Yeah, I prefer to submerge myself in house juice

crickets growing louder in volume

“An international treaty isn’t the right way to do this; billionaires will just find another solar system to move to. We can’t tax them unless it’s done by the galactic government”

Damsels in distress arent off the table, but dont be misogynistic about it.

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom did this quite well - while one of your main objectives in both games is to find/save Zelda…

One thing that really helped Brazil in this election was compulsory voting. It’s a lot harder to disenfranchise people when voting is mandatory as you can’t just make them apathetic towards voting at all; you need to make them apathetic towards voting for a specific person/party.

I’ve said it a million times before and I’ll continue to crow about it until it’s the norm in all democracies: compulsory voting saves lives. With compulsory voting in the USA the Republicans would basically cease to exist outside of rural areas, because you just can’t win with only 30% of voters backing you.

Both is a great idea. Both should be the suggestion for every reasonable person.

The US has never had a single ally, maybe except Israel. Only vassals.

Okay, I’ll bite.

In what ways has Australia been, and does Australia continue to be, a vassal of the USA? From our perspective, the USA has always been an ally for a long time (both militarily and economically), but the G.W. Bush and Trump presidencies, as well as the shambles of the AUKUS deal, have tested the resolve of the Australian public.

Generally speaking, Australian politicians - including governments - have never acted towards the USA as being a governing force over our vassal-like nature, nor outside the realms of an ally, so I’m wondering where your supposition comes from in our context.

You can fairly reliably tell whether or not such a post/comment is made genuinely (albeit perhaps astroturfically) or sardonically by merit of the instance from which the commenter posts.

Here - I can be your spell/grammar check for you:

First panel: Watching old movies is weird. Like, imagine if something like Fight Club came out today.

Second panel: Fight Club in 1999: We work jobs we hate to buy shit we don’t need; we are the middle children of history.

Third panel: Fight Club in 2026: We work jobs we hate but still can’t afford basic needs, while people born to wealth call us lazy.

Fourth panel: Our forefathers were told that if they work hard they could become rock stars or millionaires.

Fifth panel: We were told that if we work hard then maybe we will be able to afford rent and groceries.

Might be worth putting your text into a spell/grammar checker before adding it to an image if English isn’t your first language or you struggle with grammar, as I’ve made around 20 fixes to your text of less than 100 words.

For reference, I’ve also spell/grammar checked this comment I’m replying to:

The software I was using made it extremely hard to edit text. I had figured it out by the end but at that point it was too late; I had already merged all the vector layers.

8 changes to a comment of 35 words.

1/3 of the country will either blindly support Trump or the broader Republican Party. Because of a confluence of a lack of mandatory voting; first past the post voting; and the electoral college, 1/3 of eligible voters often decide the outcome of elections. This isn’t so much Trump being DEMOLISHED and EVISCERATED as it is a warning to the rest of the country: show up and vote or they’ll still win, even when Trump is this unpopular. Show up again in 2028. Show up to the primaries.

If your vote literally was meaningless, billionaires wouldn’t spend crazy amounts of money on elections; they’d consider that wasted money which is anathema to their existence.

Haven’t they invested like $100 billion or so in LLM companies though? I thought they were a big player in the Enron-esque cyclical investment scam they’re all running. Will be tough for them if they can’t recoup any of that.

Is it really? That’s really interesting, and would cause a lot of confusion in metric-English countries where ‘mil’ is pejoratively used in speech to either mean ‘millimetre’ or ‘millilitre’ depending on context.

Why does there even need to be a bill (in the sense of keeping track of costs on a per-patient basis) to begin with?

There doesn’t need to be a bill that the patient sees or has access to, but the costs need to be tracked so that governments can adequately budget for healthcare. Governments need to be able to make educated assumptions about future costs so that they can align their tax schedules to ensure that the monies are there to pay for the costs involved in healthcare. Individualising the costs per-patient and per-issue assists with forecasting costs when governments also have access to good data about prevalence. It also assists with ensuring that the correct number of specialists are available for a given issue.

A non-lethal stroke would just make him more of a Republican and more appealing to Republican voters.

If you’re driving a car at a speed much faster than you intended to, by definition you’re being negligent. Speedometers are very easy to check and by failing to regularly check your speed you’re acting negligently.

No, but it can be a problem for vaginas.

I’ve had to do similar before. When I was 16 I was learning to drive with a friend’s dad out in rural Australia. There were a bunch of ducks crossing the road at one point; I stopped to let them pass, but after they moved on and I started rolling forwards one duck turned around and tried to attack the car, resulting in me hitting it. I couldn’t even look out the rear view mirror at it but my friend’s dad did, and told me it was still alive but very mangled. He gently told me to reverse back over it and keep on driving, which I did, and then we drove in silence for the next fifteen minutes.

I felt absolutely awful about it (and still do, despite it happening almost 2 decades ago) but I know that leaving it in the road dying slowly would have been a far worse fate.

I hope you take some solace in the fact that you did the right, albeit difficult, thing for that rabbit.

Thankfully we have an independent organisation that sets electoral boundaries and administers elections (the Australian Electoral Commission) as well as mandatory voting (including imprisoned populations), so that shit isn’t really a viable option here. We have our issues, to be sure, but those pillars of our democracy have been strong for a long time. It’s part of the reason why it took so damn long for a right-wing populist party to gain real significance, and they’ve not yet been properly tested electorally so we don’t even know if the polls will deliver them a decent amount of seats, let alone a chance at government.

As Oliver covered in the episode, they also make money hand-over-fist by encouraging ‘upcoding’ to extract maximum dollars from the government. So they’re simultaneously denying coverage (to save money) which is harming and killing people, while charging exorbitant prices to the consumers (to make money), while also stealing taxes allocated to help those people (to make even more money). It’s a triple-whammy.