Elmore Leonard. Dude was a massive influence on popular culture. He was instrumental in teaching Tarantino how to be Tarantino. He wrote the books that SO MANY great movies and television shows were based on.

Hunter Thompson. His gonzo style is often imitated but rarely duplicated. And it’s such a goddamn simple concept, but no one else managed to do it with his flair.

Disney released an animated movie a couple years ago called Strange World. It was a wildly mediocre movie with a plot that had a very obvious pro-environment, message that was subtle as a brick.

But what really ruffled the conservative feathers was son character who had a gay crush. For as preachy ad the rest of the movie was, the gay crush subplot was amazingly well done. They treated it like any other hetero love interest subplot. It wasn’t preachy or hamfisted or campy… it was just a family being happy for the kid.

Yeah, the OP comic was her parents, but the meme is more representative of the people commenting in this thread.

A majority of my shirts have been band related since I was old enough to buy my own clothes. I’ve never been questioned, interrogated or otherwise questioned about my appreciation for the band.

On that same token I’ve never felt compelled to interrogate or judge anyone else on their choice of band shirt.

This is the only band shirt related rule I observe.

As the defacto Excel guy in my office… I’m sorry. Also, I’m kind of proud of what I managed to accomplish.

That reminds me of The Venture Bros. There’s a villain called White Noise who is basically anthropomorphic television static in a humanoid shape.

He was a white supremacist television repair man before his “accident”.

The writing on that show was so goddamn sharp.

That’s what I did when I didn’t have physical access to the network where I was living. My little Asus that I flashed with Tomato saved my sanity.

Yeah. I’ve had a couple of their little travel routers which are a lot of fun. But apparently you can’t flash custom builds on one of their more recent models.

What were your must have packages?

Same as my Toyota. It’s a crazy indicator of how we expect things to be, but it’s absolutely not a deal breaker.

How do you stop it from pooping everywhere? I had a conure who was “trained” to fly back to her cage to poop, but she’d only actually do it a fraction of the time. I imagine chicken poop is a little messier than a tiny conure.

Just one word: plastics.

… Organtic

If that doesn’t work, turn on the tv and try to repeat the words you hear immediately after you hear them, but absolutely silently. The goal is to echo the television ij your head.

That is your internal monologue.

Now imagine you’re trying to sleep and the asshole part of your brain starts talking about the reality dumb-ass shit you did 25 years ago…

Now imagine that you just got a song stuck in your head. You know the song really well… and you can’t stop repeating the hook in your mind.

It’s your brain silently reading the captions of the narration of the images of your train of thought.

Are’s?

Boot?

You just got killed by a Daewoo Lanos, motherfucker!

Over-regulation of airlines is almost certainly costing bodies today. That doesn’t bother you, though, right?

“almost certainly”? How have people died as a direct result of over regulation of airlines. Cite your sources.

Hong Kong, I’m not talking about their system circa 1870,

You LITERALLY did. You began your premise by explaining how the British didn’t care about Hong Kong so the people there didn’t face any regulations.

I’m talking all the way through to the Chinese takeover in 1997 and beyond. Very recent. Throughout, life expectancy and health outcomes rose steadily.

Yada yada yada, they now have great hospitals. As I said, you skipped ALL the other stuff that led to today, including how most of the civilized world followed the same general trajectory.

The fact that Western & Chinese doctors trained at Western medicine isn’t incompatible with libertarian values, at all–quite the opposite. Yes, there was some government funding during the century of British rule, but that’s not the sole source of progress, and it’s debatable whether it was necessary.

I wasn’t suggesting that Chinese and western doctors working together was incompatible with libertarianism, I was suggesting it was an example of how your “the British didn’t care” bit is incompatible with facts.

I think the pandemic is a good counterargument against libertarianism, because it required cooperative action (or at least, cooperative action dramatically improved outcomes). Interestingly, though, Hong Kong, which is still relatively light on regulations did very well compared to Western nation. It was more of a cultural issue.

you sure about that?

