I took it to be a coyote. They go after sheep sometimes. Also, they are associated with being trickster figures in mythology.

Is that saying meant to cover baseless assertions about someone’s actions? Hillary Clinton was involved in enough shady shit to not need to make stuff up. If someone says that she donated to her opposition’s campaign they should have evidence to back that up. Otherwise they just give ammunition to people convincing others to ignore real, substantive criticisms against Trump.

That article mostly describes her campaign focussing on criticizing stronger and more likely candidates early on when the Republican nomination was still up for grabs. That just makes tactical sense. Otherwise you might as well also accuse her of being involved in a conspiracy to get Vermin Supreme in power too.

You can say the fact that Hillary is a woman contributed to her loss. You can even argue that it was enough to make the difference in Trump winning. But the main reason she lost is because she was still otherwise a weak candidate overall.

If you mean they are donating from their own profits, yes they can write that off. But these customer donations are not income for them and cannot be written off by the company.

https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-000329849244

But people should research charities before giving, some are many times more effective than others.

https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/en/best-charities-to-donate-to-2024

They do not. It is not income, so they can’t claim it as a deduction. The customer could claim it as a deduction if they wanted, but these donations are small enough I’m sure they really aren’t worth tracking for an individual.

https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-000329849244

For free speech, that would be similar. A company can have a social media account or make broadcasts or advertisements, and having to have an individual as a proxy would just be cumbersome. And yes, that includes things like lobbying. Otherwise, you could have a company pay for private individuals for the service of lobbying on their behalf and essentially have no cap or regulation. Formalizing what they are allowed to do also allows you to go after them for things they aren’t, again without needing to prove individual culpability. And if we decide they have too much influence in politics, it gives us a lever to pull to reign them in.

Corporate personhood is mostly for convenience. Otherwise a company would need an individual to buy and sell corporate property, and they would have to rearrange stuff like that whenever that person dies, retires, or does something else that restricts property use. And it means an individual wouldn’t be able to be a tyrant for everyone else working at the company just because everything is in their name.

Importantly, it makes it much easier for customers to sue, since they only need to show the company wronged them in some way rather than an individual being personally responsible. Usually they would have no way of knowing who makes which decisions and has which responsibilities, and by suing the company as a whole. they don’t have to. The same applies for governments, police departments, school boards, etc.

This is a TF2 reference.

https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/ÜberCharge

Here’s the thing…if you get upset that a random woman that you don’t know would take the hyperbolic position that they would rather be in the same room as a bear than with you, you’re likely the exact type of man that these memes are talking about.

What the heck? Expressing resentment at the implication that you are more threatening than a bear based solely on gender is evidence that you are, in fact, more threatening than a bear? How does that follow? You don’t need to have a fragile ego to recognize the unfairness of it.

They know how dangerous a bear is.

If they would rather be alone with a bear than a random stranger of any gender I’m going to say they don’t.

The original post was a bad-faith engagement farm that became much more popular than it ever should have been. It ended up bringing up a bit of good discussion and a lot of insane takes.

When games go too far with this, it can encourage exploit or cheese strategies, or at least strict adherence to a meta build. This can actually mean resorting to a solution with less skill needed, since the game has already been effectively solved. A still-challenging situation that doesn’t demand perfection can be reasonably done with unoptimized preparation and adaptation.

That’s not really how these stories went, at least for the ones involving mortals. The gods used favored mortals or demigod children as proxies instead. So maybe you could interpret Athena turning one of Poseidon’s lovers into a hideous creature as her way of punishing him.

Depending on the telling, Poseidon/Neptune had sex with her in a temple dedicated to Athena/Minerva, and the latter transformed her as punishment. Then she may have just been chilling until Perseus came along to behead her for an unrelated situation.

Yeah I am the only vegan I know and I don’t get shit about it from anyone. In fact, my friends and family are very supportive. If people are going after someone for being vegetarian/vegan, they are exceptionally rude and by no means represent meat-eaters in general.

I am sympathetic to the commentors who are being given a hard time for their diet but that is not a universal experience and pretending otherwise is not going to help anyone.

Burgers are something I missed a lot too! Fortunately plant-based options are becoming more common in fast food places and grocery stores. It usually does come at an upcharge though, so I don’t get them too much. Other people have mixed opinions on meat substitutes, but they have been great for me.

Cool, thanks!

This meme’s text has figures about “now” but doesn’t note that it is mostly a paraphrased quote from Deus Ex, a video game set in a fictional dystopian version of America in 2052. The speaker is not in fact talking about 2024 America. But even for the past figures, I would want citations.

The first part seems to be talking about tax sources as a portion of total taxes raised, which isn’t easy to search for. I did find a table that cited whitehouse.gov and recorded income collections compared to total GDP at least. It did peak in 1945, but only at 7.1%.

The US Bureau of Labor doesn’t seem to have records on self-employment before 1948. The only thing I could find talking about self-employment in 1900 was a blog post that said it was 50%. 90% self-employment sounds like a lot of subsistence farming and odd-jobs work, which isn’t exactly the ideal economic model.

The Deus Ex part is part of a longer conversation, but here is the relevant section:

JC Denton: Just answer the question.
Leo Gold: Don’t believe me? It’s all in the numbers. For a hundred years, there’s been a conspiracy of plutocrats against ordinary people.
JC Denton: Do you have a single fact to back that up?
Leo Gold: Number one: In 1945, corporations paid 50 percent of federal taxes. Now they pay about 5 percent. Number two: in 1900, 90 percent of Americans were self-employed; now it’s about two percent.
JC Denton: So?
Leo Gold: It’s called consolidation. Strengthen governments and corporations, weaken individuals. With taxes, this can be done imperceptibly over time.

That sounds great, where do you get it?

If you had lived at an earlier point, there’s a good chance your eyesight would have been better. Not just because of natural selection for genes or whatever. The modern spread of nearsightedness is primarily attributed to greater time spent indoors, looking at things close to you like books, and particularly during childhood. It is largely nurture instead of nature.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220927-can-you-prevent-short-sightedness-in-kids

This could probqbly an alias for “user error”.

Besides exhausting the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief if they think about it, it honestly just feels like a waste of potential when shows do this. Redemption arcs go hard.

Fred Johnson immediately got to work investigating the job after it went wrong, and when he was convinced he was working for the wrong side, immediately dedicated himself to working to make amends. He continued to do this for years (decades?) all while making himself a progressively bigger target when just looking the other way from the start would have served him very well. He was never a villain. He just worked with limited information in his backstory. And since then basically everything he does is aimed at the betterment of the belters/humanity. His early victims probably would have forgiven him relatively quickly if they saw what he was doing afterwards and knew the initial setup. They cared about the cause more than their own lives after all.