I didn't promise not to talk to you publicly. You are here on the marketplace of ideas, and I'm not letting you spout your nonsense unchallenged. Go somewhere else,
if you need a safe space, snowflake.

When we talked privately, I was open, honest, decent, and direct with you, while you were patronizing and rude, when you didn't like an argument that you could not refute. You constantly attack the person instead of the argument. I only address your behavior when you cross every line of decency. You even leaked our private chat,
thinking it would hurt me. It didn’t; I am the exact same person in private
as I am in public. You only showed everyone here who truly lacks character.

Maybe he didn't, but holding him to a eleven-year-old comment lacks empathy.
Did someone ask him if he thinks that this is just self-defense?

South Park Apology to the White House
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I agree with that nice man, but for very different reasons than you might think.

Do you think that taxes on labor are more fair?
You own your body, you provide your time and your energy,
and then someone says "30% of what you just made is mine!".

The government needs money. Where do you want it to come from?
Do you believe in the principle of "Those with the broadest shoulders
should bear the heaviest burden"?

At least he has some property. Why do people who own NOTHING still pay taxes for the ONLY thing they have? As soon as their taxed labor allows them to own a roof over their head, a thing they need to survive, they pay property taxes. The property tax in the US
is about 1%. You pay that, even if your mortgage is higher than the value of your home.

Elon Musk own companies and property valued around 1 TRILLION dollars.
He pays roughly $930,000 annually in property taxes. His companies usually secure
100% property tax exemptions and there is no wealth tax. That means that Elon Musk pays ~0.00009% annually over his ownership. He also doesn't pay taxes over his labor, because he is paid in stock options. He only pays taxes when he sells them, which he almost never does, because he lives of personal loans, using his Tesla and SpaceX
stock holdings as collateral.

So, some people pay 1% over property that the bank owns and other people pay
almost nothing for property that they fully own and makes them money.
Now you know that, do you think differently about what that nice man was saying?

Is it a good alternative for workers making a living wage from it?
When the robots replace all the workers, it just means that ONLY
the wealthy owners make money from giving people obesity,
diabetes and heart disease.

Well, maybe some programmers and maintenance people will have a job.
Those are better jobs, so that's an improvement, but where will all the numbties find a job?
Look around and see how dumb the average person is, then realize
that 50% of them is dumber than that. How are they going to learn
to program AI and maintain robots (if they don't maintain themselves)?

Will the people who cannot manage in the robot economy be the pets
of Elon Musk, or put to work in government funded sheltered workshops,
do they get Universal Basic Income (UBI), or will they just starve?

"all of them are just screaming and hating on Trump"
They are protesting what he does and says on a daily basis,
because no president has ever been as corrupt, evil and bad for the US.

While your president is pushing through his madness ILLEGALLY,
you want Democrats to make their own stand and say what they want LEGALLY,
WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT THEY ARE DOING.

He said (something like) that in 2015.

They were NOT making a nuke, until Trump ripped up the JCPOA.
I predict with 95% certainty, that you will never have a better deal than that, and that Trump will be forced to take a loss, and explain it as a win, maybe even without any deal. Why would the leaders of Iran trust the US to ever keep a deal? Do you still think that the international inspectors come back for Trump?

It will leave you with an Iran with more extreme leadership than the ones who were killed, a people who will never trust the US again to help them resist it and who are now further away from becoming a modern society, because their economy is in shambles. They will need to be kept under even stricter control by their government, to crush their discontent. Iran will arm themselves even heavier at all costs, and they will put all efforts in their nuclear program in upmost secrecy, because that's the only thing that will keep them safe. When they have lots of them they will present that to the world, and ridicule the US.

If that ballroom comes to pass, it surely will have his name on it.
And it will probably be kept there by all presidents after him.
Just not for the reason that Trump imagines.

