under the Military Code and under general law, no military officer can obey an order that is not legal. Basically, it completely prevents Trump from issuing a legal order to invade Greenland.

Nothing is stopping him from issuing an illegal order and his generals would be in more hot water by disobeying it than obeying it.

Any military is purpose built to remove individual autonomy. The ones who rise to the top are the ones who most believe in the chain of command. The idea that one of our generals (who have been purged during Trump’s second term) would disobey an order is laughable to me. Maybe every modern president has used the military in a way that is illegal according to US law, a treaty, or both.

I worked there during the pandemic. Summer 2019 to summer 2021. I never heard about any reforms but a lot was happening around then and I’m sure I missed a lot.

One thing that did change during the pandemic was that my company went optionally remote. Working from home was even more unheard of in Japan than in the US before the pandemic so that was crazy. And they even reduced the number of desks in the office so they couldn’t have all the workers in at the same time. A lot of US companies have since rolled back those policies. No idea if my old company stuck with it.

I know them from frequent guest spots in Dropout comedy shows. Very funny person with big energy.

I vouch for Breezy. Been using it for years. It’s very easy to use and clear and I think more accurate than a lot of my friends phones. Though that depends on your weather source.

I worked for a large Japanese manufacturing company. For sure my employer was more old school in a lot of ways simply because it was a big old company. I bet some of the newer industries are less like this. However, I would still be surprised if they were that much better. I had friends in different industries and heard similar stories.

A Japanese citizen sees the full breadth and complexity of the Japanese economy. They would naturally perceive foreign media as oversimplifying and unresponsive to more recent changes. It’s true that Japan (government and industries) are attempting to move away from this style of work but, like many things in Japan, it’s extremely slow, mostly symbolic, and plagued by inertia. Us salarymen clocking in and out was probably implemented with good intentions at first. I never asked but I bet it was enforced at one time. One of the big reasons they’re trying to change is because men that work all day can’t find a wife and have kids. Japan is in a demographics crisis. The cultural xenophobia makes them reluctant to let immigrants in to help with labor shortages. I remember government sponsored dating programs which is funny to think about.

This cultural inertia isn’t all a bad thing btw. It makes institutions very stable. My company had hordes of procedures and burocracy for everything which was inefficient but you could count on them to do what they planned to do. I remember finding out about a government plan to stimulate the economy by giving some money to some companies so they could invest in growth. They had the problem of the companies just giving the money to shareholders in big dividends. They don’t have the expectation of explosive growth like we do in the US.

The thing they really do well though, is soft power. Any time I bring up that Japan is a very racist, sexist, xenophobic, or homophobic society, an army of anime fans and sushi lovers are ready to defend them. Japanese society is complicated and no one person fully fits a generality but I couldn’t keep living there.

This is the norm in Japanese offices. I worked for 2 years in Japan in an office. Officially we were a white company and weren’t allowed to work overtime. However, we would get monthly emails from the office manager detailing everyone’s exact amount of overtime. Even though we were salary, we had to clock in and out to make sure we didn’t work overtime. The nominal reason for these emails was to tell people to lower their overtime since it wasn’t allowed. Those emails had the actual effect of ranking everyone by how much overtime they had worked and pressuring people with lower numbers to work later. People would regularly leave the office around 9 or 10pm. All hiring is done April 1st when a large cohort of college grads come in and they are expected to work there for life.

To be classified as a black company, and be named and shamed by the government, you have to like…cause a high profile suicide or something.

Fun fact: Women generally weren’t allowed to get a bank account or credit card in their own name until 1974 in the USA. Before that, a man generally had to cosign. Even if she got a credit card, her wage would be significantly discounted when calculating a credit limit.

Also, even if someone is specifically trying to catfish ICE agents, how would you target them? Presumably, they don’t say they’re an ice agent in their bio. This seems kind of ridiculous. My guess is this is an easy narrative to accept for unlikeable men who keep getting rejected to blame women. They can say that they’re being rejected because women are being manipulative, rather than look inward. Is the memo made by an insecure man who is trying to explain his love failures or is it made by a cynical leader trying to control the men under him? Idk either way but I don’t believe it.

It’s sort of one-time-use though. Now that it’s been used, the gulf states are building pipelines to bypass the gulf and vulnerable countries are taking the opportunity to decarbonize. If the straight opened tomorrow, these countries would continue those efforts to reduce their strategic vulnerability. It won’t be as strong of a deterrent the second time around.

