I’m happy to see Winston Duke returning. I loved his performance in Black Panther.

Colantoni is absolutely one of those people.

I heartily agree about Bale, Oldman, Pitt, and Dafoe. Simon Pegg doesn’t always do it for me. Bernthal is a great actor, but I thought his contribution to the Daredevil series was more loss than gain (which I realize is not the common reaction).

I think Branagh can be good, but he can also be tiresome. I made the mistake of watching his Poirot movies in combination with their earlier incarnations. I think he is a better director than actor.

I completely agree with you about Gary Oldman. He manages to disappear into each roll, but the results are always interesting.

Every time I think GoDaddy has hit bottom they find a way to dig deeper.

It takes a certain number of votes to begin impeachment proceeding. There are currently not enough decent Representatives in the House to pass such a vote.

I suggest that you spend the up-front money to consult with a lawyer. A lot of them will do an initial meeting for relatively little. They will be able to give you some idea of what risk, if any is involved in this. Then you can make a better informed decision about whether to ignore this, fight, or conceded and change the name.

I find out a few years ago that there are whole law firms out there who basically just send threatening letters for low fixed fees. They don’t litigate or even provide real legal advice. It’s one step above selling pages of their letterhead.

You won’t know how serious these people are, or how serious their complaint is, without consulting a lawyer.

Best of luck!

I don’t actually disagree with you. My point was that there is nothing that could be done to fix education quickly while it would be possible to fix wealth inequality overnight. That doesn’t mean I think there’s a chance of it happening any time soon.

There are obviously multiple factors that go into this, but I think the big ones are the systematic destruction of the US educational system and the wealth inequality caused by late-stage capitalism. Fixing the education problem will take decades. Fixing the wealth inequality could be done quickly, but things will have to get worse before people begin to agree that it needs to happen. I’m confident that things will eventually get better. I am no longer confident that it will happen soon or without violence.

Similar things are happening in Europe, with the rise of the extreme right, but the situation there is not as far along as it is in the US. I think Europe still has a reasonable chance of avoiding the worst of this.

Experiments with a basic living stipend, and other similar ideas, have almost always found that the vast majority of people prefer to support themselves if they are given the opportunity. It has also been repeatedly shown that providing people with reliable housing and food makes them far more likely to get to a point where they no longer require it. The numbers indicate the helping the poor more than pays for itself in the long run.

The real problem is the people would rather let some die of exposure and starvation than support some who don’t really need it. Everyone resents being taken advantage of, but that’s only one side of the issue. Why is eliminating cheaters more important than saving lives? Particularly since all indications are that there aren’t nearly enough cheaters to be a significant drag on the system.

There is also a myth that undeserving poor people keep the rest of us from getting as much as we should. Businesses get vastly more aid from the government than poor people. People who are wealthy enough to make their income from investments pay far less in taxes than those of us who work for a living. And the really wealthy are able to game the system so they pay little or nothing in taxes. If we started collecting a fair portion from them, we could easily afford food, housing, and medical care for everyone. Anyone who want to stop the undeserving from getting things they don’t deserve needs to start there.

It is mostly semantics. I answered the way I did primarily because I was responding to “There are already self-driving cars, aren’t there?”. That seemed to be asking about functionality, not naming conventions.

I understand your point, but I disagree. There are currently no cars that are considered fully self-driving as defined by the people who created them. Except for the ones that are really just remotely driven, they all come with warnings that a human the driver must be at the controls and paying attention.

Current self-driving cars are like a printer that works most of the time, but requires a human to read everything it produces and to occasionally write in a few things that it missed or got wrong.

No, there really aren’t yet. Driverless taxis and delivery vehicles are all “monitored” remotely by people who effectively drive them when they get into situations the automation can’t handle. Individual self-driving cars all come with a lot of warnings (which many drivers ignore) that they require an active and aware driver for similar reasons.

And Tesla, who have been lying about their self-driving capabilities from day one, continue to run people down and smash into other vehicles on a regular basis.

The systems are good enough to handle 99% of the driving situations they encounter. That remaining 1% is still a long way from being solved. And “pretty good” is not acceptable when failures kill people.

I don’t have a general answer for you, but I did want to say that you should not rule out depression as a major component of what’s going on with you. I have a genetically-based cyclic depression that’s been with me more than four decades. Despite that, I have managed to remain employed. It has sometimes been very difficult, but it is possible to remain somewhat functional even when severely depressed. I have had to change jobs a few times because of it, but I’ve been able to make a steady living.

Depression can leave you with very little energy or volition, but very little is different from none. The worse it gets, the more you have to focus on your most critical necessities, which is not pleasant, but it can keep you going. Small victories like that can actually help counteract it. I think a lot of depression is “living to fight another day”.

If you do have depression, there are many things you can try. Therapy, medication, exercise, meditation, mindfullness, support groups, volunteering, hobbies, etc. Start by talking with a doctor.

I wish you the best!

I don’t think we’re going to gain any traction until we override Citizens United and make bribing public officials illegal again. That would allow us to take back the legislative process and begin passing bills that the super rich are not going to like.

“Religion” is too broad a term. Conservatives like to call what they practice Christianity, although it would have appalled Christ. They also like to represent themselves as the mainstream of Christianity, but they are very much in the minority. They just get on the news more often.

I don’t think it is generally considered a good book, but I’m sure it depends on who you ask. I thought it had some interesting ideas, but was pretty weak overall.

Neither side has been willing to change, or even talk about, the shift of wealth that has left most people barely able to get by. Working people get less and less reward for their efforts and the difference all goes to the owners. I think that is at least one aspect of Bernie’s complaint about the Democrats.

Possibly, but life is full of risks.

What you really need is a carbon fiber shoehorn. If you do manage to deform it the thing will go right back to its original shape.