Most poorly educated lower working class people don't make careers.
There are too many of those 'entry-level jobs' in your country to fill them with just high school kids.
That means that there will be by design many people stuck in jobs that do NOT pay a living wage. Then you have a choice of supporting them with food-aid programs, which means that you are supporting the profits of all those fast food companies with tax-payer dollars, OR you have a huge chuck of your community grow old without any progress in life. They will live in slums, eat garbage, never have kids or have kids grow up on the streets becoming addicts and gangsters, and then die young from poverty related illnesses. Is that Making America Great Again?

If the American people do indeed pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and make it to managers, engineers, accountants, lawyers, dentists, economists, architects, etc, by working 100 hrs/week in their fast-food jobs, to pay for their education, then who will do those jobs that pay shit wages? That will make the owners of McDonald's very sad and they will pay your politicians to open the borders and let in lots of 'dirty' immigrants to do their shit jobs.

No, it's possible to to both think that the terrorist attack on Israeli citizens was horrible
AND reject Israel for committing a horrible genocide.

The actions of Israel do not get rid of the threat, it motivated millions of Muslims all around the world to hate them even more. Jewish people are suffering from more antisemitism because of this. Not everyone can make a mental separation between Jewish people
and Israel's genocide. You should understand that, because you cannot make a mental separation between individual Muslims and Islamic terrorists.

Why are you talking about 'control'? What Trump is cutting is affecting the quality of schools a lot. You think that education already sucks, so why are you OK with more cuts? It requires investments to make education better. Every dollar invested in education creates a 300%-700% return on investment in the future. That's why wealthy people send their kids to expensive private schools.

Elite private schools in the United States that cater to wealthy families lean heavily into rigorous, secular logical reasoning, advanced sciences, biology, economics, and elite academics. They strictly do not teach creationism as science and do not leave out evolution or other religion-challenging topics.
That's because religion is intended to keep the working folks obedient.
The wealthy want their children to USE IT, NOT BELIEVE IT.

As you know, there is more than 1 child in a class, so you cannot have schools listen to the loudest parents who are demanding that the kids are educated the way THEY see it. That's why you need standards, and that is not sick.

You DON'T think that parents should be able to decide everything for THEIR children, because you want the government to meddle in their choices related to trans-gender kids.

Children should have a broad basis, that gives them choices. That should not be limited to where they live and certainly not what the loud-mouth parents of other children make their teachers do. If you don't allow some standards from the government, you have one school teach ONLY creation, the bible, the 10 commandments, and skip everything related to biology, geology, and other science, other schools who only teach gender studies, veganology or whatever the fuck, and only a few moderate schools who actually provide your country with children who are capable of surviving the harsh reality of your extremely individualistic capitalist society. Both extremes are useless to your wealthy, so I would think that you would support some standards for how kids are educated.

That's on the bottom end of the rental homes, it's not a new thing and it's everywhere.
I don't understand why you keep defending all those wealthy people,
who would gladly let you starve, if it makes them a little bit more profit.
You disrespect everyone who is like you, and worship people who step on you.
Even Kim Jong-un doesn't have people who worship him, like you worship them.
Americans are all working like slaves, and most struggle to make ends meet.
That's not their fault, that's because they are exploited by the wealthy.
It's because someone is getting wealthy, from any move they make.
And what do you get back for it? That their houses are all owned by the wealthy too.

Your ideology puts us back into serfdom, after the working class, that you belong to, has suffered, fought, bled and died, to be allowed some freedom and dignity.

Did you know that the wealth inequality in the US is now more extreme than during the Gilded Age? When will you think that the wealthy own to much and the rest too little?
EVER?

"Jack Smith Testimony Continued" (parody, but accurate)
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I know what you’ve said and how you’ve behaved.
That speaks volumes about you.

He didn't really answer the accusations; he dismissed them as lies, attacked the people making them, invoked existential threats, and presented Israel as the perpetual victim, while avoiding the substance
of the legal and humanitarian allegations.

I care about what someone thinks of me, when I respect them
and value their opinion.

