Bah! Use a particular state if you know it. Otherwise American serves as well as European.

…and people who want to hide in the shadows, there’s no reason to do that when you’re buying a vacuum off me and want to come to my home to pick it up.

As a buyer of random trash, I really don’t want anyone to know more than they have to. The only identifying details about me should be “paid $13.65 for a set of glittery plastic tableware.” In whatever ledger you keep for those sort of things.

I got a promotional text message from a store I bought a single repair component from once in a state I never visited. It made me irrationally upset. I would not accuse you of such, but every action to verify someone’s “personhood” means that marketing types have that much more access to try to sell me junk.

No of course not. Things are what they are.

The Democrats’ long-term planning skills are not in question here, but they must recognize that they cannot enact those long-term plans without access to the levers of power- and that short term concessions must be made to that end.

As for voters: we all wish they thought more and weren’t constantly led around by the nose, but both facts and feelings are part of their individual calculus for support. Obama was carried in on feelings of hope which vibed with the zeitgeist. Trump came in on a presentation of a strong figure (that we know to be false) that complements the uncertainty about the future that Obama left behind when hope kinda petered out over his term.

The feelings in this case are critical because we know politicos cannot possibly keep all their (sometimes contradictory) campaign promises and they cannot voice their position on every issue. So it falls to the voters to suss out what priorities and allegiances the politician has and how they will respond to any given event.

Inflation has largely been controlled during that period, but real wages have stagnated since at least the housing crisis of '08. It doesn’t make a lick of difference how well inflation is managed to the poors when buying power is lost.

Pandemic (and even prior) economic malaise is not the fault nor legacy of the Democrats necessarily, but political cynicism bites both ways, and is a lot harder to overcome when the party tells you economic factors are looking up and asks you to wait it out for an uncertain boom in the future.

Yes, Republican (esp. MAGA) policies and mentalities make that promised economic future dicier, but they deliver a feeling of doing something.

For realz, I’m not a Democrat! I just vote for them in primaries and general elections and defend them when those mean ol’ leftists come around.

The Democratic party may be a big tent party with values of varying progressive pedigree, but the adage of lying with dogs and getting fleas applies.

Just say zoombastic like a normal person.

The Star Wars IP is still pretty new for them, so this might be more akin to surveying the media landscape to find where to drill down deeper. They will cut back, but only when they have identified a profitable and concrete course forward.

I like watching the grackles go about their morning routine, but I rarely see true crows where I’m at.

┐(￣ヘ￣)┌

Is this a Korean War poster?

I get the message and generally don’t care for prescriptive grammar, but for some reason this particular rule haunts me.

Let those votes be a lesson: camouflage your actual point behind a picture everyone loves and you will … win fake internet points?

I know precious few rules and when even those don’t matter, I know even less.

Yeah. Never managed to properly get the hand of punctuation.

Bah, those are (mostly) immutable characteristics! You may as well bemoan opportunities missed because you weren’t born a French noble of the 14th century.

No, but the meme implies she meant cologne.

Is this to mean that state gov’ts and services will have to pick up the slack on nat’l parks, or is there no mixing of the two labor pools?

This just looks to me like a step towards “privatization” of these parks being paraded as a safety measure.

Just so. The periphery of the parks may be visited- a shared border between worlds where the most intrepid of both may briefly meet, but just as bears and raccoons are driven out of suburbs, so too should people be driven from the deeper parks.

As for the sanctity of life, it’s more of a balancing in my eyes. No life should be valued so as to cause undue stress to survivors. But I suppose my rather callous attitude is anathema to most.

Absolutely not.

Alas, I am but a blue collar shmuck without the patience to slog through theory nor the oratory skills to convincingly pass on what theory others share.

Yes? I’m not so optimistic about humans becoming interplanetary, but if it were to happen, I’d make noise to try and limit any human settlement. I’d argue that if humans want so badly to be off this rock, they can make space arcologies designed around themselves rather than inserting themselves where they ought not be and fucking up wherever they land.

I believe more important is to train on your kit. If you know how your gun works with ‘muscle memory’, you won’t even need to think about dicking around with the manual safety- it’ll be done my the time you think about it.

Even if you get one without the manual safety: train on that. The familiarity and comfort of the wielder is far more important a factor than any particular component of the gun.