You know Canada is always lobbying Congress for trade deals, right? Every country does these kinds of things with every country they have relations with. The term we usually use for it is “diplomacy”.

What about that pyramid with an eyeball on there? US money is weird as fuck and everyone is just all “yup these are completely normal things to have on our currency.”

It must be quieter than the sound of a leaf hitting the ground!

The point of trademarks is to avoid market confusion.

MTV didn’t instantly eliminate all of it’s programming and created new programming overnight. They had reality TV shows playing alongside music videos in the 90s. There are some people that might like a reality show that was on MTV when they were playing music videos, then suddenly the name of the company changes because they don’t play music and those people can’t find the show they like? Even though it’s still on, still being made by the same company, but under a different name because curmudgeons don’t think it’s appropriate that a company with the letter M in it’s name isn’t focused on music?

Trademarks are about people being able to know which company they’re buying from. The name of the company is relatively arbitrary. You could start a company making computers and give it an arbitrary name like I don’t know “Apple”. then people will associate the quality of the computers with that arbitrary name “Apple”. Well you could if someone didn’t do exactly that already. It’s not so much the name it’s the consistency that matters most.

And many names we just kind of forget their origins because they’re irrelevant to what the company now does. Does Motorolla have to change it’s name because they no longer make record players for cars? Does DC have to rebrand because very few of their comics are about detectives? KFC can’t call themselves that because a vast majority of their restaurants aren’t in Kentucky?

I’d actually go the other way if anything. Make it illegal for a company to change it’s name. Facebook promotes eating disorders to teenagers? Sorry you aren’t changing your name to Meta, you can’t do bad shit and erase that negative brand association by re-branding. You want your brand to be considered good? Then do better.

I like this. It’s stupid that LA has the Lakers… because LA is known for it’s lakes? They also have the Dodgers… yeah because people are always dodging streetcars in LA?

The MTV thing though… I think they’ve already made it so the M doesn’t stand for anything now. They removed the “Music Television” part off of their logo anyway.

I would go with: Remove expiration dates entirely. Because it’s not an expiration date, it’s a “best before” date. Which when you think about it, it’s true that food is “best before” literally any future date you put on the label.

Most of the factors that will cause food to spoil are things not under the control of the companies that package the food. How cold do you keep your fridge at? How long did it take for you to transport the food from the store to your fridge? What was the temperature that day? How long did you have it before you break the seal and start using it? How long was the food outside of your fridge? etc. etc.

Those things are just invented by a marketing department to encourage people to throw out food so they have to buy more. There are no regulations on it, they just put whatever date they think will maximize their profits.

You buy fresh fruit and vegetables (the things that will spoil faster than anything else you buy) there is no expiration date. How do you manage? Look at it, and maybe give it a smell test. The same applies for all food really.

“Best before” dates are a scam that results in food being thrown out prematurely. Grocery prices are too high, we shouldn’t allow these kinds of shenanigans to drive prices higher.

Sure it seems draconian, but how else are we going to get the kids to stop vaping and start smoking cigarettes like we did when we were in high school?

Won’t someone please think of Phillip Morris’ profit margins?

Yeah, I want the guy to be ok (apparently he was) and hopefully some learning will happen.

My second reaction is… from the photo it looks like he opened a portal into another dimension.

My car’s initials as H.A. and the colour is between #00f and #eef.

But yeah if you think that we were blameless on 9/11 disregards the history of US foreign politicy.

This is where “But yeah if you think those countries weren’t entirely blameless disregards these country’s support of terrorism”

I won’t though, because unlike you I don’t think there’s any valid rationalization for deliberately targeting civilians. That would just be me lowering myself to the level you lowered yourself to by rationalizing the targeting of civilians.

But you don’t really have any kind of argument against killing civilians because you’ve already suggested that it’s acceptable to do so.

Many many times more. An eye for an eye leaves the world blind.