“I love the poorly educated.” — Trump, 2016.
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He ordered the federal government to facilitate closing the Department of Education.
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His FY2026 budget cut non-defense discretionary spending by 23% and continued the process of shutting down the Education Department.
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His administration proposed cutting NIH funding by roughly 40%, about $18 billion, and NSF funding by 57%.
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More than 7,800 federally funded research grants were terminated or frozen
under his administration in 2025.
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He called the press “the enemy of the people”.
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His administration has explicitly targeted scientific research it considers ideologically objectionable, including climate and social-science research.
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Yes, we can safely conclude that Trump wants to make Americans dumber.

He can make you pay more taxes, if you are dumb enough to not understand
that tariffs are taxes.

Which is completely irrelevant to the point that phart made.
But you accuse me of always bringing up THAT discussion.

The UN Commission of Inquiry made that determination on its own evidentiary assessment: in September 2025 it concluded that Israel had committed four of the underlying genocidal acts and that Israeli authorities possessed the requisite intent
to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, in whole or in part.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is the principal international court for disputes between states. Under the Genocide Convention, it can determine whether a state
is responsible for genocide.

This is the exact legal framework that was created in response to the Holocaust,
with the explicit purpose of preventing another genocide.

The legal order born from ‘never again’ is being defended as universal,
until it reaches Israel. Then the rules suddenly become illegitimate,
the court becomes illegitimate, and the principle itself becomes negotiable.

The shoe is on the other foot now, and suddenly the rules are the problem.

Good idea!

"Killing billionaires is actually moral."
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(this means that it's a joke)

If you have nothing to add on the current subject, why are you yapping?

Do you understand the scale between exploitation and NO profit?
Can you only see the world in black and white?

Landlords in the US are killing it. Private equity is sucking up property.
They maximize the rent to just below that no one can afford it any longer.
That way, they are maximizing profit, but hurting people who need a home.
It's the exact same 'Price Optimum Formula' that I explained in the McDonald's discussion. I just didn't add rent prices there, because it's not much related to wages.

"what other purpose does a investor buy houses and apartments if there is no profit?"
Why do you need them to? Let people buy their own houses and apartments.
Oh, they are to poor? Yes, I know, because this system makes housing too expensive.
When you have people compete with investors, the people lose.

She had unusually thin veins and they couldn’t get the needle in on the first attempt. Now the poison is in her soft tissue, slowly killing her.

They fucked up. That’s the reason she survived. Just shooting her brains out would have been less cruel than what they’ve done to her. But that would LOOK brutal.
It would destroy the sanitized image that allows this practice to continue.

And that, to me, is part of the problem. Some Americans need the people who commit horrific acts to be monsters, because it is easier to condemn monsters than to confront the failures of the society that produced them. Others couldn’t accept the brutality of state killing, so they made the killing look less brutal instead.

That’s how you end up with this: not a society becoming more humane, but a society finding cleaner ways to present its brutality. The United States keeps refusing to confront the uglier parts of human nature and its own failures, and instead keeps finding ways to sanitize them. At some point, a nation that considers itself civilized
has to grow beyond that.

Why do you think that paying all those people NOT a living wage,
is a better option than either or all three other options?
The entire goal of working is to be able to afford to live. Right?

Executing someone after making them wait for thirty years is cruel.
A government ought to hold a higher moral standard than the criminals it punishes.

Mamdani is literally price fixing the rent, so that's not possible.

This is a false equivalence.

The 1960 population paper was a mathematical extrapolation from a limited historical dataset, produced by three researchers. Its famous “doomsday” date was CONDITIONAL: IF population CONTINUED to grow as it had grown, the equation would reach a mathematical singularity in 2026.

That condition did NOT come to pass. So NEITHER did the prediction.
There is NO scientific failure here.

Climate projections work on exactly this principle. They are conditional projections
based on different emissions scenarios. If humanity continues emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases, the projected warming and associated impacts are much greater.
If emissions are cut rapidly, warming is substantially lower.

The uncertainty is therefore not “scientists don't know whether CO₂ warms the planet”. That physics is extremely well established. The major uncertainty is how much greenhouse gas HUMANITY will put into the atmosphere, and therefore which
emissions pathway we will actually follow.

SCIENTISTS CAN NOT PREDICT THE LEVEL OF HUMAN STUPIDITY.

