The problem is that the broader Democratic electorate is a much bigger tent, with overall much more moderate politics, than online leftists are typically willing to admit. We're still only eight years past an election where Hillary Clinton took the Rust Belt for granted, and we all paid the price for that when traditionally solid union votes swung to Trump because he was boosting fossil fuel extraction while Clinton implicitly threatened the livelihoods of families dependent on coal and fracking jobs.

Healthcare you have a point on, but also keep in mind that the last time Dems had the votes for sort of sweeping reform was 2008, and what we got out of that was the ACA, which for all its faults was still a big step up over the status quo. Obama was going for a big bipartisan win, in spite of McConnell's announcing that he was killing bipartisanship in the GOP caucus, and that was a mistake, but perhaps an understandable one given that up to that point that's how Congress had always worked.

There have been windows of time since in which Dems have held the Presidency and both houses of Congress, but never with enough margin to defeat a Senate filibuster, and with DINOs like Manchin and Sinema standing in the way of filibuster reform. I do not doubt that progressives in Congress would move an M4A or public option bill through the legislature if, in 2025, the House flips back and the Senate stays Democratic in spite of the unfavorable cycle, but withholding your vote doesn't get you any closer to that happening.

There are sophisticated and nuanced critiques to be made of Western power projection, soft and hard. "Nuanced" and "sophisticated" are not words appropriate to the average hexbear or lemmygrad denizen's take on geopolitics, and for those of us who live in the real world rather than living to argue over how many Maos can dance on the tip of the icepick that killed Trotsky, the loud and unrelenting naysaying of anything less extreme than "armed proletarian revolution now!" got to be incredibly tiresome, not to mention the constant cheerleading of brutally-repressive regimes that don't have any values in common with actual socialists or communists just because they oppose the US and its allies.

Okay, but like... Even if the decimal point is supposed to be two places over, how often is Starfleet replacing people's shoes after they get embedded in the deck plates by a millimeter? Do the floors of transporter rooms get permanently rubberized after enough use? Does Chief O'Brien have a special floor razor tool to scrape shoes off the pad when they're too deeply embedded to pull out?

On the one hand Ricciardo's washed, he's been washed since at least his time at McLaren, and it was long past time for him to move on from F1.

On the other hand, RB as an organization and Marko in particular routinely handle the failings of drivers other than Max in ways that seem calculated to maximize humiliation. It's honestly reminiscent of the golden child/scapegoat dynamic that often happens in households dominated by a narcissist parent, and it's one of the reasons why I've always suspected that Red Bull has a particularly toxic team culture.

Please be moddable...

He built a homebuilt aircraft and that wasn't the thing that killed him, so he wasn't dumb by any stretch, but "smart enough to be dangerous" seems like a phrase coined just for him.

FWIW there is a cottage industry for OnStar disable/delete mods for GM vehicles. It can be done, usually without breaking too much else of the car's electronic functionality.

What's the harm in a little bit of Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking?

Nah, as near as I can tell that group is vigorously in favor of suspending all human rights for capitalists, so regardless of their views on kink I think they'd be inclined to let the comment slide.

Worse, on her blog she conceived of herself as the chief consort in his harem in between sharing her thoughts on race science and Harry Potter house sorting quizzes.

Mine is about the same for family coverage, and the shocking thing is that it's pretty good relative to the market -- my previous employer was about ~100/mo cheaper for an equivalent HDHP plan, but I've seen much, much worse.

Honestly, though, even more than the cost (having run the numbers, the tax I'd pay in a European country to cover similar services is about the same, all things considered) is the sheer level of friction that insurers inject into the healthcare system. You have to get a referral to a specialist even if you know you need to see one. You have to get insurance authorization for specialty treatments. You have to think about deductibles and out-of-pocket-maximums, and Lord help you if you start having complex medical problems around the end of the year and the maximums reset in the middle of your treatment!

We pay out of pocket for a direct primary care pediatrician for our kid (on top of his insurance, to cover any meds or emergencies) and the fact that there's no insurance to deal with means that it's vastly easier to get a hold of her to get a medical opinion whenever there's a bad bump or a strange rash that needs a professional opinion. It's shocking to see how things could be if insurance companies and PBMs and for-profit hospital networks hadn't inserted themselves in between patients and doctors, with a sole eye towards making sure they pay out at little as humanly possible while maybe keeping patients alive in the process.

Terrible. Take your upvote and get the hell out of here.

Nah, it's widely acknowledged that he'd mastered the art of metalbending.

I agree, this is a good use of the live service model to improve the gameplay experience. Previous entries in the Flight Simulator series did have people purchase and download static map data for selected regions, and it was a real pain in the butt -- and expensive, too. Even with FS2020 there is a burgeoning market for airport and scenery packs that have more detail and verisimilitude than Asobo's (admittedly still pretty good) approach of augmenting aerial and satellite imagery with AI can provide.

Bottom line, though, simulator hobbyists have a much different sense of what kind of costs are reasonable for their games. If you're already several grand deep on your sim rig, a couple hundred for more RAM or a few bucks a month for scenery updates isn't any big deal to you.

All I know is that targets[0] returns "FV107 Scimitar" for some reason, and anytime I try to purge that entry from the array it throws an error.

My wife is in the "they're false-flag psyops" camp, whereas my position is "the ourobouros is eating its own tail."

You can be smart and evil, but at this point it's pretty hard to be a conscious human engaged in society and not have an opinion either way.

For what it's worth, there's been talk that they're really having to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find true undecided voters willing to go on TV and be part of these panels. That's unfortunate in the sense that it suggests there aren't many actually-persuadable voters out there, but these clowns aren't especially representative of the general electorate, either.

Given how many women he's knocked up, and the way he talks about it, I'm about 95% sure he's got a breeding kink that he's using his fame and money to act it out in real life. 🤮

TLDR: the polio vaccine used to contain weakened versions of the three strains of poliovirus. When weakened live virus vaccines are used, the people inoculated with them shed copies of those viruses, which is usually no big deal... except that one of those weakened polio strains would, very rarely, mutate back into its full-strength form and sicken unvaccinated people living around those who were being vaccinated.

Eight years ago, the decision was made to remove the problematic strain of polio from the vaccine, because it was thought low wild infection rates meant that the risk of vaccination-derived infection had become higher than catching it from the environment. Regrettably, it seems that decision was made in error -- type 2 polio outbreaks have soared since then.