If you think that someone "stealing" 30 chicken nuggets from a company worth over 200 billion dollars is somehow an indication that they must also treat their loved ones poorly, you're thinking far too simply about the complexity of human motivation. Amazingly, exploiting soulless corporations and hurting people are completely unrelated behaviors.

You seem to be under the impression that I think our democracy somehow makes us superior, or that it functions more often than others, when my point is pretty much the opposite: regardless of the governing system, people will not do enough to avoid a corrupt tyrant of a leader from coming into power, which they will then need to literally fight to overcome.

Rights are not earned through voting, but they are lost due to lack of voting, allowing corrupt leaders to roll back the hard-fought advancements. That's what the quote means: the tree of liberty is refreshed with blood. White men own slaves? Fight to free them. Only white men can vote? Fight to achieve voting rights for everyone. Those were the times the tree of liberty was refreshed. We're now seeing these rights called into question because of political leaders that we allowed to be voted in; our rights are slipping due to our insufficient use of the freedoms we fought for, inevitably leading to us needing to fight yet again to refresh them.

If democracy worked unerringly, we'd be more free than ever right now due to the fact that the vast majority of Americans can vote, and while I believe that would be true if everyone did vote, the fact of the matter is that they wont. That allows corrupt leaders to slowly achieve strategic positions in all levels of the government over time, and eventually use their power to bring in the Tyrant mentioned in the quote.

The only people I'm blaming for the regression of our rights and democracy are the tyrants tearing them down. Yes, if we had all voted they never would have gotten the power to do so, but my point has always been that that was never going to happen.

The height was when the vast majority of people understood the importance of informed voting, and did so with pride. We've never really been great in any other way, and even back then we weren't all that great because we kept the right to vote from huge swaths of the people, but democracy functions when people vote, and it fails when they don't.

The quote is that the tree is "refreshed" with blood, which is an important distinction. Also, Jefferson wrote it after the founding of the US - he understood that our democracy is not an exception to this cycle.

Yes, if we all did our civic duty not just to vote, but to actually inform ourselves about the choices, we'd be able to maintain democracy potentially indefinitely, but the reality is that a huge portion of people are complacent, and won't take even the simplest of actions until they're forced to. So, democracy degrades slowly as it's desperately propped up by the few who understand its importance until it finally fails enough to start really affecting the people who "aren't really into politics," by which point its too late to use sweat instead of blood.

We water the tree with the sweat of the few, but when that inevitably isn't enough and it starts to wither, we refresh it with blood of the many.

That guy either needs more iodine, or he needs to stop consuming excessive amounts of iodine.

Yeah, they're always mad about something. They'll look at their trucks packed to the brim with boxes and wonder why we didn't put each and every package in the exact correct location. We'd do our best, but by the end of the day we'd just be putting them wherever they'd fit.

It would've spilled long before it got to me and the local delivery trucks I'd be loading. We'd be unpacking large cross-country semis that were packed so haphazardly that unofficial protocol was to open them and run; one time I almost had a car jack land on my head that someone decided to shove in on top of a stack of boxes.

I never delivered packages, I only loaded them on the trucks. I'd usually be assigned 3-4 trucks depending on package load and how many people decided to show up that day.

Having worked at FedEx, everything has fragile stickers and "this way up" arrows. If I payed attention to every notice on every package, I'd run out of room on the truck before I was even halfway through my shift. Plus I'd be spending way too much time in the truck, and I'd constantly be running down the conveyor to collect packages I missed while I was in there. The only special instructions we have the time to address are the hazmat signs. But yeah, some people literally punt packages onto their trucks, so there's a middle ground to be found.

Yeah, I'm already sick of this song just from hearing it in the background of the tiktok videos my wife watches before bed.

This is honestly the reason why I don't think we can achieve a successful uprising anymore. Probably not a nuke, but drones definitely could and would be used to tear through even the largest of mobs if they formed today. Marie Antoinette would be happily eating her cake watching her people get mowed down by autonomous turrets if the French revolution happened today.

Get your first look at the future site of our next holocaust museum!

One time I forgot to make a presentation for a public speaking class my friend and I were taking, only realizing after class had already started. I got my friend to lend me his laptop and quickly made one in the 15 minutes or so that I had before he needed it back to give his own presentation. I ended up getting an A on mine, while he got a B. He was pissed.

So you're saying she's betting that while republicans will have significantly more corruption, democrats will be the only ones punished because their voter base is the only one that actually cares? Honestly, you could very well be right about the result of a hypothetical universal ethic report release, though I'd be surprised if MTG was smart enough to think 2 steps ahead like that.

I'll be honest, this is the first I'm hearing that Time's person of the year isn't a celebration of a given year's most positively-influential person. Granted, I don't read Time, but I don't think it's all that common knowledge that "person of the year" isn't always a compliment. I mean, I've seen several of "___ of the year" awards, and most ended with applauding and rewarding the winner; if Time wants people who don't read it to know that its award doesn't follow common conventions, it should probably title it something to obviously differentiate itself.

Bud, you can't post a map showing that, if everyone voted, would-be nonvoters would have the power to change over half of the states' electoral college results, then pair it with the statement "Potential voters feel their vote literally doesn’t matter and statistically and practically speaking they are not wrong." You're literally providing the statistical proof that they are wrong.

I was able to insert the mini disks that came with Lego Bionicles on my family's iMac back in the day. Never had a head-shaped disk, though.

Campaigning in the US relies heavily on money from wealthy investors to get off the ground. Meaning, any new party that wants to get going needs approval from the wealthy to do so.

Additionally, a huge percentage of the population pays no attention to politics at all, just closing their eyes to the whole election and either not voting, or voting for the party they've always voted for every time, so even if your party managed to get some attention, it'd just be another 3rd party further fracturing what small portion of the population risks voting outside the 2 party system as it is.

In other to have a shot at winning, you'd need to somehow make enough money to afford competing with the 2 established parties for screen time, which would mean major corporate backing that would only happen if they liked your policies.

Hiking and fishing, mostly. It doesn't take much to get a tick. If they get near my feet they can latch onto my ankle if I don't catch them soon enough.

I'm the opposite. No matter how hot it is, I'm wearing full-length jeans. It's never bothered me, and I've had significantly fewer instances of finding ticks on my body compared to my friends.