And the physical basis is completely different from the 1960 population extrapolation.
The population prediction depended on a historical pattern of human behaviour continuing indefinitely. The greenhouse effect is a physical mechanism: CO₂ absorbs infrared radiation, and increasing CO₂ reduces the rate at which Earth loses heat to space.
That isn't inferred from a historical trend, it is directly measurable physics.

So using this paper as evidence that “science can't be trusted” gets the paper backwards. It is a conditional projection whose condition failed, not a failed prediction of an inevitable event.

If you want to challenge climate science, the relevant question is whether its physical mechanism, observations and quantitative projections stand up to scrutiny. A 66-year-old population extrapolation doesn't answer that question.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The commonly used IPCC/CMIP6 scenarios (SSPs) are:
- SSP1-1.9 — Very low emissions. Rapid transition to sustainability; warming kept around 1.5°C.
- SSP1-2.6 — Low emissions. Strong climate action; warming around 1.8°C.
- SSP2-4.5 — Intermediate emissions. Current policies/trends broadly continue; warming around 2.7°C.
- SSP3-7.0 — High emissions. Fragmented world, weak international cooperation and limited climate action; warming around 3.6°C.
- SSP5-8.5 — Very high emissions. Fossil-fuel-intensive development with little climate action; warming around 4.4°C.

These are NOT five competing predictions of what will happen.
They are five CONDITIONAL scenarios: IF emissions follow pathway X,
THEN the climate response is approximately Y.

In short; IF humanity DOES X, then the climate DOES Y

IF HUMANITY DOES THE STUPID, THEN THE CLIMATE DOES THE CATASTROPHIC

Just like in the 1960 population paper, which just stated; IF!!! humanity keeps breeding
like we do now (1960), then we have “doomsday” in 2026. We didn't, so IT didn't happen.

Yes, I'm telling you that they still make lots of profit in my country.
Those breakfasts cost almost nothing to make. There is like a 75% markup on that. The labor on it is also almost nothing. The secret behind the profit from low-priced meal deals lies in the drinks. Coffee and soft drinks have the highest profit margins in the entire hospitality industry. Coffee has a profit margin that can reach as high as 2,900%.

Companies often uses a cheap breakfast item at an extremely low price as a loss leader. Even if they make barely any profit on that specific article, it is profitable because customers rarely order just that one item; they almost always add a drink, a hash brown, or an extra snack.

It was my girlfriend's birthday, and she received a code from the garden center to pick up a free plant. It’s a lure, really, because once you’re there, you end up having a bite to eat in their restaurant (for $25), buying a few plant pots, some potting soil, some Christmas items, a couple of bags of chips, and so on, and suddenly you’ve spent $150. That’s how they make a profit off a free plant.

All Dutch supermarkets sell bananas at a loss, because they are a traffic-builder:
- Bananas are a price-sensitive product. Customers know roughly what they should cost, so a low banana price makes a supermarket seem cheap.
- They attract customers. Once people come in for cheap bananas, they often buy other products with higher profit margins.
- Bananas are used for price competition. Supermarkets may deliberately accept a small loss to compete with rivals and strengthen their overall price image.
- The loss is compensated elsewhere. The supermarket makes money on products with much higher margins, so losing a few cents per kilo on bananas can be worthwhile.
In short: the supermarket isn't trying to make money on every banana;
it's using cheap bananas to make money on the customer's entire shopping basket.

Don't you know these things? In my country, we have several consumer affairs programmes, who investigate things like this and advice the customer. I watch all of those, and that's how I know how all these commerce tricks.

OUT OF THEIR PROFITS!!! Isn't that clear?
McDonald's STILL makes profit in my country, and not a little bit either.
So do hair salons, food delivery services, supermarkets, drugstores, internet providers, insurance companies, movie theaters, gym chains, the train, airlines, private educational courses, etc. They all exist in my country, pay better wages, offer better services, and are either more affordable or have similar prices.

We just don't transfer as much money from the average citizen to the wealthy
like you do in the US.

