WatDabney

It's astonishing how completely and thoroughly fucked things are right now.

Think about it - the measure of how damaging a story might be to a deranged convicted felon presidential candidate is the eagerness with which a social media site owned by a billionaire troll and self-professed "free speech absolutist" tries to censor it.

How is that even possible? Does no one else recognize how jaw-droppingly insane these people are?

Airbnb is a fine example of a sort of variation on enshittification.

The way it works is a new company with a new and notably cost-effective way of doing things comes along and is unsurprisingly wildly successful. And then, inevitably, that leads to them hiring a whole raft of executive parasites who all have to be paid obscene salaries for doing nothing of any real value, which means the company needs to raise prices and cut back on services in order to generate more profit to pay those salaries. And meanwhile, the new executives, with nothing of any note that they actually need to or even can do, but with a need to create some illusion that they're necessary, have pointless meetings in which they propose and wrangle about and eventually approve and implement new policies and new plans that are generally awful.

And pretty quickly and not coincidentally the new company ends up at least as bloated, mismanaged, overpriced and under-performing as the companies they so recently replaced.

See also: Uber, DoorDash and the entire streaming industry.

I like wool, but I don't currently own any. It's of very limited use, since it itches abominably.

It strikes me though - I should keep my eyes open for a good, heavy wool cardigan. In the winter, I wear some number of t-shirts/henleys plus a chamois shirt and a hooded sweatshirt, then some top layer - either a down vest or coat. A big, heavy wool cardigan would work well for that top layer too.

More, definitely.

Even in the summer, as soon as I can get away with it, I go to a second layer. I prefer two light layers over one heavy one.

100% cotton in layers.

I like loose clothes - baggy chinos or cargo pants (or shorts made out of old pants that have started ripping out at the knees) and t-shirts, henleys, chamois work shirts, zippered (never pullover) hooded sweatshirts and down vests. I add layers in the fall (I generally max out at six in the dead of winter) and subtract them in the spring.

Yep - I figured this was just anon hoping for a different answer from a different audience.

Again, your intent doesn't matter and there was no social cue that you missed. The girl clearly expressed her view and you didn't do her even the simple courtesy of believing her. That's not what friends do. That's what stalkers do.

Autism as an excuse can only go so far. When you go past the point at which you simply fail to pick up on non-verbal cues to the point at which you dispute and disregard other people's clearly stated preferences, it no longer applies. That's not autism - it's antisocial personality disorder. You're not just failing to understand what other people expect, but refusing to treat them as beings with rights. You're treating them as mere objects rightly subject to your will and your preferences.

"Anon's" opinion on whether it's creepy or not counts for absolutely nothing.

Again, it wasn't a social cue and "anon" didn't miss it - girl directly expressed her opinion and instead of accepting it, "anon" argued against it, then ignored it That's not only creepy, but borderline abusive.

Creepy.

she calls me creepy and to stop stalking her

That's not a social cue - it's a direct expression of a preference. And anon didn't miss it - he ignored it.

And by imposing the partition plan instead of holding a plebiscite, the UN overtly violated its own charter.

It strikes me that what we have here is basically the plot of Frankenstein, played out over 80 years of world history...

Amusingly ironic that the UN is the entire reason that Israel exists in the first place...

The Cicero Institute also advocates legislation allowing new private prisons to enter the market and empowering governors to circumvent elected attorneys general by appointing ​“special prosecutors” to combat ​“public lawlessness.”

And there we have the actual key to all of this.

The goal is to reinstitute Victorian workhouses, updated for the modern age of private prisons and officially-sanctioned slave labor.

That's it - nothing more. It's not even an attempt at anything like an actual solution to the growing problem of homelessness - it's only and entirely that wealthy psychopaths like Lonsdale see homeless people as a resource that's not currently being exploited and that they want to exploit. Entirely in order to further their own wealth and privilege, they want to imprison these human beings and make them into slaves.

I'm entirely unsurprised.

D and D got a lot of heat for the last season of Game of Thrones, but I've never thought they were entirely, or even chiefly, to blame. Most of the problem really is that GRRM obviously desperately needed an editor to rein him in as the series went along, but for whatever reason, that didn't happen. So now he has this huge, sprawling mess of a story that's going in eighteen different directions at once, and just as D and D couldn't manage to tie it all together, neither can he.