That girl is not wanting for hugs.

I'm curious to know what you think "point blank" means.

This sort of thing is supposed to discourage the bots that reddit is plagued with.

I've made up my mind already that if they try to take me or my wife, they are gonna have to kill me, and I'm gonna try as hard as I can not too die alone.

Of course, that's big talk from me. I'm weak, overweight, and pasty.

Fuck that shit.

So clearly he's not getting his head around the idea that China is willing to cut us off if we start making demands.

Either that, or he's trying to gain leverage for the tariff talks, and only has the one idea.

Moving towards becoming a shit company, you mean.

I can't imagine anyone sane wanting this. There are some innovations that I can see people wanting to roll back, but not this one.

Unless you own a coal mine, or are owned by someone who owns a coal mine, this is stupidity from any angle.

Most of us are not getting richer, nor working shorter hours, nor living better than our parents. We're past "services" and on into "parasites."

In principal, tariffs can prop up domestic industry that is having trouble competing with cheaper imported products. In practice, this winds up being really complicated, because the world is a lot more interdependent than it was 80 years ago.

Can you imagine needing to pay a licensing fee in order to use the alphabet? Or your telling of Jack up the Beanstalk being subject to copyright?

And yet Trump lives. I guess that proves the theory wrong.

I've never been so disappointed to have a conspiracy disproved.

If only someone had warned people that mass surveillance would be used for purposes that most voters are opposed to.

Most laws of the limits of surveillance are based on the understanding that it requires time, effort, and expenditure of limited resources to observe someone. We don't require a warrant for publicly available information, like a cop following you around, and writing down where I go all day, because we understand that no police department is going to spend an officers time like that for no reason. It's a self-limiting decision. Similarly, the records of such observation would be limited in scope to the period of time that I have an officer assigned to me. They can't decide today that they want to have been observing me last week.

But with cameras and data storage, booth of those limits are removed. It costs nothing to observe and record where I go all day. Further, they can decide today that they want to have observed me last week, and just pull the data out of the archives.

With this in mind, the general understanding of "publicly available information" needs to be reconsidered, and the laws about what the government is allowed to collect and store about me needs to be updated.