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[–] 111 points 3 months ago (2 children)

US is like a bad b-movie. The villains do everything they can to destroy the people. The companies are all evil.

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  • [–] 49 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    You’ve found the plot! The twist is that this is what asymmetric warfare looks like, decades in the making. The US is currently losing the Cold War against the USSR, which began 5 years before Putin was born so it was his entire upbringing. He doesn’t need to maintain tight control of Donny, but merely let him wreak whatever havoc he will. The leopard face-eating will mostly just be sad because everything will be so badly damaged by the time the red team really understands how badly they’ve been had. Corporate greed is a reliable villain to rise to the occasion, that merely needed some unshackling. Billionaires gonna oligarch if you give them half a chance. Helping capitalism to self-destruct is possibly the ultimate communist victory.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I feel like, having read your comment, I should stop feeling so grumpy about Russia fucking with us. We can’t get thru this late-stage capitalist nonsense fast enough.

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  • [–] 29 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

    Nope, the next stages will be worse. Climate change is baked in and being in the 99% is gonna suck.

    Is fascism a sub-stage of late-stage capitalism, or a subsequent stage?

    One of the subsequent stages is AI-powered robot weapons, which I predict will be used on the domestic populace before too long, but also fits in the bad b-movie theme:

    This Tuesday, while America was obsessively watching the latest bizarre twists in Trump’s Iran debacle, Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon rolled out a $1.5 trillion budget request that contained a line item almost nobody’s talking about: a 24,000 percent increase, from $225 million last year to $54.6 billion this year, for an outfit called the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group. 

    That’s the largest year-over-year jump for any program in the entire defense budget, and it’s earmarked to build out AI-driven autonomous human-killing systems inside the Special Operations Command headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Yo dawg, I heard you like DAWGs.

    So I put AI inside a human-killing system so it can simulate killing people while it kills people!

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    They didn’t tell Ender that the “training missions” were all real battles until after he won the war, so that he wouldn’t have to grapple with ethics in real time. That was the essence of the Game.

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  • [–] 33 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Wine coolers have entered the chat.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Or how about the birthday cake flavored Smirnoff vodka as if any adult would drink such a thing.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I think it's hilarious that we keep reinventing wine coolers every so often. Wine coolers, Zima, Smirnoff Ice, hard lemonade, twisted tea, hard seltzer... it's all just neutral alcohol mixed with fruit juices and sugar, but we've got to keep coming up with fun new labels for it every ten to fifteen years so as to market it to the current hip young demographic.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Zima was popular when I was a teenager. I remember a lot of my friends drinking them as an introduction to alcohol because they tasted better than beer.

    A few years ago, they did a special manufacturing of Zima (since they no longer make it) and my friend bought a case. I can affirm that Zima tastes like absolute ass. Smirnoff Ice and everything after have been a huge improvement compared to that shit we had in the 90s.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago

    I also remember Zima since they came out just before the time I began to drink underage. I make references to it every now and then and nobody ever seems to know what I'm talking about, so I feel like I've finally found my people here.

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    [–] 31 points 3 months ago (11 children)

    The whole no fruty flavors has always seemed an out of touch rule. Kids using any addictive substances is not good, but a few decades ago it was commonplace for kids to be cought smoking analog cigs. Ecigs are safer and have gotten more people to quit than just about anything, but they are also easier for a non smoker to get into. I think the problem is with how kids are getting access to them (from shady illegal online dealers mostly).

    That said before big tobacco got involved the older style nicotine isolate vapes were much better at actually getting people to quit smoking. They don't give the same level of instant nicotine high you can get from the modern salt nicotine and if you are trying to ween off of nicotine they lessen or remove the cravings. It also helped they weren't cool, my favorite world I've heard people call them was 'mouth fedora'

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Let's not forget about smirnof flavors like birthday cake or other similar nonsense. That's not advertising to children yet somehow a mango flavored vape is?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Well, see, birthday cake flavored Smirnoff still tastes like absolute garbage.

    The real comparison would be actually good tasting alcoholic drinks like hard lemonades or seltzers. Those do actually draw in a lot of the younger crowd, you see them at a lot of underage parties.

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    [–] 27 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    What's up with fruity e-cigs?!

    Makary’s insiders said the former Johns Hopkins University cancer surgeon resigned after Trump forced his hand on authorizing fruit-flavored e-cigarettes. Makary had reportedly been resisting the sign-offs out of concern that the kid-friendly flavors could again entice youth use and addiction—something public health officials and experts have for years worked to combat. But Makary’s stance was in conflict with Trump’s “save vaping” campaign promise—and with the tobacco industry’s interests.

    Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had called Makary over a weekend to scold him for not moving fast enough to authorize flavored vapes, particularly menthol, mango, and blueberry flavors from the Los Angeles manufacturer Glas. The FDA authorized those flavored products days later and issued a new policy that would make it easier to market flavored vapes.

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  • [–] 26 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    But Makary’s stance was in conflict with Trump’s “save vaping” campaign promise

    That's funny because it was Trump and his FDA that introduced the PMTA during his first term and the reason why 95% of the industry had to close up shop.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago

    I don't care whether your gay or straight. e-cigs are still not good for you!

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    The Nanny State strikes again. Now sponsored by even more Evil Corporations!

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