You are assuming corporations use "cost-plus" pricing (blindly adding a fixed profit markup on top of their expenses). They don't. They use value-based pricing, centered entirely on finding the price optimum.

• The Price Optimum Formula: A corporation continuously tests the market to find the exact intersection where Price × Sales Volume yields the absolute maximum total profit. They always charge the maximum price the local market can tolerate before demand collapses.

• The Demand Ceiling Capping Prices: If a company raises prices beyond this optimum just because their internal costs (like wages or rent) went up, they ruin their own demand. A higher price that causes a massive drop in customers results in lower total revenue. Therefore, prices are structurally capped by consumer purchasing power and local competition, not driven upward by a company's internal bills.

• Costs Impact Profit, Not Price: Internal expenses, whether they are wages, taxes, or real estate, dictate the profit margin, not the price tag. When operational costs rise, a company has a choice: accept a slightly lower profit margin to maintain their sales volume, or raise prices and risk destroying demand.

I would not call this 'basic economics', but it all aligns perfectly with standard neoclassical microeconomic theory. It is fully backed by academic economics because it directly operationalizes the foundational principle that firms are profit maximizers operating under demand constraints.

The Ultimate Proof (Recent US Price Cuts): Look at McDonald's recent behavior in the US. After aggressively raising prices for years, they were forced to introduce value menus and slash prices. They didn't do this out of goodwill, and they certainly didn't do it because their labor or supply costs suddenly dropped. They did it because consumers, strained by economic uncertainty, stopped buying. Demand collapsed, forcing McDonald's to lower their prices back down to find the new market optimum.

Public narrative heavily distorts economics into a moral tale of companies just covering their bills. In reality, economic theory demonstrates that corporations are just cold, optimization algorithms. They charge the absolute maximum the market will bear. They will ONLY lower prices if they can make more profit from it, by increasing demand.

Trump has fundamentally re-engineered the mechanics of the presidency. He created lots of new precedents, for the next Democratic president to use at their discretion.
That's on you; whatever power you give your ally, you eventually yield to your opponent:

• Bypassing Congress on Budgets: Using national emergencies to redirect defunded or unapproved tax money toward pet projects. (Democrats could do this to bypass Congress and unilaterally fund massive Green New Deal or climate programs).

• Bypassing the Constitution via Executive Order: Challenging established legal rights by decree—like attempting to end birthright citizenship. (Democrats could do this to circumvent Congress and the Constitution by using an executive order to unilaterally implement sweeping national gun control mandates or bans on specific firearms).

• Denying Hearings/Bond for Detainees (The ICE Policy): Using broad executive power to enforce mandatory detention and deny bond hearings to people caught inside the country. (Democrats could use this precedent to indefinitely detain corporate polluters, white-collar financial criminals, or political extremists without allowing them to request bail or a bond hearing while their cases are investigated).

• Subverting the Non-Political Civil Service (Schedule F): Reclassifying thousands of independent federal workers as political employees so they can be fired instantly. (Democrats could use this to systematically purge conservative judges, defense officials, or agents from the deep state and replace them with loyal progressives).

• Bypassing Senate Confirmations: Keeping temporary, unconfirmed "acting officials" in charge of major cabinet departments indefinitely. (Democrats could use this to install radical cabinet members who would never survive a Senate confirmation vote).

• Seizing Control of Independent Agencies: Subjecting legally independent regulators (like the FCC, SEC, or FTC) to direct White House commands. (Democrats could use this to force the SEC or Federal Reserve to penalize banks that invest in fossil fuels).

• Broad Presidential Criminal Immunity: Utilizing the Supreme Court's ruling that a president has absolute immunity for "official acts" committed while in office. (Democrats could use this to execute controversial or legally borderline policies without the president ever fearing criminal prosecution after leaving office).

Trump has done all these things. He didn't achieve a lot with it, other than to keep himself out of prison, but don't cry when Democrats will use them effectively. Your side pulled that rabbit out of the hat, and Democrats can now use that rabbit too.

