I’ll start by saying that I don’t disagree with you. Human lives are significantly more important than the dollar. I would also like more people to do things because it is the right thing rather than doing things for money. However, news stories will always be told from multiple angles, and there will be more angles with bigger events like these wars. It is unrealistic to expect people to only ever talk about the worst outcome of an event and turn a blind eye to relatively smaller bad outcomes.

This is also news that some people will want to know. You seem to be asking that this story not get written or discussed because there is human suffering involved, but is it not still newsworthy? If this same thing was happening during a time of world peace, do you think it should be written about? If you think it is something that could be reported on in a time of peace, why should it be ignored in a time of war?

You said in your comment, “But let’s talk about how this affects the power of the dollar instead because that’s SO MUCH more important.” Articles like these are not saying we should talk about the power of the dollar instead of human suffering; they are providing another angle to the conflicts. This article exists, but so do countless others that talk about the death and destruction of wars. It is not like this article somehow stops others that you care more about from existing. Also, while I can’t read the article due to the paywall, I have my doubts that they wrote about how devaluing the dollar is more important than the deaths.

You also ask who cares about the dollar, and the answer is a lot of people. Humans can have compassion for people that they have never met, but they also care about the people they personally know. Changes in the dollar affect people’s lives on a personal level. It’s a hard ask for people to ignore their own well-being or the well-being of their families for people they haven’t met.

Lastly, I think you yourself are making an argument for this article existing. You say that governments and other powerful people view things through the lens of their own wealth. Wouldn’t articles like this one push those people into action to stop conflicts? If they read about how their own money will be affected by war, they are more likely to push for an early end to wars. If they never know something is hurting their wallet, they are fine with it continuing. It is a nice idea that these people would just care about humanity over money, but it seems unlikely that change is coming any time soon. We might as well speak their language to try to stop the suffering.

TLDR: No.

Looking at conservative responses online, in the news, and from real people, they don’t seem to care about these emails. I’ve seen explanations that Democrats selectively blacked out names and words to make Trump look bad, that the emails are entirely faked, or that the emails actually are good for Trump because they prove that he was only aware of Epstein’s crimes but didn’t partake in them. This last explanation usually includes talk about how Trump was an undercover operative that brought down Epstein (but he doesn’t want to brag about it for some unknown reason) or that he obviously couldn’t report his suspicions of crime occurring since he didn’t have hard proof (you can definitely report crimes without giving evidence).

I think if an email was released that explicitly said Trump committed crimes, they would say the email was a fake that was planted by Democrats during Biden’s term. If photos or videos of the crimes were released, they would say they are AI generated. If Trump himself said he did it, they would say that it wasn’t actually that bad because of some reason or another. Idk what the specific excuses would be, but I know that a lot of Trump supporters would buy them while simultaneously believing the evidence when it pertains to people who are not Trump. I think there may even be many that know the excuses are lies, but they refuse to turn on Trump because it means they would have to accept that they spent the past decade publicly supporting a bad person.

Don’t get me wrong, there will definitely be conservatives that break from Trump with each new scandal that comes, but what are they actually able to do about it? Trump runs the organizations that would be in charge of investigating him, so it is unlikely that any legal action would happen unless he is impeached. Republicans could call their representatives and say they will vote them out of office if they don’t impeach Trump. The representatives likely will not listen because they know that at this point, Republican voters will never vote for a Democrat.

I think it is possible (but unlikely) that Trump could lose much of his base’s support, but I personally don’t think there will ever be a grand fall from power or punishment for misdeeds. I’d love to be proven wrong, but I think the best we might get is that a decade after Trump has died, some conservatives will feel comfortable enough to say that he may have done some bad things.

There was a misunderstanding with a neighbor earlier that night because he heard my dog yipping and whining and thought she was in pain. He called the cops, they confirmed everything was fine, and told him that my dog just sounds like that.

A little after midnight, the neighbor pounded on my door so hard it shook in its frame and screamed cuss words at me at the top of his lungs. The neighbor moved to the parking lot and was pacing back and forth, running around in small circles, and jumping up and down, all while his eyes were locked on my apartment’s windows. I called the cops. I later learned that the neighbor called the cops a second time at this point saying he definitely heard me beating my dog, despite my apartment being silent since the first incident.

The officer that arrived acted like the neighbor’s behavior wasn’t an issue at all, and he kept cutting me off whenever I tried to give an explanation or evidence that my dog wasn’t hurt. He basically treated me like I was guilty the whole time without listening or checking. Ultimately, he said there was nothing to be done and left.

I found out the neighbor called a third time to say I was hurting my dog at 3 in the morning while my dog and I were asleep, but nobody was dispatched. My apartment management didn’t bother even talking to the neighbor after I told them everything.

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I don’t have a ton of sets, but I absolutely love Rivendell. It is beautiful to look at, has all of the fellowship, and has so many tiny details. Truly one of LEGO’s best sets in my opinion.

I bought the LEGO Rivendell set close to when it came out. It was a fun one to build, and I would do it again. Honestly, I’ll probably need to disassemble and reassemble at least some of it whenever I move.

