Oil prices hitting a localized maximum, so no surprise Dubai wants to move more of it more quickly. Also, the war has wrecked hell on their tourism economy, so they’re probably staring down some ugly long-term financial projections.

Amazed the rest of OPEC didn’t simply loosen production standards in response to the war. Now seems like as good a time as any.

Anyone who thinks doctors don’t fly Spirit, but can explain why they haven’t updated any of the magazines in the waiting room in twenty years, please speak up.

he made a specific point of praising a demented rapist and lauding the pedophile party as heroes

He made a point of praising a President’s pick for the Antitrust Division of the DOJ. He didn’t praise Trump and he certainly didn’t praise pedophilia.

Slater’s tenure at DOJ was short-lived and unremarkable. So feel free to mock Yen on those grounds. But this has dick all to do with Epstein. It has nothing to do with the bloated ICE budget (which received bipartisan approval) or the assorts nightmarish cabinet appointments, many of which enjoyed supermajority support in the Senate (Rub’em All Out Rubio was appointed unanimously ffs).

he jumped head first into the cesspit for no reason other than he believed it.

He’s a Tech Goon and Trump had a ton of Tech Goons on his team. These people aren’t partisan, they’re corporate lemmings. By 2028, I’m sure Yen will be lining up to brown nose the incoming Dem administration. By 2032, he’ll be back on Team R, shocked at how the party that did everything Tech wanted has betrayed his customers again. Oh, and incidentally, insisting that the only way to protect yourself from Mean Old Big Government is by upping your Proton License to Double Super Secure.

And so, even though our opinions on age verification coincidentally align, he can fuck right off.

He’s endorsing the poison so he can sell the antidote.

Band T-shirts are sometimes — or even often — the highest quality T-shirts available.

Small local bands tend to source from local manufacturers and distributors. And as they consider their merch a form of advertising, it pays to invest in material that lasts.

But the bigger and more volume-based franchises tend to get their clothes from the same global production and distribution chains as every other Fast Fashion brand. Taylor Swift isn’t contracting with a dozen different local print shops per venue to fill an order big enough to saturate a stadium. She’s going to the same folks that sell to H&M and Zara.

The market can remain irrational far longer than the economy can remain solvent.

I dunno how the Japanese and Koreans will do

They’re equally freaked out, as they’ve been lashed to the same Wall Street piloted sinking ship as the rest of the US periphery. If you check out the politics in Japan and Korea over the last fifteen years, its been on a reactionary bent of increasing domestic militarization amid a continuous “Why aren’t our naturally superior native peoples making more babies?!” eugenics freak-out.

You can throw in The Philippines, Taiwan, India, and Australia while you’re at it. None of these countries seem to have a serious long term plan for their economic futures. Everything revolves around “containment” of the Chinese super-economy, even as individual plutocrats demand carve outs for their own supply lines and revenue streams.

Okay, but have you considered that the Chinese Communist Party is ontologically evil? And therefore any amount of business (direct retail sale to consumers that sidesteps US rent-seekers) is in support of a genocidal regime of highly corrupt madmen who want to destroy liberty and justice across the entire planet?

We need to STOP CHINA NOW before they take over the damned world and ruin everything sweet and honest and pure that our glorious nation has created.

The nightmare trap of the Two Party System is that you can look at one party cozying up to Big Tech (Obama in 2009) and conclude the other party must be reflexively in opposition.

Trump was fully surrounded by Thiel goons before he’d even left office in '21. And the relationship only got tighter with his Elon Musk Bromance. But hey, if you’d just elected Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney Tim Walz to the White House, I’m sure nobody would be talking about how much of their cabinet was stuffed with Silicon Valley cutouts.

It’s not like a cartel of trillionaires can buy up both parties at once, right?

Social media functions as a kind of gatekeeper for public interactions, not unlike credit scores, driver’s licenses, and college degrees. The absence of a presence on social media is not only socially debilitating (you’re cut out of the information stream for local events and public amenities) but a red-flag for college recruiters and employers. It’s much like how not using a credit card regularly in your teens/20s impacts your ability to access low-interest lending in your 30s/40s. Or not having a driver’s license interferes with your right to vote.

State officials have been searching for a kind of uniform, iron-clad, easily verifiable public ID for ages. Linking your online presence (a thing that you need for a myriad of daily tasks) to your ID becomes a pathway to this goal. Universal, non-transferable digital ID becomes a wicked two-edged sword as it both exhaustively tracks the “documented” individuals and neatly severs the “undocumented” from society.

Between an exploitative streaming economy and a “cost-of-touring crisis,” buying merch is sometimes the most direct way to get money into an artist’s pocket, even with venue cuts. Just ask Taylor Swift, who, according to Pollstar, made approximately $200 million in merchandise from her 2023 Eras tour dates.

The Environmental Impact of Fast Fashion, Explained

Fast fashion companies focus on low-cost garments that replicate the latest fashion trends, quickly pushing them into stores to capitalize on these trends. This means that retailers are able to offer a greater variety of products in large quantities and allow consumers to get more fashion and product differentiation at a low price.

According to an analysis by Business Insider, fashion production comprises 10% of total global carbon emissions, as much as the emissions generated by the European Union. The industry dries up water resources and pollutes rivers and streams, while 85% of all textiles go to dumps each year. Even washing clothes releases 500,000 tons of microfibers into the ocean each year, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles.

It does however set a precedent for other celebrities and people going forward

The precedent is “you need to jump through a series of legal hoops and build up a legal army in order to secure what was already supposed to be yours to begin with”.

It would have been better if it was one of the likeable celebrities. Like Keanu Reeves.

It wouldn’t matter, because we’re talking about an entrenched legal precedent not a likeability contest.

In some sense, it begins to feel like all that sovereign citizenship bullshit. People being fed this narrative that you have to perform an elaborate, esoteric legal dance in order to have your humanity recognized by the state bureaucracy. It creates the (false) impression that there’s One Neat Trick to having your civil rights acknowledged and respected, and you just need to be savvy enough to speak the magic words and perform the ritual dance. In truth, you’re in a boxing match with a gorilla.

except in the context of managing withdrawal symptoms

Seems like one hell of a caveat

Why would I do that?

Presumably because you have a hagiographic understanding of your nation’s police and courts, and you really do believe civil rights are delivered from a benevolent judicial priesthood.

You stating that someones vehicle is public is quite literaly 180 degrees from the legal opinion.

Whose legal opinion?

You see there used to be this us thing called the 4th amendment

Point to the moment in history during which the 4th amendment existed the way the lay American thinks is does

Sure. But you’d lose the case.

You don’t have right to privacy in public.

At least in the 80s there was potential for improvement

We don’t talk about the irreconcilable damage inflicted during the earlier industrial era. We don’t talk about what modern fossil fuels and plastics replaced.

Nothing about this is eternal. We are no closer to oblivion today than we were during Operation Plumbbob or the Black Plague.

You won’t live to see the end. You won’t live to see the beginning of the end. You won’t even live to see the end of the beginning.

We’re all living through a single footstep on an endless road.

And heavily controlled, regulated and legislated.

Only took a century or ten

That’s exactly what radar guns do

Right now, the algorithm is more harmful than those because everyone is addicted to them.

Again, I don’t think you’re acknowledging the difference between chemical addiction and social habit.

If you spend a week without cell phone reception, you don’t die from withdrawal symptoms.

You can easily go up to 2010 and later without any antennas besides the radio.

I mean, you’ve still got a license plate. Cops have been tracking those for decades.