They could just provide cheap high quality streaming services to end piracy, but instead they want to provide garbage multi-tier advertising enabled massively fractured streaming service and force people to subscribe by playing a lamesauce game of pirate whack-a-mole.

Christmas is a pagan holiday co-opted by Christians. Christmas is most definitely a secular tradition in the US and there is nothing unusual about an atheist celebrating it.

What is unusual is Christians trying to bring Christ into the celebration when the timing just doesn’t make any sense. Was he actually born during this time? Where does he fit in with Santa Claus? Why do we bring a tree indoors? What about Jesus equals buying gifts to give to loved ones?

Clearly Jesus doesn’t belong in Christmas no matter how hard Christians try to pretend he does.

Remove Disney music, speed up video by 25%, and replace with Benny Hill Yakety Sax on an endless loop.

How does it feel to put you life into the hands of a dysfunctional black box?

Which lawyers? Clearly Chevron’s lawyers were able to absolve all their liability so they definitely won.

Furthermore, Chevron extracted close to 30 billion dollars of petroleum and left an environmental disaster behind. Chevron even counter sued and was awarded an addition 3 billion in damages that was reduced to 220 million for Ecuador daring to try and hold a US corporation responsible.

Not only did Chevron prevail they continued the harassment of Steven keeping him under confinement for years and preventing him from practicing law.

I think you are missing hundreds of years of progressive corporate lawyering to entrench their business model(s) into our society.

Take the US for example. Originally corporations had to be for the public good, were time limited, and the owners were held directly financially accountable for their decisions.

It took hundreds of years of court cases and lobbying to get to the point where we are now and it is absolutely insane. There is a reason the corporation has become the dominant form of our culture.

This is the guy who threatened to nuke a hurricane because it wasn’t going the direction he wanted. I think we can safely assume all options, no matter how batshit crazy, are on the table.

The Kurds should trust the US again. How does the saying go?

Trust them eight times and get betrayed every single time, trust them again and get betrayed just for old times sake - Unknown western diplomat

You might not be doing something right if all she thinks of is corn.

On the other hand, maybe that is exactly what you are going for. Cornerriffic!

Correct, with some of the more prolific owners having as many as 30 or more.

There are more guns than people in the US.

We could possibly hurt Trump’s feelings by calling him a child rapist charlatan war criminal. We need to consider his feelings as well.

We are not responsible for our own systems - idiots

Most patents for the medical sector are built off public research. Companies make minor changes to the formula to extend patents sometimes what seems indefinitely.

Reverse engineering a physical device at this point is trivial. There is no need. The reality is these are legal tools that slow down or limit innovation so the “inventer” can collect monopoly rent.

Software patents are absolute insanity often describing concepts from several decades ago like they are novel.

The entire patent system is absolute garbage rife with patent trolls gobbling up any small business that dares to exist.

There are so many examples such as the developer of X-plane that spent 1.5 million dollars and three years fighting a single frivolous lawsuit over a software patent.

https://www.x-plane.com/x-world/lawsuit/

The average patent lawsuit, if it goes federal is around $1.5 million and can go as high as $5 millions Patents are a game normal people get eaten up by.

From an ethical standpoint companies exploiting patent laws to overcharge is disgusting and the practice is rampant

https://www.i-mak.org/overpatented/

There really isn’t anything positive for the typical person. In fact, quite the opposite. Patents are legal tools corporations use to extract monopoly rent. The rest is just propaganda.

Yes, I looked it up. A non adversarial voting system based around consensus. This is similar to a system I strive for in my workplace.

Thanks for pointing this out, while extreme it does offer some good insight especially for someone who is over the first past the post system like me.

Why do you think it is so effective for them?

This is what he says on Easter…

You have got to be kidding me, or perhaps you are just ignorant to what the US has done.

Let’s just start with economic sanctions. It is estimated that US sanctions have lead to the death of approximately 500,000 lives a year for the last 50 years. That is 25 million people just because we don’t like other countries policies.

Speaking of Genocide the US has an ongoing genocide and has participated is some of the worst genocides in history. Take WWII. The Nazi looked up to the US and Hitler modeled his destruction of Jews on the Native American Genocide

Wealthy US industrialists like Ford bankrolled the Nazi Empire. When Hitler tried to expel the Jews these same wealthy Americans lobbied against taking them in and stroked anti-Jewish sentiment throughout the world to make sure no one would take them in.

This lead to the final solution where American companies like IBM developed a census system (those numbers tattooed on the Jews arms) and helped figure out the logistics of sending the Jews to their death so the trains would not backup into the ghettos.

Besides the ongoing genocide of Native Americans with US Indian boarding schools open to this day, we also have the War on Drugs which is yet another hamfisted genocide against minorities by the white nationalists.

Millions of families have been destroyed and the US accounts for 20% of the world’s prison population but only 5% of the actual world population. These along with gun violence having killed a million people in the last twenty years paints a very dark picture of the US.

Yes, the US also exceed at killing others countries citizens as well. The US is responsible for countless suffering being the number one producer of arms in the world. We are responsible for the two greatest murders of civilian life in a single day with the fire bombings of Tokyo and the dropping of the atomic bombs.

US technology is also particularly destructive with things like poisoning every human being alive with forever chemicals and plastics. While you can definitely say the countries that used this technology are also culpable, there is no denying the US invented and proliferated it.

Take lead poisoning from fuel for instance. It was estimate that even to this day 5 million people die every year due to lung damage. Added all up it is in the hundreds of millions dead. Of course the greatest loss of life (billions) will happen with global warming something the US petro scientist knew about in the 1950s.

Back to war mongering the US has toppled around 70 countries and has been directly responsible for the killing of tens of millions of civilians through these terrorist acts. Just their campaign against communism killed millions of leftist

I am found of saying it would take more than my lifetime just to detail all the atrocities and people destroyed by the US.

Show me a Democratic model practiced on a large scale that has not descended into an oligarchy of corruption.

That literally has nothing to do with patents nowadays. No one is hiding anything anymore, it is about artificial scarcity to collect monopoly rents.

The fact that you deny that we have already lost billions of lives because of corporations trying to extract monopoly rents is your perogative. It is stupid and ignorant, but your choice.