This is a good pet peeve.

I think the big difference between MCU and your Harry Potter example is that the whole series is “Harry Potter and…”

MCU movies are all titled and focused on different heroes. You might not care about the guardians, but you read every Ironman comic and thats all you are interested in watching.

Having to keep up with every arc so the next Ironman makes sense can be a bit much.

What gets me is that no one seems to be mentioning exactly what it means that US is entering their ‘Papers please’ phase, and that supporting a fascist state isn’t a very Canadian thing to do.

Not wanting to be hassled at the border, or having our sovereignty threatened is an understandable reason for avoiding the US, but it’s also pretty selfish.

I wish I see more people, and Canadian news media talking about the bigger side of it as in ‘We don’t support fascism’

That should be an integral part of our identity, especially if we want to ensure the Conservatives stop trying to normalise maple maga ideals.

Feels like it was trained with a prompt to speak in the tone of Elon, and trained on historical tweets, treating all of Elon’s tweets as gospel.

That is what needs to happen. Unfortunately the issue is that they start with messaging like this to make the vast majority of the country think they’re safe.

Its only going to be ‘certain citizens’, who’ve committed ‘certain crimes’.

So that most other citizens will sit quietly in the corner and hope to not call attention to themselves.

Meanwhile the scale and scope of who’s counted as undesirable; who’s going to be impacted, will continue to grow as their ability to process the ‘undesirables’ grows. This will go until the set of undesirables includes everyone not actively working for ‘The Party’

legally shipped off to a foreign concentration camp

I think you mean sold to the highest bidding foreign labour camp.

Yeah, we won’t really be prosperous until we’re losing multiple cities a year to wild fires.

we went from “trump never tells the truth” to “why didn’t you believe trump” so fast people are breaking necks left and right.

I think its more that he says so much shit, you can’t take any of his words at face value, which isn’t the same as everything is a lie.

If he says something that sounds positive to people other than himself, its probably a lie. If he says something that sounds horrible, its probably him telling the truth by accident.

Following this heuristic, this sort of violence was exactly the sort of thing he should have been believed on. edit: formatting

I don’t think that defeats it at all, it just changes the direction of the conversation and is as deeply philosophical as the first. Some might say life goes on with or without free will so it doesn’t matter, other say that the a societal acceptance of the absence of free will removes the burden of guilt, and could reshape society in very profound ways, so of course it matters.

My devices headsets, speakers etc will usually try to reconnect to last phone/tablet that it was connected to.

If they connect to tue wrong one, You can usually trigger them to look for a new device, connect to it from your phone, then as long as your phone has BT on when its next turned on, it should connect to your phone first.

Started compiling a list, but it posted early, and I got lazy.

List of them here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secretary_of_Health_and_Human_Services

Looking at the first handful, most aren’t medical professionals.

You would still expect that they should be able leverage their resources to have a pre-built response to a question like that.

I think the whole ‘Barbie’ thing is a reference to how the women in Trump’s orbit all have the same over-manufactured aesthetic.

Spy by Family obviously

It’ll create a new bottleneck for sure, but I expect there to be a few communities built up by the richest of the rich to survive with as much comfortable as possible. A large number of the survivors will be their serfs, essential staff to maintain their comfort in exchange for a chance to survive.

I’m not speaking from experience with the firefighters side here, but I do think it come’s down to the ick factor of smell is so much stronger than the yum factor.
Smell is how we know if something is safe to eat, so if its off even a bit, that jumps to the peak of our attention.

Usually if you burn something a little bit, that’s the only smell you notice.

By: Phelan H.B. No. 366

A BILL TO BE ENTITLED

AN ACT relating to required disclosures on certain political advertising that contains altered media; creating a criminal offense. BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF TEXAS: SECTION 1. Chapter 255, Election Code, is amended by adding Section 255.0015 to read as follows: Sec. 255.0015. REQUIRED DISCLOSURE ON CERTAIN POLITICAL ADVERTISING CONTAINING ALTERED MEDIA; CRIMINAL PENALTY. (a) This section applies only to a person who: (1) is an officeholder, candidate, or political committee; (2) makes expenditures during a reporting period that in the aggregate exceed $100 for political advertising, other than an expense to cover the basic cost of hardware, messaging software, and bandwidth; or (3) publishes, distributes, or broadcasts political advertising described by Subsection (b) in return for consideration. (b) A person may not, with the intent to influence an election, knowingly cause to be published, distributed, or broadcast political advertising that includes an image, audio recording, or video recording of an officeholder’s or candidate’s appearance, speech, or conduct that did not occur in reality, including an image, audio recording, or video recording that has been altered using generative artificial intelligence technology, unless: (1) the image or video recording has only been altered to change the saturation, brightness, contrast, color, or any other superficial quality of the image or video; or (2) the political advertising includes a disclosure from the person or another person on whose behalf the political advertising is published, distributed, or broadcast indicating that the image, audio recording, or video recording did not occur in reality. © The commission by rule shall prescribe the form of the disclosure required by Subsection (b), including the font, size, and color of the disclosure. The commission shall ensure that the form of the disclosure is consistent with other required disclosures on political advertising. (d) A person commits an offense if the person violates this section. An offense under this section is a Class A misdemeanor. (e) This section does not impose liability on any of the following persons for political advertising published, distributed, or broadcast by or at the direction of another person: (1) an interactive computer service, as defined by 47 U.S.C. Section 230(f); (2) an Internet service provider, cloud service provider, cybersecurity service provider, communication service provider, or telecommunications network; (3) a radio or television broadcaster, including a cable or satellite television network operator, programmer, or producer; or (4) the owner or operator of a commercial sign, as defined by Section 391.001, Transportation Code. SECTION 2. This Act takes effect September 1, 2025.

Sorry for the formatting, link here

Including the full body does say the law only applies to people engaged in a campaign, and sets specific boundaries around that.

I think these types of laws are important. It seems like the misinformation, including AI generated images to soil a candididates reputation is a clear problem than needs to be address. Not saying the language on this specific law is ideal, or even adequate, but it is a start and other juristictions need to be working towards this to protect democracy in this new world of endless content.

We Canadians just had our elections, and there were plenty of fake AI images making the rounds trying to link our new Prime Minister to Epstein. I don’t want that sort of nonsense to continue into future elections.

Your point is still valid, but it’s not an increase/decrease thing.

Im pretty sure Net Approval means percent that approve minus percent that disapprove.

Not yet…

Some cats are all 4 in 1.

Campaign manager : Whatever you do, don’t sound like Trump or Maga when you speak.

Candidate: Don’t speak. Got it.

Accessibility is only a tiny portion of it. Most of the US can’t walk to pretty much anything useful.

Lets start looking at ticket prices, and concession prices.

Family of 4 to watch a movie starts at $70 CAD at my local theatre. $10 for a single large popcorn to share, and $5ea per water. Fountain drinks are somehow more expensive than bottled water. That’s $100 for the start of an evening. Take a look at the rest of the economy, and figure out why theatres aren’t seeing the traffic they used to.