I check friends’ Snapchat stories from time to time, and Snapchat suggests public stories on the same page. I think Snapchat has the same sort of singular data point on me that “this account is likely a straight man”, because most of what they show me are sports clips, woman influencers in revealing clothing, and right-wing influencers talking about culture war stuff. I never view any of that sort of stuff, but it still shows up any time I try to check my friend’s stories. I guess I view public stories so infrequently that they just give me a default generic man feed.

You are correct. He used a VPN for several US locations in the video. He then compared what content was shown in different regions of the US to see if everyone sees the same thing or if the content is radically different depending on where you are.

I don’t think the person you are responding to is talking about Trump winning the election like you are. Unless I am misunderstanding, it sounds like they are saying that Republicans will point to this case being dropped as a win and that they were right all along. In other words, they will say that the Democrats were just unfairly trying to prosecute Trump, and dropping the case proves they had no evidence (even though that isn’t why the case was dropped).

I don’t think the conspiracies are going to go away. I remember when Trump got shot that there were threads with quite a few people convinced it was all staged to get him sympathy votes. I still occasionally see it brought up all this time later.

Based on the context, I think they meant “divisiveness”, but “deviousness” probably also describes the nominations well.

I volunteered at a thrift store years ago, and I was in charge of looking at the condition and prices of books that were donated. One person dropped off about 10 boxes filled to the brim with Playboy cartoons. They weren’t worth anything and couldn’t be put out on the floor anyway, so they were thrown out. I also remember that someone donated a biography of Benjamin Franklin from 1835. The cover was coming apart, but the pages were in wonderful condition. We sent that to a bigger thrift store in the area that ended up auctioning it for about $350.

Plenty of great advice here, but one more thing to think about is how such a large win for Republicans can be used against them a bit in the future. They won the Presidency and have majorities in the Senate, likely the House, the Supreme Court, and governorships. They have free reign to do what they want, which is scary, but it also means that they can’t blame the Democrats for any bad things that may happen in the next 2 years until the midterms.

Any law that passes with bad outcomes is solely their fault. If the economy gets worse, it’s all on them. If the deficit increases, they are the only ones to blame. If they don’t fulfill their campaign promises, it’s because they chose not to. If there is a government shutdown, it’s because they couldn’t agree on a budget. If bills aren’t being passed, they are arguing too much. They can’t even fall back on blaming the Democrats in the Senate because they have enough votes that they could cancel the filibuster while they are in office and reinstate it before they leave.

This means that you, and everyone else, can point out anything the government does that has a negative impact and say definitively that it is entirely the fault of the Republicans. If this is done frequently enough and loud enough, there may be enough frustrated voters to change the outcome the next time around. They will definitely do things that annoy almost every voter, whether they are going too far or not far enough in their agenda, and they can’t hide that it was only them that made those decisions.

I don’t think it is very well known, but I thought Scavengers Reign was very good. It was a bit slow, but I thought it gave time to see the weird alien world.

If you are on the fence about it, the show is a followup to this short and has some similarities in its world building.

As egrets mentioned, it is more sci-fi tech rather than realistic tech. I don’t think it is extremely unrealistic as a proposed idea, but it is something that could never work at the scale shown in the show. In a weird way, the end of the show felt to me like it got both more realistic and more unrealistic. I’m trying not to spoil anything, but I hope that can give a bit more info to decide if you would like it.

I second The Terror (never saw season 2 though). It was a slow burn horror for much of it, which I really appreciated. I liked the historical aspects and thought they conveyed the isolation well. I need to get around to reading the book at some point.

I really enjoyed Halt and Catch Fire, and I see so few people talk about it. The only issue I had with it was that each season felt like it was almost a reset point rather than a straight continuation of the plot. I wish they would have left a few more open plot points at the end of each season that flowed into the next. I felt the same way with Silicon Valley, even though I enjoyed that one as well.

Recently, Linux removed several people from their organization that have Russian email addresses. Linus made a statement that confirmed this was done intentionally. I believe that there was some mention of following sanctions on Russia due to the war. I haven’t looked into the details of it all, so take my analysis with a grain of salt. From what I understand, it sounded like it was only Russian maintainers that were removed and normal users submitting code from Russia can still contribute. Maintainers have elevated permissions and can control what code gets accepted into a project, meaning that a bad actor could allow some malicious code to sneak past. This may have also contributed to the decision since this type of attack has happened before and Russia seems like a likely culprit. The reactions to this change have been varied. Some people feel it is somewhat justified or reasonable, some people think that it means it is no longer open source, and some people think it is unfairly punishing Russian civilians (it is worth noting that that is part of the point of sanctions).

Someone I knew fell down the stairs while home alone and couldn’t get up. He was able to call out towards the kitchen and tell Alexa to call for help. If he wasn’t able to do that, he would have been lying there much longer before anyone could find out. It sucks for privacy, but those types of devices do have some legitimate helpful uses.

It depends on the place and the cop that is present, but jaywalking isn’t often enforced. It’s a law to try to protect people from crossing the street and getting injured by cars that may not see them crossing. Instead of crossing anywhere, they are supposed to cross at a specific area where cars already are supposed to stop. Since jaywalking is against the law (even if it isn’t enforced well), it will stop some people from crossing the street in the middle of a road, and it may save a few lives. It’s kinda dumb, but if it helps a few people, I have no problem with it.