That’s great. I’m glad and I would love for it to be the case here. Legalization can, at the very least, open up the doors to the glories of capitalism as far as industries to help people with drug addiction, and presumably we’d get the benefits of good clean drugs and all that.

None of that has to do with smuggling fentanyl into a foreign country and your (deserved) deportation afterwards. Also has nothing to do with an administration who thinks it’s funny to post an AI generated image satirizing it. Both of those things are no-nos, in my uneducated opinion.

I’m all for drug legalization. It’s not legal, and trying to somehow justify someone coming to America to traffic in fentanyl, which is a straight up killer, is incredibly disingenuous. And Oregon decriminalized drugs and had to walk it back because it became a problem.

Like I said, I’m in favor of it, but that’s not what we are dealing with. Someone who crosses a border to sell a deadly drug isn’t out here to help people. And if some American rolls into Portugal and starts selling fentanyl, I can assure you it ends up in that person getting removed from Portugal.

Yeah lemme go to my local fentanyl shop. Because she trafficked fentanyl.

Yeah, my mom grew up in a house with her parents and a grandparent of two. And her cousin. That was the 60s and 70s. Guess we’re bringing it back!

I upvoted you on Lemmy for being on topic, but I downvoted you in my heart.

They like pineapple on pizza.

Nailed it on the head. I think also that you need to include that Canada’s relationship vis-a-vis trade with China will be affected by tariffs the US is placing on Canada, and same with Mexico. I think much of everything is from the viewpoint that China is a bigger problem than Russia at the moment. China is also recovering from some economic turmoil, and one way to do so includes expanding their reach, and so the intent is to limit China in other areas.

Makes life more exciting.

Ha, I should’ve mentioned that you definitely won’t. It seems to paint this damned if we do damned if we don’t picture. But it at least paints a picture, versus what can at times feel like this great big unknown. It may also shed some light on some of the motivations for what’s happening. I dunno.

My brother sent this to me the other day and I gave it a watch. It feels pretty unbiased (although I’m uneducated), and seems to have a more macro, zoomed-out view of America and just nations on the whole. I thought it was pretty interesting and it helped to put some things in perspective.

The East India Company is the first example that comes to mind. I’m sure others.

I really don’t think we are living through unprecedented times, unfortunately. People have sucked for as long as we’ve existed.

Just access GMaps through your VPN through Mexico, and your wildest dreams can come true.

Google is worth more than Mexico. A frivolous lawsuit, which is what this would be, will hurt Mexico more.

You won’t hear me disagree.

I think MAGA represents to Republicans what progressives like Bernie and AOC represent to Democrats. Republicans were able to reimagine their party into a form that isn’t just going to follow the status quo that, like you said, has led to a stagnant existence for average Americans over the last 50+ years. And stagnant is probably a nice way of putting it, since buying power has essentially disappeared, on top of wages barely moving.

So Trump comes in, he says drain the swamp, and you hear that to mean the whole machine, everyone who, for the last 50 years (and some folks have been involved in that government for a good chunk of that 50 years, just perpetuating that status quo) has allowed the rich to get richer at the expense of the working middle class.

And so you toss on your blinders. You’re not necessarily a bigot, but you believe social issues are a distraction from actual problems (i.e., ones that affect you directly), and you vote in a way that you hope will better your life. It’s hard to blame someone, especially someone just exhausted from grinding through their shitty life, for thinking about themselves. It’s not the right way to think, but I get it.

Well, that is Richie Rich we’re looking at.

Easy, you pack courts with shills, you eliminate government oversight, and then you do whatever you want.

The cynic in me says there’s a big overlap between the unemployed and the unrepresented, so to speak.

My parents bought a beach house (a bungalow on a postage stamp, before anyone gets an ideas that we’re some 1%ers) and it came with an old washer dryer. My old man put a single pair of jeans in the dryer and seemingly forgot about them. He says he did it for a timer. Leaves the house. Nobody there for a week. My mom comes in, dryer still running, jeans essentially translucent at this point. One of the things you can laugh at only because it wasn’t a tragedy.

Yeah, good point, perhaps there is some engineering rationale for having them powered the same, so that the speakers are guaranteed to work as long as the Starlink does.