At the end of Obama's term wouldn't have made any difference because by then McConnell was committed to holding the seat open for the next Republican.

But people called for her to resign back during the middle of Obama's presidency, when the Democrats controlled the Senate, and he hubristic old ass decided to fuck everyone else by hanging onto power and prestige and trying to be even more historically important.

Woman had a bigger ego than Trump and Musk, and I really hope that historical opinion of he fucking remembers that.

Upside is the cult of personality is attached to Trump, and no one else has been able to pull it off him. Trump is only effective because somehow, for some insane reason, he, personally, has a lot of devoted followers.

Depends on what lesson you think they're trying to teach. "When you know the right thing to do, don't let people use rules and obstructions to stop you from doing it." can be a good lesson.

Sam aged, Frodo did not. I recall several mentions throughout the books that Frodo was considered unusually young-looking for a 50-year old hobbit, just as Bilbo himself was very young-looking for 111. Owning the ring seems to basically just pause your aging, even if you're not using it.

Sam was also twelve years younger than Frodo, but since Frodo stopped aging for 17 years, he wound up effectively older, physically speaking.

Yes, I have always from the first time I saw the movies thought that's what they needed. A five second clip of that and nothing else about the movie has to change!

If your only source is the movies, one of the annoying gripes about them is they have this deceptive editing that makes it seem like Frodo left the Shire within a relatively short timespan after the birthday party.

Frodo got the ring on the 22nd of September of 3001. He leaves Bag End on the 23rd of September...of 3018.

This is not quite accurate. The vice president must be eligible to be the President, not to be elected President. The 22nd amendment has some very specific language.

"No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once."

It prevents someone from being elected President, but does not make the person ineligible to be the President since it only restricts that one method of gaining the office. A person can definitely become President through succession even if they have served their full two terms already...at least by the constitution as written.

That gives a false picture since it only counts legal declared spending.

For instance, what's the effective value to Trump's campaign of Elon Musk buying Twitter and using it to explicitly promote right wing views? How much did Russia spend this time to promote Trump? What about Israel, cause I'll wager Netanyahu prefers having Trump in office, since Kamala might've demanded at least some holding back.

Actual spending to promote Republican and right wingers was way higher.

It doesn't need anyone to convince devs to implement it. I can do it whenever I run an emulator of old console games already, and devs of those games never implemented it.

If Sony wants to add it as a hardware feature they can.

As far as the patent, hopefully it'll get denied but I doubt it. Once they have it it'll cost someone time and money to challenge it, even though it should be a slam dunk that it is neither a new idea nor innovative and novel. This is how a lot of these egregious parents continue to stand - the cost of challenging them is high, especially if some blistering idiot of a judge ruled in a farcical manner.

Ice sinks to a certain point. If being attached to the shelf was holding that ice up higher than it would float, it'll sink.

Don't know if the movie shows it sinking further than that though, but the general assertion that ice doesn't sink at all is definitely mistaken.

Maybe Valve needs to stop pushing updates for things they certified working until they certify the update won't break them.

Never understood why Steam forces updates, but this would be a very good reason for them to do a 180 on it and let customers choose the version they want instead of forcing an update to the latest.

Things in Russia might not be great, but they're not on the same level as North Korea by far.

NK is genuinely quite successful at isolating its population, Russia is not. Russian living conditions aren't horrible, they don't experience famine and such, etc. They have internet, and many of them that are otherwise not technically inclined seem very well versed in how to evade the state censorship and control of communication. Other day I was playing D&D with some Russian friends when they started blocking Discord in Russia, and we figured out a workaround within the hour and within a day they had Discord working again, and these guys aren't otherwise heavily inclined to towards computer shit. They're above average level of user knowledge, but they've become knowledgeable in this very specific area.

From what my Russian friends say and I gather from their descriptions, it's a lot like Republicans here; the ones that support Putin and the current government are doing it in spite of obvious evidence they have no trouble seeing.

