We’ll need to do a double blind study. At least. The only question is what will we use for the control group. Femboys kissing femboys? Trans girls kissing trans girls? Maybe both? We should be as thorough as possible. Maybe a rigorous oral exam is in order as well.

They read it as a third of 20% (with 20% of all Americans boycotting), meaning 6% of all Americans.

Rule number one of OpSec is if you’re gonna do something, don’t tell anyone. If they’re planning something that the government can/would consider illegal, saying something online is the stupidest thing you can do. Even if it’s as innocuous as planning to protest.

Behind this mask is more than a man, Mr. Creedy. Behind this mask is an idea, and ideas cannot be killed.

They also said at one point that these guys were “corrupting the youth with their long hair.”

Unfortunately, this was a few years ago, and the only thing I can find that resembles my memory of the article I was thinking of is this photo in my phone:

I think I might have had that mixed up with the story of that CEO who cut his pay from 1 million dollars to $70,000 and bumped up the salary of everybody else who worked at the company to $70,000.

Contrast this with the guy in Seattle who like tripled the size of his company in a year simply because offering remote work options made it super easy to scalp software engineers from his competitors.

I was gonna say, this looks stock photo as hell. Not a single bit of individualism at each desk in an industry filled with artists and companies that have Weta Workshops make statues for their entryways. Plus, laptops? I can’t imagine rendering and compiling being done on laptops, nor is there the room for hardware like Wacom touchscreens.

Feels very “give me a photo of an office with computers.”

That isn’t necessarily an issue. The US uses their own designs as well, so if you count them, you can add an additional 1 or more to every category. You have the Abrams, as well as the F-15, F-16, A-10, C-130 and AC-130, B-52, B-2, Bradley IFV, Striker IFV and variants (if we still even use those), M109, etc. Even between different branches of the military, they use totally different designs for the same role. The army, air force, and navy all use Blackhawks for their transport helicopter, but the marines use Super Hueys, a refit of the Vietnam era Huey. Even the Abrams has multiple variants, such as the short barrel one that’s been used in the forever war in the Middle East, as well as tons of armor kits and equipment packages produced by different companies. Hell, the world’s first purpose-built sniper rifle that wasn’t just the best firing of the infantry rifles they had on hand was built by 2 guys in a shed in England who made match rifles for shooting competitions, and the current US sniper rifle is a civilian hunting rifle.

I feel like this is exactly the right place for the writer to sell in order to cast the widest net, ironically. I recently heard that at least 60% of Americans have an Amazon Prime subscription.

I feel like Europe has a leg up in this situation and can scale into it faster than people expect as well. Many European nations have experience in joint projects either with the US (like Germany with the Leopard 2 coming out of the same program as the US M1 Abrams and probably being the biggest export MBT outside of Soviet tanks from the Cold War) or with each other (like with the Eurofighter, the standardization of ammunition, and every NATO nation using the Rheinmetall L7 120mm smoothbore cannon as the gun on their tanks). Every NATO nation - and even plenty outside of it - are already on a standardized logistics platform, and moving that away from any American standard would be as easy as using an American standard, and could prove difficult for American arms manufacturers if the two diverge and NATO nations suddenly become an “export market.”

Be gay, select pronouns, and devour the world for 1.2k more copper plate production per minute.

Why would Krasnov end the tariff war that’s proving so effective against his master’s enemies?

Thanks for clearing that up, Schumer.

No, that’s basically it.

The reason for all this work is basically the concept of a currency that isn’t backed by and dependent upon governments while also being impossible to counterfeit, hence a lot of encryption because it fundamentally says that you can’t trust the other computers that you’re talking to. Everybody holds a ledger that says that you have $5, so you can’t suddenly say that you actually have $10. And all the math is to prevent inflation by limiting the amount of currency that exists at any time. The more currency there is from solving the math, the harder the math gets to slow down the creation of new money.

It all falls apart, though, because the only value that crypto has is what it’s worth in traditional fiat currency - the very thing that it’s supposed to replace.

So it’s just a bunch of computers doing a lot of math to make funny money that’s supposedly worth something because…of reasons?

I think it helps to reinforce how silly crypto is, though. Once you establish that fiat currency is basically magic paper we all agree is worth something because it’s backed by things like the government’s reliability and contract to uphold that value, and then you say, “and crypto, designed to replace fiat currency, is backed by fiat currency,” the whole thing falls apart like the house of cards that it is.

How can you justify a funny money that doesn’t do anything new in terms of cyber security, while burning vastly more resources to do it, and is only worth something because of the currency that it’s supposed to replace, and that value rapidly fluctuates from moment to moment.

I highly recommend watching The Worst Guide To Factorio, which is where that quote came from. Gives a great overview of the game with awesome lines like that.

Some other great ones include:

Do you have a STEM degree or similar mental affliction?

Using this very average German, we need to build an automation factory, and to do this, we’re going to become more obsessed with belts than an anime protagonist so that we can accomplish more insertions than a sounding enthusiast.

It was never about winning, it’s about sending a message. This planet is alive, and I’m going to teach it fear. And in order to do that, we’re going to be expanding harder than a furry artist trying to make rent.

Hope you started this several hours ago, because now it’s time for the Kovarex enrichment process. … Fun fact: It’s named after the game’s lead developer and works by exposing the uranium 238 to the radioactive yikes that is his Reddit posts.

Scale up our circuit production to an absurd degree and consume them like they’re Doritos. Size does matter and anyone who tells you otherwise is a bottom, and I’m always on top of my game.

And probably my favorite:

Finally, I have to address a bit of an elephant in the room. The lead developer of this game kind of sucks. I truly hope they’ve had a redemption arc since their controversy but I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending this game without acknowledging it. So to balance the scales I’ve done what any reasonable person would do in this situation. I learned LUA out of spite and made a mod that lets you be gay and select pronouns.

Counterpoint

This planet is unprocessed, and I will be the one to refine it. The Factory Must Grow.

Yeah, this one feels more like, “I can’t believe they hurt us like this. And by us, I mean me.”

There’s been enough that “Do you play War Thunder” is a security risk question that the US military asks during job interviews.

And they just keep happening…