From another article: “Containing the virus in Hong Kong has depended on cutting off transmission chains as soon as they appeared. Any person with a confirmed infection, even if asymptomatic, was required to be hospitalized, while close contacts were sent to a government quarantine facility for up to three weeks.”

Global warming is another sticky point. Any place where externalities cause problems is a good point for argumentation.

Externalities? You mean the kind of stuff that governmental regulations on private businesses are intended to prevent/mitigate?

Again: I’m not a libertarian.

You’re debating like all the libertarians I know. Poorly.

Which brings us to your next point…

Pharmaceuticals, automobiles, and homes all get safer over time because that’s what people want.

They got safer over time because what people want is to not die and the government put rules on how those things can be manufactured and operated.

People buy cars that are rated as safe by independent bodies, so cars are often much safer than is strictly required by regulation–and getting safer every year.

Sounds to me like the regulation on the automobile manufacturers pushed them towards innovation.

That’s because people want safe cars, and are willing to pay more for them, and because unsafe cars cause lots of bad press.

No, the bad press happens when the press leaks an internal memo proving that the car maker knew full well that they’re car had a flaw that could cause death or dismemberment but they decided not to do anything about it because it would hurt their bottom line.

There were very few restrictions on what could be sold as medicine in Hong Kong for a century, and yet people didn’t all die of toxins in their medication.

Because they weren’t selling toxins. Traditional Chinese medicine is generally derived from natural ingredients. They still knew to avoid the dangerous mushrooms or berries.

Developers follow professional standards, most of which are not enforced by government. The government hasn’t been adding newer and stricter regulations year-on-year in these industries–and yet they get safer year-on-year.

What are you talking about? You sound like your just guessing about things. The FDA has a tremendous amount of regulatory oversight. They have an army of inspectors, investigators, and policy makers keeping bad shit off the market every day. I don’t know where you get the idea that they don’t enforce their guidelines, or that they aren’t constantly revising or writing new guidelines when they have new information.

If regulations are the sole driver of safety, why is that the case?

I never suggested that, and I don’t believe anyone debating against a libertarian in good faith ever would.

You were scolding me for referring back to the 19th century in reference to HK healthcare (though I wasn’t doing that), and yet you suggest that the only thing keeping us from living in dirty hovels is government regulation.

Again, NOT what I was suggesting. I’m saying that if you don’t enforce a minimum level of safety, there WILL BE people who will sell dangerous things.

That’s silly. If libertarians (and incidentally, most economists) are right, fewer regulations would mean much cheaper, better-quality housing for low-income people.

Cite your sources.

Shit, let me point you at the YIMBY movement: Fuck single-family zoning! Fuck building restrictions, and parking requirements, and set-back regulations, and dozens of other petty and arbitrary regulations

I agree with you to a point, but it you want to build lots of low cost multi family housing in the suburbs, you better have building and parking and set back requirements. My first house was a condo on a busy 4 lane street. The front door was maybe 50ft from the road. I spent years in that house dealing with the never ending noise of the traffic and the foundation shaking any time a semi drove by.

all put in place by well-meaning but naive bureaucrats. Getting rid of all that shit would drastically reduce housing prices, meaning better housing for everybody!

Again, I agree that there are some zoning laws that are due to be revised or repealed, but suggesting that they are all pointless and detrimental to society demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of basic civic planning.

And incidentally, the YIMBY movement is not only fully compatible with libertarian views–it’s basically torn straight out of the libertarian playbook!

No, the libertarian playbook says my neighbor should be allowed to open a gun range in his backyard if he wants to. The libertarian playbook says that a local businessman can buy and bulldoze the houses on the other side of me so he can build a new branch for his industrial widget factory, and that he’s allowed to dump contaminated waste water into the creek that runs through my backyard.

We need to regulate the development, production and distribution of drugs. ALL drugs.

Tell that to people with chronic conditions waiting impatiently for the FDA to approve experimental medications which might well help them with their sicknesses, which will kill them soon. Why shouldn’t they be free to try something that might save their life?