Naming every major Trump failure in 30 seconds
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According to the highest estimates, not yet a million 'illegals' have been deported,
while according to statements by Donald Trump himself and his vice president,
there are more than 25 million undocumented migrants in the United States.
If my administration did 4% of the main thing that they promised me, I would be pissed.

Trump controls the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI and the DOJ,
and still he gets nothing done. I'm happy, because he's evil, but why are you?

It was INDEED meant for remote areas, but Trump is no longer investing in fiber
for less remote areas, with much larger communities, and forcing them to rely on Starlink, because that fills Elon Musk's pockets.

Trump got his donations, Musk gets people who stay dependent on crap satellite internet,
and lots of tax-dollars for his business, and Americans get fucked over.

By the way, you pay about twice as much as we do, for worse internet.

On a simple comparison website, I have the choice of 68 different internet subscriptions from 8 different companies. The cheapest one is $315,83 for a YEAR for 30 Mbit/s down and 3 Mbit/s up. I could have 2000 Mb/s up/down fiber for $434,46 for a YEAR or 8000 Mb/s up/down fiber for $718,81 for a YEAR. Those are all stable wired connections,
without hidden added costs for equipment. Adding phone or TV subscriptions will result
in discounts, but it is harder to compare TV services.

Currently, I have 100 Mbit/s down and 10 Mbit/s up, which is more than I need,
but my provider is working to replace all copper with glass, so I will be transferred
to something faster in a while.

It's an AVERAGE. This is what people pay at a hair salon.

We have a self-employed hairdresser who comes to us.
She doesn't have a boss skimming her and she doesn't need a salon.
For her, every cent that she adds to the price results in a higher income.
We were talking about employees of a company, that's different.

You are starting another argument; the taxes don't change the costs
for the business.

Your argument was that higher wager MUST result in higher prices.
I just showed you that this is NOT correct.

We have only 19 active landfills for waste that is very hard to recycle or burn.
Things like these plugs are easy to recycle or burn.

We Investigated Starlink. The Corruption We Found Will Shock You.
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By the way, satellite internet SUCKS:

• High Latency: Traditional satellites sit over 22,000 miles in space.
This distance causes data delays, making live online gaming, video calls,
and fast browsing feel sluggish.

• Weather Disruptions: Heavy rain, snow, and dense cloud cover can easily weaken
or block the signal (a problem known as rain fade).

• Strict Data Caps: Many providers strictly limit your monthly high-speed data.
Once you hit that limit, they drastically throttle (slow down) your speeds.

• Network Congestion: You share bandwidth with everyone else in your region.
During peak evening hours, speeds often plummet.

• High Setup Costs: The upfront cost for the dish and router is typically very expensive compared to standard cable or fiber setups.

"I can't help the cost of living" Yes you can, it's the result of your politics.

"People want high wages, it requires high prices."
WRONG; it requires that more money goes to the people who do the actual work
and less money goes to the people who don't add any value.

Let's find an example where the service of the worker are the direct product,
so you see the best link between price and wages; a basic men's haircut.
(We are talking about workers who work for a boss, not self-employed people)

Average Consumer Price (of a basic men's haircut):
US: $30 to $45 (Plus expected tips 15% to 20% -> total: $36–$54).
NL: €15 to €25 (Roughly $16.50 to $27.50). Tipping is rare and/or only a small token.

Worker Base Wage Floor (of a hairdresser):
US: Often tied to the federal floor $7.25/hr or state floor (e.g., $10–$15/hr).
NL: $16,52 (€14.71) /hr absolute minimum, but legally scaled up based on experience (via the Kappers-CAO (Hairdressers Agreement))

Mandatory Protections (for hairdressers):
US: Zero federal paid sick leave, zero paid vacation, and employer healthcare
is rarely provided.
NL: 8% holiday allowance, 25 days paid vacation, fully paid sick leave,
and mandatory employer pension contributions.

So the price in my country is about HALF, while our wages are up to DOUBLE.
And they have lots of benefits that American hairdressers don't have.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE THEN:

Just a while back we talked about the wages of McDonald's workers.
They make considerably more in the Netherlands, than in the US.

