My sister and I were talking about benign superpowers and decided the X-Men probably have someone like a band director with a superpower like perfect pitch who watches after the school while everyone else is off adventuring.

The Republican majority in the House isn’t that big. They only need a few to flip, and the reactions to this round of tarrifs are cataclysmic so far.

American tanks :(

The 22nd amendment was written poorly, and prohibits someone from being elected into the office.

Terrifying fact: the Speaker of the House is third in line, and doesn’t actually have to be a member of Congress. If the VP and President both leave office without a new VP being appointed, the Speaker of the House assumes the Presidency, bypassing both the 12th and 22nd amendments.

Everybody arguing rock, stone, or pebble.

It’s a jpeg.

You try to take numpads from standard keyboards and I’ll gladly charge that hill.

It works well, and I’m a huge fan and contributor to Open Street Maps (which it’s bassed on). But it doesn’t do traffic, which is unfortunately wha I need from my navigation apps 99% of the time.

If they had a paid option to cover the costs of using TomTom’s traffic API, I’d make the switch.

I was born in 83, and grew up in the time where being a computer need required real work and knowledge of computers.

The things got easier and easier, and then the smartphones came.

These new kids literally don’t know how to search a file directory because they are used to the apps magicing stuff where it needs to be.

That’s a correct word. In fact, it’s more correct than “supressor.” The first supressor was literally called the Maxim Silencer, and the ATF uses the term “silencer.”

The end part about Americans traveling the world being respected again in 2010 is really depressing in 2025.

Yeah. I grew up around guns. I was shooting 22s early like you, had a compact shotgun by the age of 10, etc.

We didn’t live in the country, so while we had guns in the house, we did NOT have ammunition in the house until I was 15 or so, just in case me or my sister ever decided to play with a gun. We bought ammo on the way to the range or the hunt, and anything we didn’t shoot was given to a family member.

American here:

Don’t travel here. Don’t buy our products. Don’t sell us your products. Isolate us. Feelings about the American economy are the number 1 predictor of elections. We need the American economy to be in ruins to defeat these fascist fucks. The only other option is violence, and another American Civil War would be catastrophic for the world. We’re swimming in nukes.

Yeah, we shouldn’t have got ourselves (and by extension, eyeryone else) into this position. But we have, and we’re asking for your help because our opposition party was too fucking incompetent to keep the least-popular President in American history from being elected back into office, and we need them to sweep future elections just to slow the bleeding in 2 years.

Who’s gonna make them pay you?

If the executiv branch doesn’t cooperate, that’s the end of it.

The Courts power ultimately means nothing is the executive branch doesn’t execute.

Okay. Say you do that and you win.

What next? California can’t make them pay you damages.

They’re ignoring the courts. What will suing do when there’s nobody enforcing the ruling when you “win”?

Trains specifically are bad on shared lielnes because passenger trains are lowest-priority rail traffic, so you can get delayed for days at a time.

Mozilla outage going to take a 90% hit to their income without going all-in on ads and user tracking.

I work for a city where the stupid-rich live. Their houses are NUTS. I recently approved construction of a 5,000sft guest house with a rooftop tennis court. We have over a dozen houses in active construction that cost over 15 million dollars, and no new structures being built under 4 million.

We actually have standards in our development code regarding servant’s quarters. And the most important thing to know about those standards is that they’re required to be smaller than the minimum allowable size for guest quarters. Can’t have the Servant’s getting all uppity.

But the thing is, they pay very little in taxes as a portion of their wealth. They have enough political power that they founded a 4mi^2 enclave as its own city entirely surrounded by a major city. They also managed to get their own school district. As a result, they have some of the lowest taxes in the state. Someone with a 7 million dollar house here will pay the same amount of money in property taxes as someone with a half-million dollar condo 2 miles away, because the rates for the school district and city for the wealthy are so low.

For utility districys, they get out of paying property tax by having the city provide it directly without a WCID by contracting to the major city next door that gives them the utilities at a loss to keep the rich assholes happy and supplying campaign donations.

All that to say, then people that are hurt by property taxes aren’t the rich. It’s people living in areas where the value of homes go up faster than income can keep up with the taxes. My parents eventually had to sell and move. And yeah, they made a nice profit off their house, but they still had to move away from the city they’d lived in for 60 years, and now live 30 minutes from the nearest gas station even though they used to be solidly urbanites.

When the insane Emperor Caligula was killed by his Praetorian guards and they installed Claudius in his place, the first thing the new Emperor did was execute the guards involved in the assassination.