Yeah, that seems to align nicely with the instincts I outlined in my comment. No need to apologize. Thanks!

From what I googled, it’s especially bad when you pair “man” and “female” together, which makes sense to me.

No stupid questions time: This kind of lurks in the back of my mind and I sometimes find myself hesitating to use the term “female” to refer to female figures in any context. I don’t have to do that, right? Like, would “woman lawyer” be better than “female lawyer” in contexts where specifying gender might be relevant? I would conversely prefer the term “male lawyer” in the same context and “man lawyer” sounds just as odd to me as “woman lawyer”. Am I overthinking this?

It’s true, but intelligence and counterintelligence is kind of their whole thing, isn’t it? They’ve certainly had a long list of laughable fuckups, like their many failed assassination attempts on Castro, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Iran-Contra, etc., but they’ve also successfully toppled governments in South/Central America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Asia, etc. Apparently they’ve made at least 70 attempts at regime change since the end of the Cold War, according to Wikipedia. I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the CIA as a non-threat, personally, especially if they’re going to be following the malevolent orders of a Trump loyalist. I fear the CIA will turn more inwardly to our own country and use their efforts against US citizens (more than usual, that is), specifically against those who would oppose a Trump regime.

We already saw FBI agents engaging in 60s-and-70s-style surveillance of BLM activists in 2020, where they and other feds went around in unmarked vans snatching random activists off the street and traded literal baseball cards they made about different individual activists for fun. Those feds were also sent in at the express direction of Trump. With that in mind, I have no doubts the CIA would do the same in heartbeat. I know they already conduct domestic surveillance operations, but I’d predict a substantial increase in that under the current administration, especially given the ways things have been going after only the first couple weeks with Trump demanding absolute fealty throughout the government and vilifying all opposition. It’s just frightening that Trump had a ready-made intelligence org that was so easily converted to his agenda and seems poised to be his personal secret police. I think that’s probably even scarier than the CIA of old. At least for right now, I might somehow prefer a CIA that says, “Sorry, Mr. President, but we don’t follow orders.”

CIA, too. I thought they sort of just did their own thing and aren’t really beholden to the president. People think the CIA is such a rogue organization that some people have suggested they killed JFK because he sought to shrink the org and make them more accountable. Seems unlikely, though, since apparently all it takes to completely take it over is just to change around some personnel.

Like, my head cannon is that the new leaders would be figureheads only and that there’d be someone secretly chosen to keep things running behind closed doors and pulling the real CIA strings to resist such changes (and maybe have an encore, pretty please?), but that’s based on nothing at all. I’m no fan of the CIA or anything, but I do fear what such a shadowy government org might do when wielded by Trump cronies even more than the stuff they usually get up to.

That’s true and part of me would love to see that, but some utilities (such as water and electric) going under would probably be a bad thing if there wasn’t a plan to swoop in and bring them under public control right away. Otherwise, things would get bad really quick in a lot of places if power and water stopped being available for everyone for an extended time. Things like hospitals, grocery stores, repair shops, etc. would all be working at greatly reduced capacity and capability. Barring a full-on revolution where the people could seize these utilities for public ownership and operate it themselves, I don’t see that happening because the government would be likely to simply bail out a lot of the companies, or they’d be bought up and probably end up being consolidated by an even fewer number of people.

Forgetting how it works and having to relearn it again

The basic rule is that if you can drop the name and the sentence still makes sense, use a comma. It still applies to greetings, since a greeting is still a greeting whether or not you use a person’s name while doing so.

You wouldn’t use a comma if you said something like “Jack went to work.”

That’s a correct use of a comma. You often use commas when using a persons name. Isn’t that right, Grandwolf?

“Mom, have you seen my keys?”

“I’m off to the store, Sarah.”

“My best bud, Zach, is a geologist.”

Say no to ecofascism, kids.

Basically. Top it with olive oil, olives, and some anchovies for a traditional fisherman’s snack.

Wouldn’t most pizza snobs say that Margherita is the most pure pizza? After all, this guy doesn’t actually like pizza, he’s just using it as a vehicle for all that extra cheese. Hell, pizza Marinara doesn’t have cheese at all and originally didn’t even have tomato sauce. Surely that’s even more pure? I guess I’m a pizza snob snob. /s

Also, It’s kind of a stupid opinion. It’s ignorant of some absolutely fantastic kinds of pizza like capricciosa, which is one of the most popular kinds of pizza in Italy. If the inventors of pizza say plenty of toppings are fine and even good, why be so prescriptive for everyone else? If OOP could expand their definition of pizza, they might even get to try the magnificence of pissaladière.

If this is how I hear about Quincy Jones dying, fuck you

People always freak out over this picture but it’s just a joke about motorcycles. Bumper stickers say “Yamaha” and “Look twice”, a common motorcycle-awareness safety slogan. “[MO]TORCYCLE” is written on the same sticker below, but you can’t really tell due to the low image quality

Good thing we also have more thylacines than ever before, right?

Nah, son. Thylacines have, in a way, become cryptids since their extinction, complete with cheesy travel shows where some bogan tells you all about how they totally saw one time and they’re 100% sure it was a thylacine they barely saw from a distance running away through the tall grass after sunset. I’ve seen similar shows about Bigfoot, Nessie, Mothman, and others. They don’t exist anymore, making your chances of seeing one alive no more likely than seeing Bigfoot, which is the point I was making. Animals thought to be extinct being officially rediscovered is a pretty rare occurrence; I assure you it doesn’t happen “regularly”. It’s a big deal when it happens because it’s quite rare. Yes, I’m familiar with the stories of all the other extinct species you mentioned as well. The ivory-billed woodpecker is still considered by most ornithologists to be extinct, and the last widely accepted sighting of any individual was in 1987, despite some supposed (but not universally accepted or entirely conclusive) sightings every once in a while. In 2020, a guy working for Fish and Wildlife claimed to have ID’d one in video footage, but it must not have been very compelling because the very next year Fish and Wildlife proposed declaring it officially extinct. People claim to have sighted the ivory-billed woodpecker not infrequently, much like the thylacine. What is infrequent is any compelling evidence whatsoever, however.

There have been many sightings and footprints found of Bigfoot, too. I live in the Bigfoot sighting capital of the world and new sightings are routinely reported. If the “Portland” in your name is in reference to the one in Oregon, you do too.

The last widely accepted sighting of a wild thylacine was in 1933, nearly a hundred years ago. Even if any tiny, isolated pockets had managed to escape extermination (which is unlikely on an island without much mountainous terrain or dense forest, especially when everyone and their grandma was out hunting them for the bounty the government put on their tails), they’d be in big trouble owing to genetic drift by now. You always hear people say “I know what I saw,” but do they really? It makes me circle back to the Bigfoot thing. At least some of the people who claim to have seen Bigfoot genuinely believe they really saw him.

“By precisely reflecting sunlight that is endlessly available in space to specific targets on the ground, we can create a world where sunlight powers solar farms for longer than just daytime, and in doing this, commoditize sunlight.”

You’re right, my bad. My comment was directed at the actual OP, though, so you can rest assured the comment wasn’t for you

“You see them everywhere.” That’s it? This opinion feels way too specific for that to be the only thing on your mind lol. Maybe at least some context? Are you from somewhere where people are less tall on average? Is there something you don’t like about tall people? Like the other guy said, give us a rant! Let’s hear where this is going.