Yep that’s the joke ;)

Good news! If the MAGA party wins in November they’ll surely defund, gut, or do away with the EPA entirely, so pollution fines will drop to zero, clearly indicating pollution is gone!

I always thought of Quark as the moral center of DS9. Hear me out. It’s a darker show, much more shades of grey, a bit of a break from Roddenbury’s vision of star trek. Instead of Jean Luc’s pompous speeches, and Janeway’s infuriating (and inconsistent) adherence to the prime directive, DS9 actually toes the line and crosses it many times. Quark meanwhile has his own code, and he sticks to it as faithfully as anyone can. He is true to himself and his species and pretty much never crosses his own line - he crosses our line for sure, but rarely if ever his own. Pretty much the only time I can remember him doing something un-ferengi is when he turned down a gazillion bars of latinum to run weapons for those people planning on blowing up a planet with a few million people on it. At the end of the day you can always count on quark doing the right thing. He’s quite complex, and by far one of my favorite characters in all of Trek.

Yeah, himbo definition is unattractive and Rom is a sexy beast! How else did he land a knockout like Leeta?

You’re a very unpleasant person.

Calm down professor. The US is one of the only countries in the world to tax worldwide income, even if they are a nonresident of the US. That is NOT how it works in every country.

Here’s a pretty good article about it from the WSJ if you want to educate yourself on the subject: https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-WB-34630

It’s somewhat accurate to say “every penny they make is taxABLE to Uncle Sam” which is different from saying 100% tax rate. Americans living outside the US still need to file a tax return and report all their income, and pay tax on it to the US, even if it is from a foreign source. That said they could claim the foreign tax credit if they paid tax to a foreign regime on that income already, or the foreign income exclusion under some circumstances which would reduce their taxable income to the US.

…How does that work? Who pays for the lumber, cement, electrical, plumbing, etc?

In my direct experience (albeit anecdotal) this is not simply a joke, but reality. So many of my colleagues have this fear, especially the younger ones, and with everyone demanding full remote it fucks my shit up real bad when they won’t even answer the damn phone.

I love the nuclear waste storage argument. Wouldn’t it be grand if we could just stick it in the atmosphere like we do with coal and oil? Smh…

You and your dad sound like what, millennial and Boomer? You’re definitely not Gen Z or younger though I’m assuming.

I’m 40 so elder millennial I guess. I like Gen Z overall but goddamn do they SUCK at using the damn phone. I train a lot of 22-24yo kids at work and they truly are terrified of phone calls. Video call, friggin forget it man. Like they might turn on their camera once if I directly ask or tell them but it’s a battle every time.

This is the same generation that’s demanding full remote, and they refuse to actually communicate remotely. It’s really frustrating and annoying. How in the world do you expect to function in a group if you can’t or won’t communicate with people in real time? Do they really expect to go to their entire careers only texting or emailing?

Again I like them overall, they are very smart educated and resourceful, but their communication absolutely fucking sucks. So yeah this comic is super accurate but I don’t find it funny.

I spoke with a far left friend of mine about this. His position essentially boiled down to the risk of a massive nuclear disaster outweighed the benefits. I said what about the known disastrous consequences of coal and oil? Didn’t really have a response to that. It doesn’t make sense to me. I’ll roll those dice and take the .00001% chance risk or whatever.

I really wonder if people like this have a playbook, like have they read history and put together a step by step guide at this point for maximizing assholery, or does behavior like this sort of emerge naturally as the assholes take control? Like why do we see this over and over in authoritarian regimes, is it natural or are they copycats?

Sidebar: today I learned the word assholery is a real word, I thought I just made it up lol

Imagine you own a goose that lays golden eggs. It lays one golden egg per year. How much would you sell it for? Probably not one golden egg, but definitely you’d sell if for a million gold eggs. You’d probably settle for maybe 5? 10? 15? Something like that.

Suppose the goose only lays one egg per year now (or none at all!) but it’s still young and most people expect it to start laying four or five or even ten or twenty eggs per year in a few years from now. It’s impossible to tell for sure how many it’ll lay over its life, or when that will happen, or if it will happen at all. NOW how much do you sell it for?

That’s the stock market.

A bunch of investors think a bunch of gooses will start laying a ton more golden eggs soon, and they’re willing to pay big bucks now in exchange for the possibility of that in the future. This isn’t a pyramid scheme or a zero sum game or anything like that. It’s just a prediction of the future which may or may not be correct, and only time will tell.

Have kids if you want. It’s just insane to me to plan your entire life and make major decisions on a cataclysm that may or may not even occur in your lifetime; and it (climate change) may present in ways that we can’t even imagine now.

Edit, fine, fuck me, it’s raining fire and brimstone out there, billions of people are dying in the streets, the horsemen of the apocalypse are here, it’s game over for the human species, my bad. Nobody have kids, it’s over, might as well just shoot yourself right now.

My advice is to live your life as best as you can without worrying too much about things you can’t control. Try and build a life around yourself that’ll help you be happy through it all, regardless of what happens. Enjoy your 20’s. 30’s are good too and 40’s don’t suck either.

To paraphrase Sun Tzu: do not choose a path to victory. Instead, choose a strategy such that all paths lead to victory.

I’ve barely even noticed this writers strike because I’ve hardly even bothered to watch any new Hollywood movies or TV shows in literally years. Everything I have seen recently has been complete garbage. So I find myself watching older shows again and again, more YouTube content, educational and history stuff like that…heck, I’ve been following some modern film critics like Red Letter Media and just watch their commentary vs the real thing, and it’s usually much more entertaining.

I think Hollywood is going to use this opportunity to replace the writers with AI. If it works great, if it doesn’t work, nobody will notice or care.

I’m so sick and tired of every single website and service trying to push an app on me. No, I don’t want to download your stupid shitty app, I’ve got dozens and I don’t want another one that I don’t use that interrupts me to push stupid notifications. Now get off my lawn!