Hourly Wage (Adult 21+):
US: $11.00 to $14.00 / hr (Stuck at $7.25 in states using the federal floor).
NL: $17.10 (€15.22) / hr absolute base (Set by the mandatory Horeca CAO).

Mandatory Benefits & Rights
US: NONE!
NL: 8% holiday allowance bringing it to $18,47 (€16.44) / hr,
25 days paid vacation, fully paid sick leave, built-in pension accumulation,
and strict overtime premiums.

So, that should result in McDonald's being astronomically more expensive
in the Netherlands, RIGHT?

Price of a Big Mac Meal:
US: $9.50 to $12.00 (Varies wildly by state and franchise location).
NL: €9.50 to €11.00 (Roughly $10.40 to $12.00).
(there are no cheap locations in my country, because we are densely populated)

If it is just price vs wages, explain this.

Two gun laws resulting in a stupid solution:

1) The Mandate to Trace: The Gun Control Act of 1968 mandates that the ATF must be able to trace firearms found at crime scenes to help law enforcement.

2) The Mandate Against a Registry: The Firearm Owners’ Protection Act (FOPA) of 1986 strictly forbids the government from consolidating these records into a centralized, searchable registry.

The 'solution':

• Static Images, Not Text: The ATF scans paper records into computers, but stores them strictly as static images (like flat PDFs or TIFF files).

• No Name Search (Disabled OCR): Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software is legally barred from the system. Because the text is not indexed, computers cannot search the database for a gun owner's name, address, or social security number.

• Manual Scroll-and-Find: When tracing a gun used in a crime, an ATF agent cannot type in a buyer's name. Instead, they must look up the specific closed gun store, open that digital folder, and manually scroll through image files page-by-page to visually locate the right form.

This is what we call "Engineered Inefficiency"; Instead of finding an optimal solution,
by correcting the law, your government is wasting lots of time and labor.

It's not the professionals who make your system that expensive,
it's the people who profit from it, without adding to it,
the Vivek Ramaswamy types. Useless people who only scam the system.

There is no such thing as 'free healthcare', there is 'free at the point of use'.
Your wallet stays fuller, if instead of a $500/month insurance premium,
and half the costs if you need care, you pay $200/month in social healthcare tax,
and nothing when you need care.
It makes no difference for the surgeons, nurses and quality of services,
it just eliminates the useless money grabbers.

You could have some more empathy towards young people these days.
Even if they do EVERYTHING right, the prices of homes are rising faster
than they can ever grow their income. In your youth, everyone could become
a homeowner, now it is only for kids with rich parents, or the few very lucky ones.

The company I work for doesn't look at that. There are some limits; you're not allowed to walk around in your underwear or show Nazi tattoos, but outside of that they only look at your potential. We do business with people who don't mind doing business with people of various stripes. If other companies don't share our values, then we do not care to do business with them.

Because she has blue hair? OMG man, we are living in 2026.

She's talking about jobs at DoorDash and McDonald's, the absolute bottom.

Is this how your elected representatives should hold a hearing?
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And this? Requesting toll records, when you're doing an investigation into a conspiracy
to steal the election, is not against the Constitution. What a clown.
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Why does this exist?
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Why make people beg to pay for healthcare?

I don't live in a paradise, but we don't have THIS for Medically Necessary Care, YET.
If my countrymen keep voting for right-wingers, we WILL have this too.
They are planning to raise the deductible AGAIN.

Your MAGA culture worships stupidity, and you wonder why kids fail in school.

It simply came down to refusing a direct order. The U.S. military has a very strict vaccination policy; service members are routinely required to be vaccinated against numerous diseases (such as anthrax, hepatitis, flu, and rabies) to guarantee worldwide readiness. Under military law (UCMJ), anyone who refuses a medical order can no longer serve and is discharged for insubordination.

Historically, troops have been mandated to take far harsher vaccines, with much higher risks. The anthrax vaccine introduced in 1998, for instance, caused adverse reactions in up to 85% of personnel and put thousands in the hospital, yet it was accepted as part of the job. Medically speaking, the Covid vaccine is much milder. This mass refusal wasn't about health risks, it was purely driven by modern political polarization and the media-driven hysteria surrounding it.

