Trump fails logistics once again. Mandatory military service makes sense in smaller countries because you need a minimum number of people to make a military function. In larger countries like America, we wouldn’t even know what to do with that many soldiers. On average 4 million Americans turn 18 each year. Let’s assume we’re only taking men, and that generously half of them find a way out of service. That’s still 1 million new recruits each year. America has the third largest military in terms of manpower in the world and we have 1.4 million active duty troops. In one year we’d double the number of active troops. Now you need to pay, feed, house, arm, and train them, which all takes… more personnel!

After seeing his absolutely bungled exit from Afghanistan, I have full faith in that administration to handle that transition

I mean if you’re stupid enough you could try to claim a donation to the Taliban as charitable contribution for a deduction. And never underestimate the stupidity of people

American tax forms have an “other income” field. That’s where you can report any money you’ve made not covered by the other fields including any ill gotten gains. That section doesn’t require you to list a source, and even if it did nobody expects you to list “$7,800 - meth sales, $32,200 - crack sales, $50,000 - robberies”. You’d just say “Other income - $90,000”

The logic being that if the government never gives you the opportunity to pay taxes on something, then they can’t charge you with tax evasion. Plus there’s a lot of money in crime! If the US can get a piece of that pie they will!

Finally, the IRS is an already underfunded organization and contrary to the popular narrative, is very easy to work with. If you make a genuine good faith effort to pay your taxes and they find issues, an agent will work with you to resolve it. They’ll set up payment plans, defer payments, and more if you’re cooperative. All this is to say that reporting people for crimes besides tax ones and terrorism (the only one they’re legally required to report to outside agencies) just makes their job harder, so they don’t

Late judicial tinkering with election laws can lead to disruption and to unanticipated and unfair consequences for candidates, political parties, and voters, among others.

I wonder if there’s anything else that’d be unfair? You know like making the votes of citizens not reflect their demographics

A Wells Fargo spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company “holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior.”

I mean the jokes write themselves

I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but 2017 was 7 years ago. Which is squarely in the middle of 5-10 years ago

I react poorly to blood donation and have had these used on me, they are incredibly unpleasant. There’s no lasting harm, and they do work very well. Basically imagine a chemical burn throughout your nose, sinuses, and upper respiratory system that lasts 30 seconds. It works immediately and gets a very strong reaction

Would you use your VP position to do exactly what I would do and screw everyone around you for power or will you be a good little boy like Pence and let us threaten your life for supreme Executive power?

Gee, what do you think they want to use the presidency to accomplish?

If speed running counts I was once top 10 in the world for speed running a puzzle game. Since then I’ve dropped into the 20s and the video has been lost

The Doughboys have been joking about this on their podcast recently. One of them remarked that in Tenet you would suck poop back up your butthole. So they joke that shitting is pulling a “reverse Tenet”

Man who has never been the most popular person upset that he still isn’t popular

Man I’m glad I outgrew high school

The short answer is that we don’t know. It has long been a legal grey area when depicting porn of underage characters that are clearly not real. There’s the classic “she’s actually 1000 she just looks 6 years old” and “all characters depicted are at least 18 [despite all of them being in various stages of high school]”. American politicans are by and large way out of date with modern technology and cannot be expected to rule competently on the subject. Is the AI nude of a real person “revenge porn” or constitutionally protected free speech? People have been drawing fan art of underage celebs having sex with high detail for a long time (see Harry Potter/Twilight rule 34). Ultimately congress will need to make laws about this or courts will have to interpret a previous ruling as applying to these images. Unfortunately due to the Streisand Effect whomever is at the unfortunate center of this shitstorm will be forever made into pornographic material so we understand the general hesitation to get involved

I kinda agree. Sure there’s observable/measurable phenomena out there, but past a certain point it’s like a toddler asking why? You just have to say "because that’s the way it is:

Why did that apple hit me in the head? Because of gravity

Why does gravity make things fall? Objects of larger mass attract objects of smaller mass

Why do they do that? Well the more massive something is the more it warps space around it

Why do massive objects warp space around them? Well there’s some theories that certain sub-atomic particles interact in a way that causes these forces

Why do those particles do that? Well that’s just what they do

(yes, I know these are overly simplified)

Eventually you reach our furthest level of understanding and we just have to say “that’s just what we have observed happening, we don’t have a root cause or explanation yet.” That bottom level is basically magic in our universe until we learn more about it

The only reason I listen to Film Reroll is because it’s about movies. I don’t even listen to all of them, just movies I know will be fun/I’ve seen. Fifth Element, Mighty Ducks, Aliens, Last Action Hero, and Memento (which was incredibly cool how they did it) are the ones I’ve listened to since 2020.