You know that’s actually a thing, don’t you? There have been plenty of people with a terminal condition who have volunteered in clinical trials knowing full well it may kill them.

Fentanyl was developed and distributed right in the open, approved by the FDA, and distributed to doctors and pharmacists, and everybody happily prescribed it and took it believing that it wouldn’t be FDA-approved if it was dangerous.

It IS safe in clinical doses. It’s administered in ways that prevent accidental overdose like patches. And people don’t so much trust the FDA as much as they trust their prescribing physician.

It’s only recently that it’s gone underground. Meanwhile…lots of less-regulated countries have no such opioid epidemic.

Again, your just making things up. Opioids are a problem all around the world. Some countries are way worse than others, but it’s not at all unique to America.

A strict and overbearing regulatory regime (the FDA is relatively strict even compared to similar nations) did nothing to prevent it,

So the FDA is strict and overbearing… but did nothing to prevent it?

and arguably exacerbated it.

You could argue that, but you’d be wrong. If anything, it was exacerbated by the obscene amounts of money it made for the makers of the drug, money that they used to lobby government officials.

Isn’t that the free market in action?

There are some cases where you can argue that regulation was a response to abuses. I’d agree with banking. I gave a counterpoint re: healthcare, where free market healthcare worked really well.

Yeah but, a basic Google search about the history of the Hong Kong healthcare system makes it obvious that your counterpoint is almost entirely incorrect. Whether that’s a result of your arguing in bad faith or a result of you just ignorantly parroting something you heard an elder libertarian say is up for debate.

Your example was 19th century Hong Kong and you said “the British didn’t regulate healthcare and anyone could put a sign on their door claiming to be a doctor and start treating people” you then yada-yada’d to “and now they have world class hospitals”.

You completely skipped a bunch of history, like how the British government actively subsidized the establishment of a Chinese medicine hospital. You skipped the part about how a combination of British physicians and Chinese physicians who were trained in Western medicine founded the first medical school in Hong Kong.

You were correct when you said it was all done without government regulation, but so was most of the healthcare in America at the time.

And the most glaring issue with your counterpoint is your comparison of late 19th century medicine with modern times. Modern medicine is practically magic compared to those times. And yet we just experienced a worldwide pandemic where millions of people

collectively lost their minds and actively fought against science, logic and common sense. We had the modern day version of “putting a sign on their door claiming to be a doctor” with all the youtube quacks and anti-vac “influencers”.

Free market health care might have worked well enough when populations were smaller, distances were greater and lives were shorter. But we don’t live in that world anymore.

nobody ever lost their bureaucratic job by being too careful. If you’re a government bureaucrat and you eased up regulations on airlines (or food & drug safety, or building codes, etc), and that caused some incident that killed a person or two, you could be offered up as a sacrifice to public rage–even if the same relaxation of regulations saved lives by encouraging (safer) flying over driving, or made drugs available that saves hundreds of lives, or made housing 13% cheaper in some given city.

I love how you’re going with the optimistically naive libertarian schtick.

I WANT my food, pharmaceuticals, automobiles and homes to be made to strict standards of quality and safety. Haven’t you read The Jungle

No amount of “driving safer” will protect you from a car that will crumble/explode in a collision, no amount of “driving safer” will keep a poorly manufactured engine from falling apart or the cabin floor from rusting out. But hey, what’s another couple thousand dollars in repairs or having to buy a new car when I saved so much up front, right?

And why should lower income people be forced to live in shoddy, substandard housing? Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you deserve to live in constant fear of electrical fires or building collapse.

We need to regulate the development, production and distribution of drugs. ALL drugs. I csn trust that the new diabetes treatment for my aunt has been well tested and is safe because I know how exhaustive the development process is. And on that same token, the ONLY reason there are so many fentanyl overdoses right now is because recreational drugs are produced and distributed by clandestine (i.e. unregulated) facilities.