We do, but it’s really scaled back compared to what we used to have. There are so many scars of abandoned rail lines all over major cities where they were torn out and replaced with road infrastructure. So many central train stations that are shadows of their former selves.
The unicorn also has forward-facing eyes like the horses in Skyrim, implying that the unicorn is a predator.
I think those are lines with standard passenger train service on them, though I can’t remember the reasoning for that. Might have been the states there refused to cooperate with the company or it could just be a terrain issue with the rail grade being too steep or winding for high-speed rail.
In short, the US has absolutely zero high-speed rail infrastructure - and barely any rail infrastructure at all compared to what it used to have and the size of the country.
This was one of many proposed high-speed rail networks from (I think) the late 2000s/early 2010s, but the fledgling train companies were largely strangled or bought up and closed by freight rail, car, and fossil fuel companies, so nothing ever happened.
TERF Island is not a safe place for trans people. Better than the US? Probably. I imagine you’re less likely to get hate crimed, at least. But they’ve been the biggest driver of the anti-trans misinformation machine that’s plagued medicine and culture for 20 years now. Trans medical care is incredibly difficult to get there and the government has been trying to get rid of it entirely for at least a decade now. Many of the politicians are funded by right-wing extremist Christian fundamentalist groups from the US.
They’re not far behind the US and Canada in the fall to fascism. It’s just a less hateful and more Big Brother flavor for the most part.
even windows added support a year ago or so supposedly
You answered your own question. I spent years playing the game of “This image is a JPEG. Will the website force me to save it in a format that can’t be opened by the basic Windows photo viewer, or will it actually be a JPEG when I download it?”
You’d be surprised how often it would turn out to be the former rather than the latter.
Jim Jones, of the Jonestown Massacre. The cult leader who we got the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” from (though they actually were too poor to get Kool-Aid and they laced Flavor-Aid, the off brand version, with cyanide instead). When he started out, he was actually a very influential Civil Rights activist who is responsible for the policies that would later become the foundation of the civil rights laws in his home city. But he later became a crazy cult leader and by the time of the cult’s mass suicide, he ranted like Trump does today.
As for how anybody could believe that Trump’s a good businessman, many people only know him as that guy from The Apprentice, not the businessman who has bankrupted multiple casinos, an airline company (and beauty pageant for young girls who he flew around the country with in his private plane - just him, the girls, and a man by the name of Epstein), and who couldn’t even sell steaks to Americans.
People are more likely to be interested in who you are as a person than your country’s politics.
The current political state of the US is just the icing on the shit cake. When I was a kid traveling abroad with my parents 30 years ago, Americans were considered fat, ignorant, and egotistical. That they expected the rest of the world to speak English, accept USD everywhere, and give them special treatment. That they were loud, obnoxious, ignorant, and rude.
2016 Trump ran on the idea of being the good businessman who was going to clean up the swamp and get this company’s country’s act together. Just like any other CEO selling to investors. I have friends who, halfway into his campaign, were like, “I kinda like this Trump guy, he tells it like it is,” and by the time of the election they had completely 180’d on him because of the details of what he was promising.
One of these friends is super into cults and true crime, and he says that listening to Trump is eerie because he sounds exactly like Jim Jones. Then, and now. Back then he sounded like Jim Jones in his prime (and read Hitler’s speeches as bedtime stories according to an ex-wife, which would explain why all his campaign promises match up with Hitler’s). Today, he sounds like Jim Jones making his death speeches while you can hear them forcing the cultists to drink the Flavor-Aid and gasping, choking, and dying in the background of the recordings.
The people who liked Trump the first time and didn’t change their minds then were never going to change their minds the second time. They’ve already bought into the cult. And that’s what Trump is - a cult leader. He promises them a solution to their misery by giving them an obvious target to take their aggression out on, and people eat it up because they want a simple solution that absolves them of any blame.
