Everything is an arbitrary division when we get down to it. Doing away with states would require a complete rewrite of the constitution, and a fundamental shift to the country as a whole. I personally like the Republic concept and ability for states to experiment with things that might not be popular or a priority for the entire country. This will have good and bad outcomes on these experiments, but it’s how we have things like decriminalization, universal healthcare attempts, etc. Without the “all other things not innumerated belong to the states” this isn’t possible, and removing state representation removes that.

Depending on your forecasted capacity needs, Ubiquity does have some attractive options depending on your comfort with managed vs unmanaged switches is. I am making some assumptions based on homelab tendencies. I have been very happy with the UniFi ecosystem personally, though I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. The Dream Machine Pro has been very good for me both operationally and reliability wise, and there are expansion options for 10Gb Ethernet or SFP+ switches that cover most (pro/prosumer) price ranges.

They are definitely not the best bang for buck necessarily, and I have not tried any MikroTik alternatives to directly compare so take my opinions with a big grain of salt. I work in a purely Cisco environment and am used to working almost exclusively in CLI, but I found the UniFi GUI and environment easy enough to pick up with a little effort. UniFi firewall is too permissive by default if you are using something like the Dream Machine as the front end, but as a Boundary non-expert it was not too difficult to configure satisfactorily. Wireless APs are pretty great too.

The sun is a giant lithium battery that became a spicy pillow and then exploded, and as everyone knows you can’t put out a lithium battery fire like a regular fire. The fire department just pushed it out there into space beyond the environment to let it burn itself out, which is expected to take at least 5 billion more years.

The environmental music just keeps increasing in tempo and I can’t find the next geyser of air bubbles.

Except for Sprite at a McDonalds, because the water purification and soft drink system costs as much as the rest of the store combined.

You are saying that politicians from one party cannot represent constituents from another party, meaning that a percentage of the population in every level doesn’t have representation at any given time. If only a person from your particular party affiliation (ideally with perfectly synchronous beliefs about everything) can represent you on the city council, and again as the mayor, governor, etc, then partisanship can only accelerate and dissolution of the union is inevitable.

I would also like to point out that our government was designed for tyranny of the minority and tyranny of the majority acting as counterbalances. You are also conflating North Dakotans with North Dakota. The priorities and mindset of the State are and should be different than the individual, and the Fed is and should be different from both of those. This is supposed to balance disparate needs of all the groups and people, and the reason for all 3 to have their own “representation”.

We could just as easily break up the populous states into multiple smaller ones, then they would get the same benefits as the Dakotas or Wyoming. People could also move to those states and get the same benefits, but neither of these are desirable as there are benefits to the population density both for states like California and the people that live there. Rural vs urban needs have been in conflict for thousands of years and probably aren’t going to be solved any time soon.

I can’t help but read the ph as an f, even though it is clearly a concatenation.

And there you go from the moral/intellectual high ground, mocking them as toddlers and saying it’s right and normal to laugh and make fun of them.

I can’t stand vaccine hesitancy and anti-science bullshit. I’ve had to deal with this becoming a Fox News thing in my own family, and lost too many people from alternative “Eastern” medicine over “Western” medical science. But the mockery and ridicule only feeds into the Christian persecution complex most of that rural white population already embraces, and causes the wagons to circle.

Universal healthcare, universal education to a collegiate level, and UBI replacing most/all welfare results in much less government interference/involvement and results in the greatest individual freedom via geographical/socioeconomic/employment mobility.

It’s also not incompatible with capitalism, and in fact the increased mobility will spur more entrepreneurialism.

January 6th is not seen as an insurrection but as citizens banding together to protect democracy. Collusion with Russia was always seen as a false attempt to make him look bad, especially with things like the dossier being faked. Tax evasion is considered smart if you can do it legally, and the New York prosecution for what the industry considers standard practice reinforced the perspective that it was weaponizing the justice system. Autographed bibles are no more sacrilegious than any of the megachurch/televangelist who buys a private jet because God wants him to to.

