It’s very good if you don’t mind the subgenre of pathologically narcissistic main characters, like Seinfeld or Always Sunny. It’s also a clever send-up of the Friends era of shows about “hip” young urbanites.

I’m still salty that this is the direction they went with the Mcguffin for Indy 4. You’re going to take Harrison Ford’s last halfway plausible outing as an action hero and waste it on this? A little-known niche element of new age woo conspiracy shit that nobody coming into the movie cared about AND that literally sucks all the magic out of the universe the characters inhabit in favor of underwhelming sci-fi unobtainium?

Also Shia Labeouf.

I don’t recall the episode, but that’s David Mitchell looking awkward with a woman inadvertently challenging him not to be a wanker with a superiority complex, so I imagine it’s Peep Show.

And while none of the more popular US sports have a card system with set rules, every single one of them can and does eject players and then suspend them for subsequent games.

I read it as tongue firmly planted in cheek, especially after he noted they were using the courts to address issues with their “post apocalyptic fantasy” community.

Mostly, I think he’s just so egotistical and so far up his own ass that he has completely conflated his own self-interest, instincts, hobbies, and ego with literally saving the world. Legitimately held beliefs are not necessarily legitimate beliefs.

I do have to admit I enjoy his big-ackshully energy that reveals itself when people call him out on the Palantir name.

It doesn’t get a lot of play, because it’s kind of obtuse, but he has extremely strong beliefs; they’re just ones that don’t preclude him saying this stuff to fool investors. There were a few pieces that have been written about it, and they flared up again after his weird antichrist lectures last year.

The article hints at it it, but basically, he subscribes/contributes to an extreme variant of an obscure religion-adjacent philosophy that posits that the social stability benefits of an authoritarian Christian monoculture, preferably over the whole world due to some quirks of Christian theology, but certainly at least in the parts of the world where Christianity is a majority religion, are so amazing that they’re worth pretending that it’s all actually factually true, and that a surveillance state to preserve harmony (and, surprise side effect, it also locks in the power of the elites who establish it all!) is completely acceptable. Theoretically the Christianity part is optional, but there is a lot of risk inherent in not relying on the historical social glue.

To him, seeking this is for the good of humankind. Anything that opposes any of it with any sort of sway, and especially from a Christian context, can be fairly called an antichrist. It’s some serious Leto II God Emperor of Dune shit.

You’re only slightly off, and the point is well taken that it’s far from the point of the show.

Third season of Ted Lasso gets to be pretty saccharine and certain plots are rushed, but by then the characters have built up so much goodwill that you’re willing to ride it out.

Also, if you find him immediately grating, give Ted himself about three episodes at the very beginning to turn into an actual human. It’s worth it.

We will see if the upcoming season four can recapture any of the magic.

Consumers turn to older DDR4 RAM since prices haven’t gone up as much as DDR5

In absolute dollars, sure, but hoo boy those percentage jumps are ROUGH! I bought 16GB of no-name DDR4 for my aging desktop 15 months ago for USD 22. That same listing is now USD 100, and still pretty close to the cheapest retail I see, though that’s only with an admittedly superficial search of Amazon and PC Part Picker.

Their sauce is okay (I prefer Layne’s), but that’s good because it’s fuckin’ necessary, since I think somebody saw a recipe for the batter that included a pinch of black pepper and said , “Whoa there motherfucker! We ain’t makin’ ethnic food here!”

Admittedly, when the Cane’s comes out it does always look very sanitary and photo-ready. Like, I don’t feel like I’m gonna get Salmonella from eating there, but it’s just so joyless.

Raising Cane’s

Ugh. even within the limited circle of fast-food and fast-casual chicken finger franchises, Cane’s is bland nonsense. Fried chicken as interpreted by a Star Trek replicator, and not one from the Enterprise, but the Cerritos.

Yup. Give 'em laptops or tablets if you like. Maybe you break their distance vision in exchange for saving their backs from the half a dozen hardback tomes and trapper-keeper we used to lug around. Textbooks can be updated quicker, incorporate video, and if there are public domain texts, they can be provided for free. Completing worksheets with a keyboard and trackpad also doesn’t worry me, and I actually wish we had class discussion boards when I was in school.

