Unfortunately, nobody would be able to take him out that quickly. Russia still has plenty of nukes, and they could fire them all before anybody has time to react. If that nuke is an ICBM, though, as soon as it leaves the silo the world would know, and the counter barrage of nukes would be firing up before it even lands.

I originally meant that dropping a nuke would have the entire world declare war on Russia, even his former allies because no one wants to rule over a pile of radioactive rocks, but thinking about it, his allies would probably be the ones most likely to try to have him assassinated in that situation. A maniac with a big stick is only useful so long as you don’t have to worry about him smacking you with it, too.

Mutually assured destruction is still a thing. We may not be at Cold War levels of insanity, where between the US and Russia there were enough nukes to glass the planet like 150 times over, but plenty of nations have arsenals (especially in Europe), and the best way to make enemies of the entirety of the world would be to be the first one to launch a nuke. Dropping a nuke would signal to every leader in the world that no country is safe from becoming an irradiated wasteland.

I think if Putin dropped a nuke, his allies would drop him faster than it would take NATO to declare all out war with Russia.

One thing to remember about Republicans is that logical dissonance comes with the territory. They’re not worried because they’re “one of the good ones.” Or because they’re one issue voters who ignore everything else the Republicans say that they’re going to do. I’ve seen many Republicans who live in Massachusetts and enjoy the benefits provided by the liberal politics of the state while at the same time complaining about those same politics. People complaining about Obama care despite having been on Romney care for years, that sort of thing.

Amazon already has their own pharmacy, btw. They even bought a prescription delivery service a few years back, called PillPack or something. Buying CVS would give them brick and mortar stores for the pharmacy they already run online.

As much as I hate Amazon and their overreach into every sector of the economy, I’d love to see them bring the full might of their lawyers against Musk.

On Barq?

This has such MSI “there will be no bad dragons on my watch” vibes.

Based on the photos of the mascots, there’s no way they didn’t hire a furry to draw those.

throw a parachute on it so it’s aligned vertically, make it detonate when it lands, make it blow straight down as opposed to all over the place, and try to get that thing to land on a tank

You’ve basically just described a HEAT round without the melted copper penetrator.

Life, uh, finds a way.

The 30mm “Barrett” Pattern bolter, created by MARS, Inc. and Barrett, is currently undergoing evaluations by the US Army.

Everything old is new again.

IMO, I think creative people are at the heart of a social media platform. A big part of art is the community aspect of sharing it with others. So they interact with each other as well as create Content ™ for others. This is especially obvious with platforms like YouTube, but even Twitter is like this. If there weren’t people posting photos, drawings, music, game dev posts, and livestreams, Twitter would be a very different place. Creative people are responsible for much of the original content online. Without them, Twitter would basically be news, political rants, and reposted memes.

Twitter was largely considered the best place for artists by process of elimination, and I know plenty of artists were dying for an alternative but didn’t have one. Places like DeviantArt don’t get traffic from the general populace, and Instagram’s algorithm is horrible for discoverability. With Bluesky getting enough people to make it worth the migration, the creative people are moving over, and their followers will join them.

I know the only reason I ever made a Twitter account was because 70% of the people I followed on Tumblr left for Twitter after the porn ban. Hell, Tumblr dropped like 99.7% in value after the porn ban because they drove off almost their entire userbase.

Since the mid-2000s, most companies expect everybody to be pseudo on-call at all times without any additional compensation thanks to cell phones and the internet making everybody reachable at any time. Your boss calling you after work, on the weekends, or while you’re on vacation to talk about work is normal and they expect you to be accessible at all hours of the day. At shittier jobs like retail, you can even expect to be called on your days off and asked to come in if somebody doesn’t show up or something, even in the middle of the day, and if you aren’t available or “flexible” you can expect it to negatively impact your job.

At my first job for a small business, I didn’t take a vacation (not even a single day) in 10 years because the boss didn’t give us vacation days and instead said that anybody could take days off at anytime and he’d make the schedule work, but we were always understaffed and he’d make you feel guilty for taking days off. That’s closer to the norm these days in the US than the 6 weeks of vacation time that is the norm in Europe. Large companies are required to give you 2 weeks plus a handful of sick days, and that’s it.

Nor would they care if they knew about it.

I think “leave” is doing some heavy lifting, but I could see plenty of people creating accounts as the site reaches a large enough user base to attract the general public.

I saw a video recently of somebody talking about how they were posting the same thing on Twitter and Bluesky, and despite having a fraction of the followers on Bluesky, the post there had like 6x the engagement compared to Twitter. As they put it, “The creatives have moved to Bluesky.”

They did it a second time, too.

You should look into Operation Wetback 1 and 2, where the US deported a bunch of Mexican immigrants (legal, illegal, documented and undocumented alike) and US citizens to Mexico for “looking too Mexican.”

Citizenship means nothing to racists.

Tumblr used to let you edit other people’s comments. That’s close, right?

California has one of the highest CoL’s in the country. 51% of Americans made $15k or less in 2021.

They absolutely did. I saw somebody say how the demographic of the Democratic Party has fundamentally changed, and I think there’s some real truth to that.

This should’ve been an easy win, but the DNC didn’t campaign on the things that voters are worried about. They seem completely out of touch with their own base.

Legal or illegal matters very little. During Operations Wetback 1 and 2, American citizens were rounded up as well as the illegal immigrants/foreign workers and deported to Mexico for “looking too Mexican,” and I’ve heard of at least one or two border towns that have done the same thing in the past 10 years (and crashed their economies doing it). I don’t expect Wetback 3 to go any differently other than probably targeting more minority communities besides Latinos.

And what do you expect people to do other than make exasperated “I told you this would happen” comments? It’s not like making comments on Lemmy will do anything when the dictator hasn’t even entered office yet and the only thing we can generally do anyways is whine to those in office to actually do something. There’s donating to various groups put in place to help minority communities, but that also has nothing to do with commenting on Lemmy.

Fun fact(s): The COVID strains that were active at the beginning of last year were actually more infectious and deadlier than the original COVID strains. The only reason we didn’t hear much about them is because, despite RFK Jr’s beliefs, the vaccines work. 443 people died from COVID in the US during the first week of November, even with the vaccines. There were about 15 deaths from the flu in that same week.

There are plenty of immunocompromised people who can’t get vaccinated who can no longer be in public without risking death now that COVID is endemic.