1. “Handset” is obfuscating legalese to refer to a cell phone in a way intending to distance the meaning of the word from the thing that the old and technologically illiterate people who rule on this use every day.

2. I’m no fan of their strategy, but cell phone providers have claimed for a long time that filling your phone with unremovable bloatware causes the overall price to decrease. Their argument is most likely that they will have to charge more once the propagators of that bloatware realize that they can no longer force it on people and wedge that as a reason to pay less to carriers.

3. The reality is that cell phones are priced based on what people will buy anyway and carriers pocket as much of the money as they can that third parties pay them for their bloatware. Ultimately because of that this ruling hurts their bottom line, but the above reasoning gives plausible deniability in the face of the law as it is interpreted by old technologically illiterate lawmakers

It’s the natural conclusion of the strategy republicans set into motion to manipulate their base.

It started just after Watergate. Nixon was facing massive calls for justice from both sides. Republican think tanks realized that their base of conservatives consumed news from all sources that informed their mostly unbiased decision to hold their guy accountable. So those republican think tanks devised a plan to create a conservative news outlet that explicitly demonized other news so that the conservative base would never turn on one of their own again. That strategy was realized in the 90’s with the creation of Fox News.

Since then, conservative media has been slowly transforming politics from the perspective of the average conservative into a team sport, where the main motivation isn’t “who runs the country better” but rather “my team is better than yours”.

It wasn’t so pervasive 20 years ago, but conservative media has found themselves with a base that now only responds to the outrage they’ve been conditioning them with, and that has created the raging confrontational assholes you see today.

Being a conservative doesn’t mean what it used to. And that’s because the Republican leadership robbed conservatives of that in order to maintain control of their base.

I like the “formally” vs “formerly” suggesting Elon is never going to get away from Twitter in favor of X

All games are time wasting. Rogue-like games don’t have no progress, it’s just not the same kind of progress other genres tend to have.

I think it’s really funny to hate a certain genre of entertainment because it wastes time though. The ultimate point of all entertainment is to waste time and produce dopamine.

I mean like, it’s cool to not like rogue-likes because you don’t like starting over. That’s a valid opinion. But saying it’s because you don’t want to waste time is kind of hilarious

Our conservatives aren’t like conservatives elsewhere in the world. Our liberals are like your conservatives, policy wise.

Our conservatives are brainwashed by four decades of targeted conservative media that’s explicitly designed to keep them in an anger loop in order to create a political climate where republicans (who are the actual politicians) don’t have to appeal to the conservative base with actual policy.

Republicans, through channels like Fox News and OANN (seriously, go watch some of it and see what we’re dealing with here) have demonized everyone to the left of them so hard that entire generations of conservatives genuinely believe that there’s a bloody revolution coming.

It would be nice if it were actually bullshit, but these lunatics who make up half of our voting population put a con-man entertainer with zero political experience in the whitehouse for four years and installed conservative justices to our highest court who are systematically dismantling our democracy.

It’s very real. It’s so real that some of the less insane conservatives are waking up to how dangerous the details of this plan actually are, and that’s why Republicans are panicking about this.

Aiding the less fortunate in society benefits everyone, same as maintaining roads or building libraries.

For decades republicans have artificially raised the bar for that aid and lowered the aid actually received, for no reason than to appeal to the crowd that thinks taxation is theft but uses modern public amenities anyway.

The rampant cutting of those benefits and handing the rights over to corporations is one of the major reasons we have a nationwide health care crisis, just for one example of how those cuts end up hurting everyone.

The call where Biden urged a ceasefire and Netanyahu completely ignored it? I think you think the US has more power in this situation than they actually do.

Could Israel continue this war without US aid?

The US provides about 1% of Israel’s GDP in military aid and Israel already exports weapons and ammo it doesn’t need. Who would provide American-centric weaponry is irrelevant to the question of whether the war would stop.

To add to that, it literally doesn’t matter who steps in to aid Israel, as the aid itself is less important than the potential ally and the strategic act of robbing the US of influence in the middle east. You think Russia or China wouldn’t stoop to changing their position on a massacre to get a step up politically? Two countries currently hosting genocides of their own?

A magic stop button doesn’t exist for the US. We’re clearly not going to agree on that so this is where our conversation ends. Goodnight.

There’s no magic button that ends this conflict, except the one that lies on Netanyahu’s desk. Israel isn’t dependent on the US in the way that you’re trying to make it sound. If the US pulls away from Israel, it creates a vacuum that US’s adversaries are chomping at the bit to fill.

They won’t suddenly go broke. They won’t suddenly be disarmed. They won’t suddenly decide the war isn’t worth it. They will take money and weapons from other nations who want their influence in the middle east and the only thing that will change is the US losing that influence.

Look, I’m not saying that Biden’s hands are clean either. The US as a governmental body is complicit in this heinous war.

What I am saying is that you are woefully naive if you think a phone call could end this. That phone call already happened. It was international news. Netanyahu laughed in Biden’s face.

All of these things, but still Biden does not directly have the power to end this conflict. Blaming him for it happening as if he’s the one crushing Palestinians under the rubble of their houses is dishonest.

Oh right, the war in Gaza is completely Biden’s fault and not the product of decades of politics coming to a head in a way the US can’t explicitly control. I think I saw Biden out there personally shooting Palestinian children in the face 🙄

Being self righteous about doing nothing is worse.

Despite your own brand of defeatism in insisting the outcome is the same no matter what, one side actually is better. Even if the metric of “better” pales on the grand scheme of what we deserve or should be doing.

I’m not trying to project self-righteousness by recognizing that there are only two real choices. I’m asserting that advocating non-action or pointless action is such a tired trope that what you’re doing is circlejerking for dopamine instead of applying what little influence you have as an individual to work toward the avoiding the actual worst outcome.

When the American populace as a whole is brainwashed into believing the only choices are red and blue, you have to accept that whining about it and voting green (or not voting) is going to accomplish nothing.

So make your colorful allegory and feel good about yourself on the internet. In the end, you are accomplishing less than the people you look down on who recognize the shitty reality of our situation.

I’m a little shakey on the details but I think it has more to do with the extra bone mass in relation to the way the jaw functions. It acts more like a shock absorbing bumper than a lever.

Other animals that get punched there tend to take that blow more to the throat, which is a bit more problatic

I read somewhere sometime ago that the theory that makes the most sense is that we evolved chins to take a punch, which animals besides our immediate evolutionary relatives do not do.

So we evolved chins as an evolutionary advantage over our immediate evolutionary relatives who would logically be competing for the same resources.

That’s what makes this extra stupid. Maga hats don’t think that far

This is kind of obvious and I probably don’t have to say it but…

Trump is doing this to weasel his way out of a debate he shouldn’t have agreed to. No way in hell Trump subjects himself to the same drug test. He’s betting on Biden not agreeing to it either so he can just say “well those liberals are obviously playing dirty so I’m out”

The drugs in question are necessarily irrelevant

Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

For the elderly folk who write and enforce the laws that caused this to come to pass, sufficiently advanced technology just means more complex than notepad

And this is why my math teachers never gave multiple choice tests

Any response other than “I already have” or “I donate resources” paints you as an armchair hypocrite who doesn’t have the credentials to understand, let alone have an opinion about this conflict.

You my friend, are the one who is adorable.

World War is not the solution you think it is