Something about actual play just irritates me, especially for D&D. I’d just rather play myself

I’m fully in the Nick Weiger podcast universe so I listen to:

• Doughboys
• Doughboys Double
• Get Played
• Get Played Season Pass

Which are all comedy podcasts with similar people appearing. They’re about chain restaurants, random side bullshit, Video Games, and Anime respectively. Then I also listen to:

• Quick Question with Soren and Daniel
• The Film Reroll

Which is a podcast by 2 former cracked writers which is the only reason people listen to them and a podcast about playing through movies as role playing games

I just watched a video where the director of John Wick was talking about how hard he had to fight the studio to kill the puppy right at the top of the movie. People wouldn’t stand for a dead dog, it’s too evil, etc…

Anyway now we’re discussing if a puppy killer should be in a position to run the largest military in the world if an obese, confused, incontinent, drug addicted, 77 year old man kicks the bucket

Who needs to make America Great Again? We’re already here baby!

Surfing USA

No actually, in America we don’t actually have all that many rights. I was specifically asking him what right we have as citizens that he feels we are being denied by this decision. Because I would be hard pressed to identify a right we have that is harmed by this decision

It appears this person signs off all of their comments with a creative commons license for fair use, presumably saying how you’re allowed to use their comment. Which I’m relatively sure has exactly the same legal power as a boomer posting a Facebook picture saying that they don’t consent to having their data collected

Every single time we infringe on personal freedoms, we need to do this calculation.

What freedom do you have that you think this is infringing on?

Stop Chinese data collection. I think this is just misdirection. You say it’s conspiracy, but just like the PATRIOT Act had nothing to do with patriotism or protecting children and the Iraqi war had nothing to do with WMD… the government often misleads or outright lies.

Correct, it had nothing to do with patriotism or protecting children. It had to do with war profiteering. That’s the simple answer to basically every question that starts with “why did the American government do…” It made wealthy Americans richer. That’s the default US policy

Much of our data is for sale to anyone who wants to buy it. In fact, our law enforcement loves buying data instead of going through the process for a warrant.

There are so many apps out there with less than scrupulous devs who are more than willing to scrape for as much data as possible and sell that off. China can easily acquire massive amounts of data regardless.

Yup, and that’s fine in the way that it’s fine for us to ship oil, soybeans, and semiconductors to China. As long as America gets the first bite of the pie, what happens after that is mostly fine

Chinese influence on Americans. I think this one makes more sense than the first one. China is able to quietly suppress or encourage certain points of views - subtly pushing the 170 million Americans into directions that are beneficial for China’s interests. For example, perhaps media discouraging support for Taiwan.

I think this is ancillary benefit that is mostly being pushed by our military. I know it’s the “reason” they’re giving but I agree this is not the primary purpose

I believe this because we are a free society.

We are not. By basically every measurable metric of “freedom” the US doesn’t even crack the top 10 in the world and on a lot of lists we don’t make the top 20. I don’t know what Americans think “freedom” means but whenever I hear people talk about it I often wonder if we live in the same country

You are right that we don’t always live up to that term, and never really have. But we get a hell of a lot closer than China or Russia. We shouldn’t be moving towards them in ideological terms, but away from them.

It’s pretty hyperbolic to say that banning the Chinese pipeline of disinformation and spyware makes America ideologically similar to Russia

As for the young people, there are 170 million people on the app and it skews younger. A large portion of these people use Tiktok as their primary social media. A lot of these will be pushed towards anti-establishment and radical ideologies. Tiktok already leans leftist (and not neoliberal left).

That’s just conjecture. Do you know how many social media sites we’ve seen come and go? You assert people will become anti-establishment, I assert they’ll just move on to other social media. Both of our assertions are equally valid without evidence