I don't think that B2B cold calls are "spam", per se, and I wouldn't even say that most of them are truly "cold" calls. Worst case scenario, they should be warm calls. Or room temperature calls. Like, if you sell printing presses, you probably shouldn't be calling a hair salon. But calling a local newspaper--somewhere that you know uses the product category that you sell--is reasonable.
I do take cold calls from salespeople in my current position, and my response is usually that, if they can provide a product that meets the needs of the company I work for, I'm more than happy to try it.
I believe that it offers a degree of protection against malaria. Or, enough protection that you live long enough to reproduce before dying a terrible, agonizing death.
I don't think that you can put any of this down to individual choices. Individual men aren't the ones making choices that it's 'gay' to cry when you feel sad, or that being a Real Man (tm) means that you bottle up your feelings and push through the suck until you can't anymore and eat a shotgun for breakfast. These are societal-wide issues that are guiding people into the 'right' choices based on their presumed gender. While there is certainly some biology involved in how people act, those expressions are heavily shaped by society, and aren't within the control of any single person.
I mean, yeah, it's a patriarchal system, and that system causes harm to men also, and limits the ability that men have to express who they are as individuals, in the same way that it harms women, and limits their expression of self (and overall power within society).
No one alone with no witnesses, at least. And there's the issue, isn't it? It's not, "would you rather be in a crowded bar with a mix of men and women, --or-- would you rather be in a crowded bar full of bears".
maybe the real message is women saying: “We are scared of unknown men.”
It's not unknown men, it's alone with men, period. Most sexual assaults are not stranger-rapes; they're sexual assaults being committed by a person that was known to the victim. Often it's an intimate partner, a date, a close friend, or someone that they went to class/church/etc. with. If people you know aren't safe, then how could you trust strangers?
Those knives do not look like they’ve been honed since they left the factory.
Every chef I’ve known took immaculate care of their knives, and they sure as fuck didn’t leave them out in the kitchen for everyone else to use.
Also: the value added is in looking at the remaining particle board that’s on the drawer face. You can see that it’s split on the right side, and pieces have separated on the left. That doesn’t have a lot of structural integrity, and gluing it isn’t going to solve that long-term. If humidity is causing the glue holding the sawdust together to lose integrity, then there’s not a lot that can be done that will actually fix the problem permanently. Sure, glue it back together. Then it breaks again, only in a slightly different place. Rinse, repeat. This is the problem with particle board, and why it doesn’t belong in a kitchen or bathroom.
First: get yourself a real knife block. Tossing all your knives loose into a drawer is ruining the edges, and keeps them duller than dirt. A dull knife is dangerous.
Second: I wouldn’t bother trying to fix that. The particle board looks like humidity has done a number on it, and it’s falling apart. I would suggest getting a new drawer made out of 1/2" plywood (1/4" bottom) and box joints. It’s pretty easy to do if you have a table saw, but if you’re asking here, I’m going to assume you don’t.
We know that Russian troll farms amplified political divisions in 2016 and 2020 in order to make the US less cohesive; the intent was to weaken our home support against Russia’s planned in vasion of Ukraine. While I don’t think that China has any similar intentions, anything that makes the US less cohesive makes it harder for us to assist our regional allies in resisting their imperialism. So you do the same thing: amplify the most extreme voices.
“This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States,” a TikTok spokesperson said.
That is patently false. It only bans TikTok if ByteDanse refuses to spin TikTok off and take the control of TikTok outside of China. The company that owns TikTok could be based in very nearly any country other than China, and TikTok would be fine. China already exerts significant direct control over social media that’s inside China; Facebook and Twitter have both been banned because they haven’t been willing to give the Chinese gov’t the level of control that it wants over expressions by users. The concern is that the Chinese gov’t can exert the same level of control over TikTok’s data that they do over Weibo, and that they can for the company to change the way that they feed information to people in order to serve pro-China propaganda to people. That’s a concern in the same way that a social media platform serving pro-Russian propaganda is.
Bush was given several literal blank checks during his two terms
And it was dumb then, too. Republicans–in general–are more authoritarian, and are happy to cede more power to an executive. Dems then use the power when they take the executive branch. Which is stupid, because it allows Republicans to keep expanding the power of the executive.
all ended up either being swept under the rug or continued under the incoming Biden Administration.
…Which is literally part of my fucking point. A strong executive and weak legislative branch is bad, and using the power instead of getting rid of it means that someone that’s malicious has more tools at their disposal.
It’s fast and easy to break things. It takes a long time to fix things once they’re broken. A strong executive can break things far, far faster than a strong executive can fix them.
Its a precedent that’s been in effect under dozens of prior administrations. You govern the country with the tools you’re given. Or you don’t.
It’s a precedent because presidents take power–not use the power they were given–and then the courts eventually say, yeah, okay, we guess that the constitution doesn’t really apply here after all. Then it’s precedent for the next president to take even more power, and repeat. I give it the thumbs down because even though it means that a good president can use that power to accomplish good things, it means that a shitty president can use it to do enormous amounts of damage in a very, very short period of time. Supporting that kind of trash means that you’re handing the tools of your own demise to the people that want to tear down democracy. You can support that if you want; I won’t.
In point of fact, Obama’s restraint did put constraints on Trump. It meant that he had to go to court multiple times over things, and he lost on a lot. Like his Muslim ban; remember that? If Obama had greatly expanded executive power in the same way that Trump did, then Trump would have had far, far fewer court challenges to act as speed bumps.
One big difference was that Clinton enacted Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, while Obama was much friendlier in general to LGBTQ people and their rights. In my opinion, Obama was a better communicator, but that might be because he was speaking at a generally higher level and communicating policy and law rather than empathy. They had different approached to law, and I definitely preferred Obama’s.
Unfortunately, under a fundamentally capitalist system, there’s not a lot that can be done to make sure real wages grow for the workers, aside from a strong NLRB and having solid pro-union policies.
frittered away their executive authority
Here’s an area I very, very strongly disagree on. I oppose a strong executive branch that can enact edict without oversight. I believe the gov’t branches should largely be equal, and Obama went too far in uses of presidential power, which Trump then expanded on. That’s an awful precedent. We revolted against Britain for a good reason, and I would prefer to not see a need for American Revolution Pt II.
As someone that’s been alive since Ford… Yeah, I’d love to have Obama back. I didn’t agree with him all the time–or even a lot of the time–but he was reasonable and largely measured, and managed to work fairly effectively with a divided congress. Would I rather have someone like Jimmy Carter again? Sure. Would I much, much rather have another Obama than another Bush, Reagan, or–may the dark lord protect us–Trump? Absolutely.
(Am I pretending that Clinton didn’t happen? Yes.)
The bad people will always have guns, because cops exist. And–spoiler!–cops are not usually on the side of the good guys. Bad guys in mobs certainly didn’t need guns to lynch as many people as they did in the American south. Matthew Shepard wasn’t murdered by people with guns, nor was Sophie Lancaster.
Oppressed minorities will always need to have the means to defend their own lives with violence, and sometimes it’s directly against their own gov’t. The idea that the whole of human history isn’t soaked in blood is, frankly, willfully ignorant. The idea that cops can–or even would–protect you is laughable.