Leveraging tech because it provides some practical benefit is just common sense, but thinking the tech is the benefit is stupid, so of course that’s where we are, driven by the olds you mention, as well as a healthy ecosystem of ed-tech grifters.

Fair enough, I may have inferred a bit too much, so here is what the CEO said:

And so third parties, the reason you saw some of these really high numbers, is we’re like, ‘A Rivian? And what’s a Rivian?’ So they they don’t know the car, and they quote an enormously high number, the insurance company agrees to it, and then that happens.”

TL:DR: Poor scale and awareness due to being a niche brand, overly large aluminum body panels requiring either massive replacements or complicated welding, small shops guessing that it must be even more exotic and expensive than the CEO claims, and insurers shrugging and moving on because the volumes aren’t hitting their financials hard enough for them to care.

“What transpired is not reflective of who I am, the values I hold, or the way I was raised,” [ADA CEO] Henderson said. “I will work hard to bring our community back together to build on the progress we have collectively made for those affected by diabetes.”

Jesus, he sounds like a pro athlete who got arrested for drunk driving.

Yeah, that’s the main gist. DoD is straying from their lane because Hegseth is a raving Christian Nationalist, and not even one of their better advocates, and that is a LOOOOOOW bar. This all stems from a published list, screenshot in the article, that still includes Mormons but doesn’t preface them with “Christianity” like it did for the others.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he personally redlined a Word doc to delete “Christianity” from the Mormons’ line before approving it for release, and maybe without any particular emotional animus, just parroting what he remembered from Sunday School that one time he wasn’t hungover. The fact that the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Adventists made the cut might also argue for there not being a ton of theological rigor to the decision.

I think Mormons get too defensive about wanting to be included in other Christians’ theological definitions of Christianity (literally can’t happen… The Mormon Trinity is polytheistic by almost any standard, to say nothing of extra books and other heterodox beliefs), but those invested in one group or another’s theology can overlook that there are other contexts (shared history, cultural practice, self-iidentification, etc. etc.) that can generate just as much passion and be internally reasonable. It’s almost like the separation of church and state is a pretty good fuckin’ idea, especially in a pluralistic republic…

I guess, but that’s some pretty unnecessary gatekeeping when one is dealing with the definitions assigned by a secular government who, in your analogy, is not in the business of evaluating wellness and healing practitioners’ truth claims at all. All the various outgroups that became heretics when a very political conference wrapped up in Asia Minor didn’t suddenly stop identifying as a Christians, and the fact that some provincial American conman steeped in Great Awakening Protestantism inadvertently reinvigorated some of their ideas 1500 years later doesn’t make it nonsensical for his marks and their descendants to self-identify as Christians. The state has a very good reason (and no bar) to evaluate whether a given “healthcare provider” is going to harm the public by claiming certain titles, but the situation with religion is very different, particularly for a bit of minor military bureaucracy (historical contextisn’t even really relevant here). Unforced error by the MAGAs.

Now, IMHO Mormonism is a pretty toxic, high pressure religion, and it believes some shit that strikes the modern mind as particularly goofy, but it’s a religion with a creed that’s very clearly arising out of the Christian tradition. If you want to take different magic sky-daddy theology at face value, then sure, within that framework you can reasonably draw a line and declare anyone on the Arianism line of it as “not Christian,” but that’s not the US government’s job. Absolutely not the hill for the Department of Defense to pick at all, much less to die on, but if it makes some Mormons disillusioned with one oppressive cult of personality, then that could be a good thing.

On the one hand, as an Ex-Mormon, LOL.

On the other, maybe it helps depress gop voter turnout and makes sure the Democrat wins their new district in central Salt Lake City. And maybe MAGA finds Utah is a lot less inclined to run through walls for them in 2028. Nobody does “stoically endure oppression, real or perceived” quite like Mormons.

The way DoD did this is also classic Bible thumper Protestant shit, right out of a Chick tract. Mormons are absolutely not Nicene Christians, but they profess to follow Jesus of Nazareth, so if they want the gummint to lump them in with the Christians, it takes a special kind of stupid and short-sighted religious pedant not to humor them.

I suppose to hear them say it, they’d say this is how they’re holding the line on the core use. Shrinkflation instead of inflation, so… Yay?