Cars are expensive and necessary in areas without good public transit (read: basically everywhere except a couple of areas in specific cities). Most of us don’t have a year’s salary just sitting in the bank, especially when you’re young.

If you need a car to get to work, you’ll pay what you have to because the alternative is no job which means no home, no healthcare, and no food.

Both systems are purposefully inefficient and byzantine because it increases tax revenue for the state (and bribes for the state government).

The 3 tier system is where alcohol must be sold by the producer to a distributor, by the distributor to a bar/liquor store, and by a bar/liquor store to the consumer. This effectively allows the state to collect tax 3 times on any one serving of alcohol. Unfortunately, it also results in higher prices and less choice for consumers. You can’t just buy liquor on amazon and have it mailed to your home, you (sometimes) can’t just buy from a local distillery, and you have to pay extra for the distributor to do a lot of not very much.

The dealership system allows local government to collect sales tax on resident’s cars and allows local government officials to collect bribes from car dealers whose entire business relies on their competition being illegal. Without dealerships, you could just order a car from a manufacturer to be shipped to your home and you could buy it without cutting a dealer in, but the local government wouldn’t get the sales tax income and your mayor or whatever wouldn’t get to collect as many bribes.

Automatic weapons are regulated and cost more than a new car. Our firearms laws are lax and have many problems, but that isn’t one of them.

I disagree that there is any way to do it. Ultimately, people don’t want you there and are unhappy enough that they’re willing to die rather than cooperate. It is simply too expensive in terms of man hours, lives, and money to keep a population under occupation like that. At the very least, you need to do as the colonial powers did and exploit a local division to deputize some of the locals to rule on your behalf.

Yes, they win most of them. They mostly lose when they try to occupy a foreign country and do counterinsurgency.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States

There’s a dungeon by me that has stockades but doesn’t allow free use and it is the mother of all missed opportunities.

They eat crops and are considered a disease vector here. They can also damage your home by trying to build a nest inside a wall or something.

The little bastards are still so ugly they’re cute though.

Exactly, that’s why they’re still around. They still haven’t been used at their intended scale since before most working adults had left home.

If anyone else wants to feel old, MySpace is old enough to drink and the iPhone can vote. College graduates have never seen someone type on a t9.

The “large vault” you’re referring to is either old enough to predate the internet or full of safe deposit boxes for rent.

Even busy bank branches probably only need a vault the size of an armoire these days. People just don’t use much cash.

whoosh

Federation means that instead of one central server like Facebook or google, the service relies on several interoperable servers and you can pick which one you want to sign up with and use.

Email and lemmy are federated. If you want to use email, you can sign up for an account on one of many different servers run by other people or you can even host your own email server. No matter which you choose, you can always email another user regardless of where their account it.

How else would you pretend to be federated besides saying you’re federated when you aren’t?

It would be very useful to people who don’t consume multimedia, especially writers and certain types of hobbyists and office workers.

Apologies, I guess my terminology is incorrect.

What I meant is that I’ve seen people written up for vaping ~2 feet too close to the back door or showing up <5 minutes late or any number of other frivolous things in hopes of avoiding unemployment payments.

Do you have to pay unemployment if they’re fired with cause? Because I’ve definitely seen (and experienced) constructive dismissal over some very petty things.

A lot of people started calling for violence against Musk’s cronies at DoGE.

I don’t know if it was “a lot” or “basically all of them” though, /u/spez is a trumpet so who knows.

Sure, butterfly a chicken breast and fry it over high heat. Or eat cheese. Or make succotash, or lentil soup.

All of our cultural defaults for breakfast are terrible for us anyways, we need to eat other things regardless.

I make a bunch of deviled eggs maybe once or twice a year. I don’t care for most other types of “easy” egg preparations and there are plenty of cheap beans, chicken, and cheap bits of pork for my protein needs.

Tbh I don’t understand why people don’t just buy something else. There are several good alternatives available.

The US military has actually been short on recruits for a long time now due to the obesity epidemic.

I mean we could stop maintaining an invasion force in basically every corner of the globe simultaneously, but we aren’t filthy communists or whatever.

You can have it so long as it is semiautomatic. There’s just a lot of paperwork involved because the bolter itself and each individual round are probably considered destructive devices.