Now I would assume they'll isolate these North Koreans quite a bit, the language barrier will prevent them from talking to the average Russian and so on. The ones they bring home, for domestic propaganda purposes, will be the most loyal, willing to go on with whatever story they're told to tell about their experiences.

Are they running anyone in elections they might actually win? I might vote for a party like that for mayor or something. But I wouldn't even vote for them for state house representative unless they were well known enough in my state that they might actually win.

'Third' parties in this country can show themselves as serious if they try to establish themselves from the bottom up. If all they do is run for president and occasionally Senate or House, then they show themselves as unserious parties which are probably nothing more than attempts to siphon votes that might have gone to a real candidate.

The "pedophile" thing has always been a front for conservatives to wedge in, from what I've seen. They saw a real problem and then, as they always do, fearmongered and inflated it way out of proportion to reality, then started to expand the definition.

I'm old enough to remember when pedophile actually meant people trying to engage in sex with children. As in, actual children. The definition began expanding to older and older people, and expanding into fiction, fictional characters, and more.

They also started getting weird about any men being near children. I am also old enough to remember when fathers, uncles, and generally men, could be in public with kids without a woman around and without being looked at with suspicion. These days we hear countless stories of men stalked, harassed, and threatened when they're out with kids they have every right to be with.

And that's just the stuff that affects everyone, not just minorities and marginalized people. How the left ever got on board with this pedophile panic I don't understand, considering conservatives have been equating LGBT with molestation and pedophilia as long as I can recall. Anyone who didn't see this coming from the beginning is a blind fool.

I think it was the Catholic Church thing. A real case of pedophilia committed by figures generally considered conservative and right wing, which the left rightfully jumped on attacking...but then kept going when conservatives egged them on further instead of stopping. People got tricked into going nuts on it cause the right was all 'well if that's bad then you must condemn this...and this...and this...and this...' with each step being something less and less real, less egregious, less of a true problem. But they're good at stoking hate, and once the hate was kindled in people it took less and less to spread it just slightly further each time, until now we have people ostensibly on the left calling for censorship of completely fictional works and punishment of people who produce or consume them, despite no actual harm to any actual people being involved.

And that's exactly the level of unthinking hate they want, for people to not stop and consider whether any actual harm is being caused, just condemn and punish and don't argue or dispute the severity of what you're calling for. Just hate, just view them as monsters, deserving of death. Even as the definition keeps expanding.

After all, what group is othered and made the enemy doesn't matter that much to them, only that some group is hated to the point of an unexamined desire for violence and death. They can work with that, after all.

Even Trump can occasionally be right!

Don't feel like a dick for that! That again is management's fault!

Remember that bagging your groceries used to be part of the service and part of the price, they eliminated that job to increase their profit margins!

At least around here Walmart still bags them for me, except they now have the cashier doing it instead of a dedicated employee for bagging.

Self serve gas was actually lower priced than full service back when the transition was happening, so there was actually a reason to do the work yourself.

If it had been the same price, only I have to do the work of pumping it, damn straight I would have felt the same.

In retrospect it was a bad deal because once full service went away entirely, so did the price difference, so I'm smarter now and wouldn't use self checkout even if they gave a discount.

To be fair, there is someday going to be a generation where that doesn't happen (assuming humans don't obliterate themselves first). Eventually it's practically a certainty that we will develop the means to preserve humans indefinitely.

Not when, in a universe known to contain non-organic beings able to perform tasks like smuggling plans, a gunnery officer decided to save lasers (as though they were apparently a precious resource) and not fire on an escape pod with no life signs? I feel like that would be the most appropriate moment to stop taking Star Wars seriously.

Up until the court decided to start ignoring centuries of legal tradition that is the bedrock of our legal system and threw out stare decisis the decision was actually more secure than a specific law.

Any law codifying it can be challenged on many grounds, especially the 10th amendment. It could easily have been struck down as unconstitutional because the federal government has no power to pass a law affecting this issue, since the constitution doesn't grant it.

Only a constitutional amendment would have been likely to survive a court willing to do what this one has done, and there is zero possibility the Democrats could have passed one.