Each one of those hurtles may take someone out of his camp, but for some that will only be if there is a viable alternative. Keep in mind that the alternative on the democratic side is trying to end their 2nd amendment rights, open the borders to secure a permanent underclass voting block, and lose the national protection of God by persecuting Christians. It doesn’t matter to what degree any of that is true, that is the hurtle they have to clear.

Since armed service is venerated more on the right than the left, and has higher percentages of veterans and their children, this might indeed be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for some or many. He is grifting in so many areas, that if he is also shown to be a grifter on respecting the armed services in addition to being a false Christian and 1 percenter elite then parts of his base might see him as no better than the Democrats.

Still have the theme song stuck in my head to this day. Good times. The 90s was a great decade, which was definitely only 10 years ago because the 80s was 20 years ago. No need to check my math on that.

If there was credibility for a Jewish ethnostate 70 years ago due to the Holocaust and global antisemitism, how do we get to say things are better now and take the country back. Especially with all the other ethnostates in the world.

Obviously there is a problem because the region had changed hands over the past 1-2000 years and had other ethnic groups when the country was established by the Allies. The idea of having taken the land from Germany instead of the area around l Jerusalem sounds like poetic justice, but ignores that they have a historic homeland. Anyone would want their historic homeland with their historic religious sites back over somewhere else.

It seems like Jews are treated as second class when it comes to that. Talk of giving Mt Rushmore back is because it was that tribes sacred religious site, and no one would be happy giving them another mountain in another state.

You indicated that anyone that is Zionist and anyone who has served in the IDF should be deported to wherever they came from or wherever their father’s family line last held citizenship. With the IDF being mandatory service, that is basically the majority of able bodied people.

You also said the same should happen with the US and Canada, which are over 200 years old, so I am not sure why Australia gets a pass. Better optics on treatment of aboriginals than first nations and native Americans?

Actual justice to you is deporting all people without sufficient/correct bloodline from Israel to Europe, and the Americas back to Europe, Africa, and Asia, to return those lands to their “correct” ethno states? I assume you would include Australia and New Zealand, and Africa as well. Very “sins of the father to the third and fourth generations”.

It seems that you are arguing that only the Jewish people who stayed or managed to return to the region prior to the 18 or 1900s count as “real” Jews, and those that came after the foundation of Israel are Europeans faking being Jews for the purpose of colonizing the middle east?

Ah, so as long as you push a people/culture out of a region long enough, they no longer count as having been there. Or are you saying that the Jewish people interbred with Europeans too much after the Roman diaspora and thus Jews are no longer of middle eastern descent? Is there an argument that the Jews originated in Europe or elsewhere and not from the region surrounding Jerusalem?

I am ignoring the entire subject of the state of Israel, I’m just trying to understand the logic on the Jewish people and culture not being “already there” in the region.

That may or may not be entirely true, but you have to admit that was a damn good burn. Someone had to say it, it was too perfect a setup not to.

Clearly Megyn Kelly is clearly concerned about boys being exposed to unnecessary lead and other toxic metals. Got to look out for the health and safety of tomorrow’s men.

Technically you are falling for the positive stereotype fallacy, like saying Asians are good at math or the endowment of black males doesn’t count as prejudice because those are “good things”. Same boat as the Model Minority myth for East Asians.

People from those cultures may lean into those positive stereotypes or be less bothered by them, but they are still a prejudice. They also make it a little easier for less positive stereotypes to be believed by less educated or less tolerant people.

That said, as an Italian American you can pry my cooking stereotypes from my cold dead hands.

Dear God yes, why the fuck is my Fold trying to install fucking candy crush and a bunch of other games every time it does a software update?! And recently it has a new system app trying to install games as well, that comes back if dismissed in any other way than opening it to get the offers and then clicking on the never option. And apparently never is like 3-6 months according to Samsung, because it does come back.

I really hope the Pixel Fold 2 is a solid phone, because that is where I plan to migrate to after nothing but Samsung phones since the Note 3, which was has been all downhill since TBH (RIP microSD cards).