.”

Exactly this. Any kind of settlement does a massive disservice to the people whose wages were stolen.

When people complain about white collar crime going unpunished, this is exactly what they’re referring to. Wage theft is larger than every other form of theft combined. It literally accounts for more than 51% of all theft. But it largely goes unpunished, and is treated like a civil issue instead of criminal.

If a cashier steals $100 from the cash register, they’ll be leaving their shift in handcuffs. But if that same company routinely and systematically steals $100 from every single employee by rounding their timesheets down, netting them millions of dollars in excess profits by the end of the fiscal year… It’s treated as a civil issue, the business gets fined 10% of the profits they made, and the individual employees see virtually none of it after the lawyers get their take. The company treats it as a cost of doing business, and changes nothing in the future.

Should also go back and check to see if you were unbanned. I was banned during the API purge, for mass editing+deleting my comments. First automod banned me from various pro-Spez subs when I started editing my old comments. Then when I repeated the edit+delete with my second/third/etc accounts, it “permanently” banned them site wide for ban evasion.

Went back a little while later, and all of my accounts were magically unbanned and all of the edits+deletes were undone. The benign explanation is likely that the ban(s) prevented any of the edits from actually committing. But the more tinfoil-hat explanation is that the admins want the site to look more active, so they rolled back bans so old content was still available and their user count appeared higher than reality.

My only complaint about Ground News (and most media bias meters in general) is that factual papers will almost always be listed as left-leaning. Because the Overton window has shifted so far to the right that cold hard facts presented exactly as they happened with zero spin now has a left-wing bias.

Chaotic Good: Donate it to food pantries and soup kitchens.

Chaotic evil: Dump it on the steps of the capitol building and build a giant ground beef Mitch McTurtle.

Yeah, lots of folks don’t realize that cat and dog food are required to be fit for human consumption… Not because of accidental “toddler found the bag of dog food” scenarios, but because of the “destitute people on social security can’t afford anything better” scenarios.

Yeah, my parents are hardcore preppers, for all the wrong reasons. For the longest time, it was the “Biden is going to roll tanks down the streets” type of prepping. But now I’m seeing the prepping in a new light, because it could 100% turn into a full blown “nobody can afford soup, and the government is actively dismantling the soup kitchens while forcing people onto the streets” economy.

Yes, it was a clusterfuck, but ~~not on the level~~ even larger than it was made out.

FTFY. Uvalde was a complete capitulation in regards to training, leadership decisions, and execution.

I already had you tagged as “Okay boomer” for some reason, and I guess that tracks with someone who would downplay how fucking atrocious the Uvalde police response was. Every single cop on the Uvalde police force deserved prison time for their outright complicity in the shooter’s murders.

Yeah, the military has to hold regular “you’re not as attractive as you think you are. Know your fucking number” meetings with the people who have security clearance. Basically, they have to be blunt, and straight up tell the people with clearance “you’re a grey and wrinkly old man who smells like wet beef. At the bar after work, you’re a 3. Maybe a 3.5 if you bothered to shower before getting to the bar. If a solid California 10 strikes up a conversation with you at the bar and seems really interested in your work, it’s because she’s a spy.”

They have to hold these meetings because honeypotting is so fucking effective on the sad sacks who have clearance.

Torture has proven effective, but only before the torture actually starts. Basically, the victim is more likely to divulge good information when they’re anticipating the torture, as an attempt to get out of it. Basically, before the torture, there is still some level of rapport between the victim and the torturer. But once the torture starts, the rapport is gone and the victim will harden themselves and refuse, or intentionally give bad info. Or they will simply say whatever they think the torturer wants to hear to attempt to stop the torture, regardless of whether or not it’s accurate.

Basically, the only time the torturer has any actual trust in the info is when the victim is trying to delay/avoid the torture. Once it starts, the torturer can’t actually trust anything the victim says. If getting info was actually the goal, the torturer could simply start prepping for the torture and never actually start it. Essentially, keep the victim in that initial “if I keep talking I can avoid the torture” phase.

It's all so random and spread out.

Until you consider the fact that he’s taking orders from Russia. When you consider all of his actions under the filter of “would a Russian asset do these things” they all make perfect sense.

To be fair, the entire region was a powder keg that was simply waiting for a spark. The assassination ended up being that spark, but it’s likely that something else would have kicked it off even if he was never assassinated. It’s not like the assassination was the only thing that caused the war; It simply happened at the height of political tensions, and provided convenient propaganda.

So yeah, there would be a whole hell of a lot of parallels if Luigi gets offed. But even then, it will likely happen even without his death.