Yep that’s the joke ;)

Good news! If the MAGA party wins in November they’ll surely defund, gut, or do away with the EPA entirely, so pollution fines will drop to zero, clearly indicating pollution is gone!

I always thought of Quark as the moral center of DS9. Hear me out. It’s a darker show, much more shades of grey, a bit of a break from Roddenbury’s vision of star trek. Instead of Jean Luc’s pompous speeches, and Janeway’s infuriating (and inconsistent) adherence to the prime directive, DS9 actually toes the line and crosses it many times. Quark meanwhile has his own code, and he sticks to it as faithfully as anyone can. He is true to himself and his species and pretty much never crosses his own line - he crosses our line for sure, but rarely if ever his own. Pretty much the only time I can remember him doing something un-ferengi is when he turned down a gazillion bars of latinum to run weapons for those people planning on blowing up a planet with a few million people on it. At the end of the day you can always count on quark doing the right thing. He’s quite complex, and by far one of my favorite characters in all of Trek.

Yeah, himbo definition is unattractive and Rom is a sexy beast! How else did he land a knockout like Leeta?

You’re a very unpleasant person.

Calm down professor. The US is one of the only countries in the world to tax worldwide income, even if they are a nonresident of the US. That is NOT how it works in every country.

Here’s a pretty good article about it from the WSJ if you want to educate yourself on the subject: https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-WB-34630

It’s somewhat accurate to say “every penny they make is taxABLE to Uncle Sam” which is different from saying 100% tax rate. Americans living outside the US still need to file a tax return and report all their income, and pay tax on it to the US, even if it is from a foreign source. That said they could claim the foreign tax credit if they paid tax to a foreign regime on that income already, or the foreign income exclusion under some circumstances which would reduce their taxable income to the US.

Well thank god we don’t have any Death Panels from Obamacare though!

They call it “Lincoln’s Tax War” in the South.

I love the nuclear waste storage argument. Wouldn’t it be grand if we could just stick it in the atmosphere like we do with coal and oil? Smh…

I spoke with a far left friend of mine about this. His position essentially boiled down to the risk of a massive nuclear disaster outweighed the benefits. I said what about the known disastrous consequences of coal and oil? Didn’t really have a response to that. It doesn’t make sense to me. I’ll roll those dice and take the .00001% chance risk or whatever.

I really wonder if people like this have a playbook, like have they read history and put together a step by step guide at this point for maximizing assholery, or does behavior like this sort of emerge naturally as the assholes take control? Like why do we see this over and over in authoritarian regimes, is it natural or are they copycats?

Sidebar: today I learned the word assholery is a real word, I thought I just made it up lol

I’ve barely even noticed this writers strike because I’ve hardly even bothered to watch any new Hollywood movies or TV shows in literally years. Everything I have seen recently has been complete garbage. So I find myself watching older shows again and again, more YouTube content, educational and history stuff like that…heck, I’ve been following some modern film critics like Red Letter Media and just watch their commentary vs the real thing, and it’s usually much more entertaining.

I think Hollywood is going to use this opportunity to replace the writers with AI. If it works great, if it doesn’t work, nobody will notice or care.