Also, a nuke is supposed to deter aggression. It didn’t do that.

the blow back led to laws that are still on the book today.

Effectively, those laws were already in place. If the first time a tactic is used against powerful people, it is outlawed, it was never actually allowed. The laws getting passed at least shows people how the law is being used to benefit the rich and powerful. The previous unspoken rule gave the people in power plausible deniability. I’m not some huge fan of Just Stop Oil but the edges of the laws should always be probed by activists, imo.

Yes

Luckily the first gen Audi TT managed to avoid it. I had one that I bought for cheap and all my coworkers though it was much newer and more expensive.

I learned to drive stick in an e30 BMW. I have a real soft spot for boxy 80s cars.

I use a pencil case.

• Tire levers
• Spare tube
• 15mm wrench
• Multitool
• 2 nitrile gloves
• Some bandaids
• Hand sanitizer

I keep a mini pump in my bag or mounted to a bottle cage boss. I also have a u-lock and cable in my bag whenever I go out.

It’s the motor and mechanism assembly the makes a car window go up and down

I have an accountant friend that mentioned he was thinking about getting a rental property one day. I told him I thought that was immoral and his response was that he would charge below market rate. This implies that market rate is the neutral point in his moral system. Above that line is immoral and below it is moral. But market rate is the max that you can possibly charge by definition. If you charged above market rate and got a tenant, that’s just the market rate now. It’s impossible for him to be immoral in his system. All the while, he’s setting himself up to build his wealth off of someone with less money than himself and increasingly benefitting off of a housing crisis.

What a terrible comment

No. There are many types of missions a drone can’t currently do.

To devolve into their tactics is to give them ammunition to fuel the brainwashed.

I agree with this message but not your reasoning. Fascists don’t care about what is true. If we only speak objectively, make rational arguments, emphasize logical consistency, stick to our principles, etc, they’ll just lie and take things wildly out of context to feed to their base. They don’t need us to feed them ammunition.

However, we should still do these things for our own sake. If we fight their misinformation with our own, we erase any hope objective truth and shared reality have of coming back. A lot of Trump voters and supporters don’t support every aspect of modern fascism. If the Epstein files or Iran war gets some of them to realize they’ve been lied to, they might look around to other ideologies. We need to represent the values of transparency and truth that the MAGA movement pretends to uphold. If manipulation and deception eventually defeats fascism, it would still be bad. The new normal and values of the new leadership would continue manipulating and deceiving people to the benefit of the rich.

I like this and think it would be a big improvement over the current system. However, I do see some potential problems:

• These senators would be normal people only on their first day. Once they are an important person with power and money, they will change. Your work buddy that gets promoted to supervisor suddenly becomes a dick. Imagine they got promoted to senator. Their needs and incentives will no longer be the same and they won’t be able to represent their previous life as well.
• The first year being silenced and mentored by a senior senator exacerbates this problem. When they are most close to the common person, they will be least powerful. I would expect the senior senator to represent the needs of a retiring senator and to influence the new senator to do the same. If anything, they should be most influencial their first year and silenced their last year.
• A former senator is unlikely to return to normal life. They spent a decade being highly paid and powerful. If they were a truck driver before, they aren’t going to return to driving trucks. They’re going to get book deals, start a consulting firm, etc. I would expect the sitting senators to shape society to that end so they can retire comfortably when their term is up. You would end up with a class of sitting/former senators and the normal people.
• Who gets included in this lottery? A reasonable answer would be “citizens”. We’ve seen the path to citizenship made harder in recent years. It could selectively be made harder for certain immigrants. A Norwegian immigrant would have an easier and quicker time gaining citizenship than a Venezuelan refugee. Would there be a minimum or maximum age for the lottery? Should non-citizens with permanent residence get in?
• With no elections, I would expect the senators to be relatively unresponsive to public pressure. Also, with no voting or way to participate in political matters, I would expect the average person to feel like powerless subjects rather than vocal advocates.
• I would expect the senators to be more susceptible to lobbying, not less. The public can’t influence me, but this oil company might be in need of a consultant once my term is up.

Like I said, I still think this would be an improvement, but I think you’re making a mistake in thinking that people will bring their values with them once they become senator. I think our values are highly shaped by our incentives and the incentives of a senator will change their values.