Except for telling people which bathrooms to use, which sports teams to play on, which news stories to cover, which God to pray to, and how; the federal government needs to be big enough to do those things.
Why stop there? According to one (SovCit-related) school of “thought,” the County is the most powerful level of government, and the County Sheriff — provided that he* is a “Constitutional Sheriff” — the supreme legal authority.
As a timeworn trope has it, Democrats want government out of the bedroom and into the boardroom; Republicans want the opposite.
* Always male by birth, of course. Anything else would be woke.
Is that a reference to something?
Two words and a Wingding.
I have no idea.
Me neither. I googled it and just got articles about how women shouldn’t be in the military.
I’m finding two ‘groups’, one called The We Like Women Army and another called The We Like Women Pride Army. The one with the word ‘pride’ in it appears to be just a guy with a dozen followers, but their facebook pages says “We Like Women Pride Army… If they do not like women, they are the enemy!” They both appear to be located in NW (one in WA and one on OR). But that’s as far as I care to look into it. Honestly, I’m not even sure either of them are real. They websites/facebook pages look like jokes.
I’m in Olympia, so the WA one is probably mine. I assume he’s just one of our local cranks, like Goodspaceguy or Mike the Mover or the guy who changed his name to “Democritus” and ran for city council on a pledge to reform the city into a classical Greek direct democracy or the old man who shops at my store who wears a camo jacket with “OBAMACARE” in big block letters across the back along with a patch of the Zig-Zag guy and a bunch of other incoherent slogans.
Looking again, I think they’re the same person. He’s got a podcast, a youtube channel and a bunch of social media pages. Nothing’s been posted to any of them in years.
Here’s his youtube channel if you want to look at it.
I have no idea where to post this one, but I don’t know a better thread. Amazon is the stupid MFer in this instance.
You remember when Amazon is where you went to buy books? I’m done buying them there now. They SUCK as a book seller. The top two issues I’ve had lately:
- Pay for a new book and an obvious used book shows up
- Pay for a new book and they toss it in, loose, with the rest of your order and it shows up beat to shit.
I don’t buy many physical books these days (mainly get them on my Kindle via my library), but there are books you can’t get there and sometimes I also want a physical book (like my friend just publishing one). The last four books I got via Amazon have all been disappointments.
Done with Amazon for books. They can’t even do what they set out to do when they started.
The last time I bought a book from Amazon, it turned out to be a print-on-demand copy where they literally just ran every page of a used copy through a copy machine and printed it out, complete with a huge margin, discolored page, blurry text, and visible highlighter marks from the previous owner.
Just look at this crap that they had the audacity to charge me $16 for. I wouldn’t pay 50 cents for this at a yard sale.
I haven’t experienced that entirely different level of bullshit and I won’t since I’m done buying books from the company that started off by selling books.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, bought Oculus, a manufacturer of virtual reality headsets, in 2014, for two billion dollars and then has plowed billions more into virtual reality and the “metaverse” as a whole (and even renamed his company Meta to emphasize just how serious he was about this). A grand total of $80 billion.
Now, he’s rethinking all of that. Instead, this year, he plans to spend more than $100 billion on artificial intelligence.
(This is all a bit personal to me, as I worked for a couple of companies in the virtual reality industry from approximately 1994-1999. I don’t think anyone in the business back then could ever imagine anyone blowing that kind of money on the business.)
The last time I had that sensation was after eating 8-day-old fried rice.
I suspect that any “new” copy of any older book from Amazon, one that isn’t recently published, will be a print on demand re-tread of an old copy. I got lucky, in that my hardcover copy of The Maltese Falcon had very clean text which, if it had been scanned, had had OCR used, been carefully edited back to the original text with footnotes added about those changes, and cast in a nice font. My complaint, which seems very minor now compared to yours, was that they did a lousy job of binding.
I also agree that Amazon doesn’t provide adequate protection for shipping books, mine was just thrown into one of their heavy paper envelope things and left to the mercies of their shipping system.
Well off topic, but… as a bit of a book nerd at school I learned how to rebind library books. It is not very complex, just requires quite a lot of time and effort per book.
As to books from Amazon. …
Are you all buying from Amazon proper, or from one of the thousands of small businesses who use Amazon as an advertising and fulfillment platform? Amazon deliberately makes it a bit difficult to tell which. But there is a huge difference in potential sleaze between a third party seller and the real Capital-A Amazon.
It used to be that if I bought an ebook it got downoaded and I didn’t need an internet connection to read it. The last few have been strictly “read on demand” and an internet connection is required in order to read it. I am very disappointed.
They must not be Kindle books then. I’ve never heard of ebooks you needed to be online to read.
One reason I love ebooks is because it’s something I can do on my phone even when there’s no connection.
Both. We’ve stopped with the third party purchases since that is when you get an obviously used book sold as new. But buying from Amazon proper doesn’t mean your new hardcover book won’t be thrown in, without any protection, into a larger box with other items and show up with the dust-cover half off and wrinkled, and the other items digging into the corners of the pages. I’m not buying books from them again. There must be a bookseller out there that cares about books more than Amazon.