X to doubt. The UK threw out due process a long time ago, wave the ‘terrorism’ tag and egregiously Orwellian policies become law:

• Legalized warrantless arrest and imprisonment of suspects without trial or warrant for 28 days
• Permits freezing of a suspects assets without trial
• Allows unlimited imprisonment of foreigners suspected of terrorism without trial
• Military police permitted to operate on UK soil openly, even for non terrorism reasons
• TPIM orders without trial that permits electronic tagging, travel bans, limited house arrest, curfews and constant monitoring.

And all that’s before we even talk about the recent Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act nonsense.

Oooooh I like the spoken sound of ‘concubi’ but strictly aren’t concubines more so a pseudo-partner/marriage than a smash-and-pass like the incubus and succubus?

This is the line that even at my most cynical, I never thought Trump would go for/be allied to cross - fuck with the money directly. Ruin the bag for the capital class. Tariffs were bad long term but presented an opportunity for huge wealth transfer during that manufactured chaos’s period of ‘creative destruction’:

“He made $2.5 billion, and he made $900 million! That’s not bad!” Trump said, pointing to financial investor Charles Schwab and then NASCAR team owner Roger Penske

But then again, this loon is who he put forward in his first term, sooo yeah.

…what if we can do even better tho?

During COVID when nobody able to spray for mosquitoes there was a really cool resurgence - even in the suburbs. Came home from a bicycle ride late one evening, and swear every tree had Christmas lights strung up, they were chilling out and just glimmering in every branch.

I pushed the bike home that night and watched the show in the trees, a lovely coda to the day

I equally enjoy the 1 and 2 star reviews where they will openly state “product is great, no issues” but then immediately throw all that away because the version they bought doesn’t fit their grandpappy’s 1963 Barracuda, or “that table of six let their kids run around the restaurant, 1/10”.

The bipolar reaction of the average consumer is maddening, no nuance.

Proper scran, that

If you’re a business that’s serious about a supporting an actual charity like childhood cancer or homelessness, I’m expecting at or near 100% of profits to be donated.

Virtue signaling while pocketing essentially all of the proceeds is a super scumbag move. And that’s before the badge worship angle…

It’s okay, we’ve all been gotten by this too. It’s easy to look at an older piece of technology that has survived, and ascribe that to ‘things used to be better’ while ignoring the materials advances or better engineering that doesn’t require massive buttresses to stop building falling over, or why using MIM instead of forging is better for 95% of use cases, or how wastefully overbuilt things were in the past because they didn’t know how to build efficiently.

There is a flipside of planned obsolescence and value engineering something to death where the wrong material/spec is decided for profit reasons… but that is not a new phenomenon