We've been living under right-wing socioeconomic policies since 1994.
I have told you many times before how pretty much all public services
have been privatized. My disgust for American-style policies comes from
the fact that I’ve seen the damage of such policies unfold with my own eyes.
The housing shortages are a direct result of privatizing public housing associations,
into commercial housing corporations.

You claim that the Torah is just a foundation and that God simply created
the universe and walked away, not caring about our sins, leaving humans to either love or kill each other. But you are just twisting things to escape the corner you are in. If God doesn't care, where does the Torah even fit in?
Did God write a reference manual on morality and then abandon us, or is
the Torah purely man-made? If it is purely man-made, why do you value it
as a spiritual foundation at all? If your goal is truly to base your morality on empathy and altruism, modern secular philosophers have provided far more coherent and valuable frameworks for human ethics than ancient scriptures.

Regarding your claim that you don't have to justify your support and that nothing will change my mind: I actually have no problem changing my mind at all. The only thing you need to do is present a justification or evidence that is stronger than what I currently hold on the subject. The fact that you refuse to do so tells me everything. You are now just showing that you completely abandon your own self-reported morality system, which you claimed was based on empathy, the moment it contradicts your political views.

Furthermore, you say that all I do is 'show how much I hate Trump'.
I simply provided concrete facts and arguments regarding his policies.
You did not contradict or refute a single one of them. By labeling those facts as 'hate,' you are implicitly admitting that Trump's actions are indeed terrible.
Unless you can actually prove my arguments false, your own logic dictates that you should be just as critical of him as I am.

Finally, you say we are here for 'development.' Personally, I am here because my parents wanted children. Now that I am here, I generally enjoy life. However, I see an immense amount of misery around me. Not only is that deeply troubling, but it poses a massive danger to our collective future. As humans, we are acting incredibly foolishly again. For a while, things seemed to be improving, but right now, short-sightedness and pure egoism are being heavily rewarded and promoted. If we don’t turn this around quickly, it will inevitably lead to widespread suffering. Personally, I am no fan of misery. So, if God has indeed walked away and it is entirely up to us to make this a good world, do you honestly believe that figures like Trump and Netanyahu are contributing productively to human development?
Because looking at the reality of their actions, I cannot possibly see how. Both Trump and Netanyahu are deeply hateful figures who clearly find joy
in causing misery to others. How can you claim your directive is empathy
and yet not hear that malice every single time they speak?

I don't need to be in a hospital to believe medical doctors, and I don't need
to be in a war zone to look at the consensus of the United Nations, human rights agencies, satellite data, and journalists who are actually there documenting it every day. By the way, journalist who have been killed at a higher number than ever in history, because the IDF is intentionally targeting them, because they want to hide their genocide.

Were you in Israel on October 7th? I can just as easily claim that their government is lying. They are lying a lot, about a lot of things, so why do I even need to believe it even happened? If you are saying that I shouldn't believe anything from the United Nations, human rights agencies, satellite data and journalists, then who is your more trustworthy source?

That quote is from the front page of The New York Times, published on September 12, 2001, following a direct interview between Benjamin Netanyahu and journalist James Bennet on the evening of 9/11.
It does rely on the reputation of that newspaper, but Netanyahu's team
never legally challenged, denied, or demanded a retraction for it.

Are you seriously telling me that Netanyahu didn't know or didn't care to refute a quote on the front page of the most well-known newspaper in the world, but he literally went out of his way during an official United Nations speech to launch a full-on attack against Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, quoting years-old clips? If the 2001 quote were a lie, he would have fought it day one. His silence back then, combined with his hyper-focus on internet commentators on the world stage today, proves that The New York Times reported exactly what he said.

Early in my education, I discovered that I wanted a career focused on intellectual rather than physical labor. While the body deteriorates over time, I trust that my mind will remain sharp throughout my career.

Did you also see all the reactions to that speech?