At that point, why not just 3d print one or something. Save money by not giving it to a scummy company, and hey, throw a raspberry pi in there or something with an emulator and you can probably actually run Virtual Boy games on it.
Don’t forget to inscribe transgender ideology on it like “0w0 what’s this notices bulge” and “hey fascist, catch! ⬆️➡️⬇️⬇️⬇️”
It’s difficult to say, but they’re definitely overrepresented both online and in the news. They’re definitely a minority, the Republican party knows this and it’s why they fight so hard to maintain control, but other context in the country makes it hard to say how much of a minority they are. Conservatives generally make up the areas of the country with the lowest population density, with cities running very much in the opposite direction. And a big part of Republican policy is convincing voters to vote against their own interests. I’ve seen stats that say that 60% of the population is more left-leaning than the government at any time. But we also have very low voter turnout here due to things like disenfranchisement and gerrymandering. Without that and things like the Electoral College, Republicans would never hold enough seats to hold any real power ever again. Trump actually got noticeably less votes in 2024 than he did in 2016 - it’s just that the Dems got way less votes and the Electoral College that allowed him to win.
As for the political spectrum here, I’d argue that the spectrum in Germany (and the rest of Europe) is normal, while the spectrum here is so shifted to the right that it’s unhealthy. And it’s gotten way worse just in my lifetime. Trump’s party called the Republican party of the 90s communists for their policies. Back then, the two parties largely disagreed on the details of policy, though there has always been the bigoted side of the Republicans. It wasn’t until the country elected a black man to office that things really went off the deep end. The Democrats every year say that they have to court some mythical moderate Republican to vote for them or else they won’t win, so they shift to the right and disenfranchise the left. But that’s not how Republicans operate, especially anymore. They no longer care about policy but about hurting Democrats, so they’d never vote for them anyway.
It’s also important to note that Bernie isn’t even really a Democrat, he just runs with them because they’re the closest to being a leftwing party. The Democrats don’t want him, he’s too leftist for them.
Ironically, Windows users have generally felt that way with every new Windows version after 7. Vista was painful for a lot of people and 7 was basically Vista but with the problems finally fixed, and every version since then people have complained that the newest version feels unfinished.
And in a lot of ways they have been. In 10, there are at least 2 different UIs for navigating the system and settings. Some options have been migrated over to the newer one, some only exist there, and some still only exist in the old version of the settings. And then 11 made it even worse by moving a number of frequently used options in the right-click menu into a second menu that you have to open after you right click.
People hated 10 at first, too, but by now they’ve gotten used to it and Microsoft has ironed off most of the rough edges people hated. But it’s been building for years and this pattern has seemingly hit some kind of breaking point with the present-day circumstances.
It’s always a very case by case kind of situation, but I’d say don’t expect them to change their opinions. Even the ones who aren’t in it because they were already bigots.
Trump runs a cult, and after a certain point of commitment to a cult, it becomes basically impossible to get someone out because of the sunk cost fallacy of making it their entire personality and having to admit what they did in service to the cult was wrong.
It’s not about taking the high road but about accepting the fact that the worst monsters to ever walk on this planet have all been humans. By accepting this and being aware that these monsters can come from anywhere, we can better make sure that “never again” actually means Never Again.
It always is. They always jump to blaming liberals, minorities, etc. long before there’s any information.
Attacks on Jews tripled in the days after 9/11. The hatred is the point.
Kirk certainly knows what it’s like when the blood’s pumping.
Considering studies have shown that conservatives have, on average, smaller parts of the brain that are related to things like empathy and higher rates of aggressive personality disorders and the like, I’d say all of the above. Bigotry is learned, not natural, but people are also emotion based and don’t like to be proven wrong, so facts and logic don’t really convince many people. It’s why so many conservatives only change their opinions when it happens to them, and why so many who do have it happen to them continue to do the thing that hurts them.
Why would you smear Charlie like this? He died protecting our 2nd amendment rights, a noble sacrifice just like he said we need, and by showing any empathy, you’re doing a lot of damage.