Why don’t you apply this to 9/11 and October 7? What al Qaeda and Hamas did are an “eye for an eye” mentality aren’t they? Why not just do the sensible thing and denounce these “eye for an eye” actions as inexcusable?

And what’s the point of bringing up that some of them may have done compulsory service at some point in their life under a story about Hamas killing six hostages?

There is a context to this, and there is a narrative being promoted that justifies Hamas taking hostages (which is a war crime) and justifies the killing of these unarmed hastages (which is also war crime) because they were at one time IDF (aeven if that were the case, it would also be a war crime to summary execution prisoners of war).

It’s all about building a permission structure to make the war crimes of Hamas acceptable by attempting to classify the hostages as IDF.

Twitter did have an office in Brazil (with legal representation) but after refusing to implement court ordered bans, the court fined them. Elon Musk threw a temper tantrum and shut down the Brazil office and eliminated his legal representation in Brazil.

Note that Musk will implement bans when requested by authoritarians, just for some reason he draws the line when it’s a court order in a democratic country.

Anyway the situation where Twitter doesn’t have legal representation is a situation Elon Musk created. Basically “I fired my lawyers so there’s nothing you can do against me now! Checkmate!” So Brazil says “fine, I guess we’re banning Twitter then…”

So Space Karen thinks the the law doesn’t apply to him and it’s going to cost him a lot of money. Again.

To be more fair, Brazil is a sovereign country, Starlink is not.

I see you there making an effort to dehumanize the hostages. Shame on you.

Good on you.

I think people are trying to reduce the most complicated problems in global politics into a simple good guy vs. bad guy narrative and that leads people down to all kinds of crazy thoughts.

To me the real enemy is hatred. Hatred of Palestinians have resulted in Israel having the corrupt and incompetent leadership of Netanyahu. Hatred of Israelis has led Palestinian to corrupt and incompetent leadership of Fatah on the West Bank and the corrupt and genocidal leadership of Hamas in Gaza. Those promoting hatred of either side are just pushing for the conflict to continue and like all conflicts in densely populated areas, there will be a lot of civilian casualties. The claim to be very upset by the loss of life but their actions indicate they want it to continue until “their side” kills the other.

Also how do you get flags on your username? I think I’ll put both an Israeli and Palestinian flag on mine. If people that hate the people of either place want to hate, then I’m fine with them hating me too.

Whatever the US may have done does not justify the killing of thousands of civilians. If that was the way the world worked than any civilian deaths the US inflicted after 9/11 are also justified by the same logic.

Rationalizations of terrorist acts is really insane. There’s no moral high ground you can gain from this, the best you can accomplish is to say “both sides are bad” which accomplishes nothing.

Far better to denounce terrorism and work to make a distinction between the terrorists and people that have harmed who are not terrorists.

“I have a hard time believing it. Could it have happened? Sure. Did it? Since the IDF says it did, it’s much more likely that it didn’t.”

You’re saying you have a hard time believing that a terrorist organization that murdered 1200 people in a day in the most brutal ways imaginable would kill hostages.

I think you have your default mode set to “blame Israel for everything”. You might want to turn that dial back a little, you’re getting a bit disconnected from reality.

Yeah it’s a weird thing about parasocial relationships. You like someone based on things you’ve seen about them on TV and then you start feeling like you know them. But really, nope you don’t.

I think it’s fine to like famous people, but just understand that you don’t really know them. If you later find out they’re a horrible person well then don’t like them anymore and it’s no big deal. You only like the things you know about the person, but if you avoid going down the road of feeling like you really know them, it’s fine.

Nah, there’s been enough spamming Israel hatred on this Ukraine thread. Please express your hatred towards Israel and it’s people to your daily Israeli hate threads so we don’t spam this thread about Ukraine with it any more than it already has been. Gaza might be the only thing your brain can have in it, but other people have other things they want to discuss.

Just someone that thinks anyone that disagrees on anything with them must support genocide. It’s become typical in with the self-righteous in the pro-Palestine crowd. And then they wonder why most of society is starting to ignore them.