majestic

Maybe they're allergic to water?

OH MY GOD BRO THIS IS SO FIRE. 32% of YouTube is screaming idiots these days. 67% is AI generated slop, and there's 1% of decent content.

That's the point @uuuhhii was making. People just promise Trump eleventy billion billion dollars in investments that will never materialize and he agrees to screw over the local automobile companies to sell a quick win now that his base is falling apart over electing a pdf file. Personally I find that rather hilarious - I mean cognitive dissonance or not, people knew who and what Trump is. It is bewildering to see even the QAnon Shaman being weirded out by Trump's handling of the Epstein list and its implications. You're too hung up on the word bribe. Yes, relenting and giving the US meaningless wins so Trump agrees to lower tariffs isn't bribery in the legal sense. Not that anyone in the Trump administration would be stopped by doing something illegal, but one can dream of a world where actions being illegal isn't the stopping point for politicians. There's still an ethical layer that used to sit well above the legal one. Alas, o tempora, o mores.

No, not no. Yes. Trump doesn't even notice that the EU just "agreed" to buy more energy from them in the next three years than US companies could feasibly supply, even if there was enough transportation capacity. If US based companies would ramp up oil and gas extraction to meet the demand and transportation capacity would be redirected entirely to trading with the EU, the energy market would collapse. That's not going to happen. The bridge offer's still on the table, by the way. I can see you're interested. C'mon. I know you always wanted a bridge. Obviously that is what Trump thinks he is doing, but nation after nation says these trade "deals" are more like frameworks. Point being, they get a reduction in tariffs - for car imports the EU now joins Japan in having US dealerships pay less tariffs for imports than domestic car manufactures because they still have to pay the regular tariffs on Canda and Mexico. Look at Australia, they "opened" their markets for American beef. Australia doesn't import beef beyond wagyu from Japan. They export beef worth billions and import beef worth millions. Do you really think anyone is going to sell US beef on the Australian market? It's more expensive and of lesser quality than locally sourced beef. Besides, the beef population in the US is at an all-time low, similar to the current situation in the EU where beef prices are exploding due to a lack of cattle. Trump can go home and tell people that he now opened up formerly closed markets for the ranchers and farmers suffering under his killing of USAID to placate them. Markets that aren't going to buy. Just like the Japanese aren't going to buy cars larger than their roads from US companies.

YouTube comment of the decade:

Japanese car company stocks exploded while GM's dropped. Fairly easy to see who "won" the deal. US car makers aren't going to sell a single car more in Japan while their cars now have an advantage over others, and Japan can really use rice imports at the moment, rice prices are becoming a huge problem for the government. Not that the US is exporting or even producing a whole lot of rice anyway. Trump's really a master of negotiation and deal making. His tarrifs are now screwing over GM more than Mazda, Toyota & comapny.

Comin' in about, uh... two weeks.

edit: also, if anyone really believes Japan or Japanese companies are going to invest a single yen more in the United States than they would have anyway thanks to this agreement, I have this here slightly used bridge to sell you for cheap. It's a great deal. A fantastic deal. The best deal ever. The bigliest biggest deal ever. Don't miss out!

Don't know why people are so soft on Picard season three. Yes, it as massively better than the turd that season one was, and it would probably break the laws of physics to make a season worse than two, but that just made season three less bad. It wasn't good, most of the time, and the cringe factor of the Millennium Enterprise attacking the Death Cube reactor was over nine thousand. But yes, I am definitely one of those who wanted nothing more than TNG Season 8 out of the series after the Discovery debacle... and all we got was more yum yum.

Moved the really important parts of my digital life to a new e-mail address. I've had the same mail account at a small non-profit for almost thirty years, but the service has since become unstable. I have toyed with the idea of migrating for the better part of a year now, but talking to another user of the service raised a major red flag beyond some instability a few days ago. He has - or perhaps more apt to say had - the pro subscription (once upon a time this was for unlimited timeslot access to the BBS part of the system, which no longer matters, as there are barely any users left and no one ever runs out of online time) and said they've stopped charging his account for the subscription fee. They no longer react to support requests either. We don't really have any idea if someone's left working at the non-profit or if the service is just running because the hoster's been paid in advance. How old the non-profit is can be gauged by its name, it is mostly a BBS and mail service provider calling itself Club for the Promotion of Youth Communication. As if the youth of today would even know what a BBS is, or use e-mail to communicate outside of work.

Yes and no. It is a trailer for a Johnny Cage martial arts movie in the Mortal Kombat universe. It is real insofar as Karl Urban is going to play Johnny Cage (which is pretty weird), but it's not actual scenes from Mortal Kombat II.

No, but it is fair game to infer from what Trump posted about. Saying the Epstein client list was written by Obama and the Clintons on Turd Social pretty much confirms that the list is at least equally - probably more so, even - as harmful to influencial Republicans as it would be to Democrats. Elsewise the list would be public by now. Wouldn't even have to be an official release, Laura Loomer is awfully well informed about the goings on in Mango Mussolini's regime.

Until this recent Scam Blondi hooplah with the Epstein list/files I was under the impression that the high level MAGA influencers were all in on the grift (like Fox news), and just out to profit from the, uhm, cognitively challenged MAGA cultists. Why else harp on about Epstein's client list even though the reincarnation of Cyrus the Great almost certainly partook in his offerings. Apparently not, the reactions to Bondi trying to hush down the topic appear, if nothing else, quite genuine and sincere. I have no idea how you can be that far up in the MAGA cult ranks and not realize that Trump wasn't the victim of a witch hunt, but it is what it is. The Laura Loomers and Dan Bonginos and Kash Patels of the MAGA-sphere seem to really be under the impression that the problem is Pam Bondi, and not Pam Bondi under orders by the Great Tangerine to drop the investigation. Dan Bongino going on record saying the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein was really a suicide basically ended his right-wing influencer career, which is but a small solace: he probably made enough off the cult for him and his family to live comfortably for the rest of their days, unless Lutnick and Bessent really kill the economy.

Done with D4 season nine. Hydra sorcerers are hilariously overpowered. Squishy compared to other classes, but with that kill speed it's fine. Once again made the mistake of playing a melee character in with the current T4 meta, so it took me a couple days longer than it would otherwise. Not significantly better than the last season, but less much annoying journey elements. With Blizzard removing the secret achievement for completing all the elements, I can also pretty much just leave the grindy ones. Don't really care about running a ton of nightmare dungeons.