EpeeGnome

Professors don't always teach in their actual area of expertise. I had a German language professor whose PhD was in Philosophy and activity published in that field, in English, German and French journals. It does seem like an odd combination, but probably not a lot of students signing up for a class in usability of buttons, even from the fields you would expect to study them .

We have the same thing as your prop 1 on the ballot in South Carolina. It's already illegal at the state and federal level. It's just on there to help get low information conservatives to the polls, since they are convinced the Democrats want to change the law to let "the illegals" vote.

They think this is what everyone does. They publicly virtue signal that they oppose whichever bad thing so they can condemn others for doing it while secretly doing it themselves. It's ok when they do it themselves anyway, because they are good people doing a necessary thing for good reasons. When others find out about their behavior, their reaction is to accuse harder, because they assume we are all doing that too and they are angry that we didn't get caught yet.

You're right we're nowhere close to downtrodden enough for that, but we definitely have enough inequality to want to joke about doing so, which I'm pretty sure is what was happening there.

Why buy the bridge when you could buy a Senator for less?

This scam has been around since long before AI voice was a thing. You say something scary enough, and people will subconsciously attribute anything off about the voice to a bad connection and the severe stress the person is presumably under and genuinely think the voice sounds exactly like their loved one. AI voice makes it easier to fool more people, but I bet most of these types of scammers are not putting in the time to research every target to build a voice profile and instead focus on calling as many people as possible. Of course, these days anyone taken by this scam will assume it must have been AI voice, because otherwise how did they sound so convincing.

The owner shut down his McDonald's for the afternoon for this. Trump declined to wash his hands, dropped a batch of fries, and "served" a few "customers" through the drive through window. So yeah, basically a photo shoot.

Those scenes are just there to establish that he's capable, intelligent and talented in the ways the agency needs, so it's plausible they would recruit him. Never-mind that they also establish the way he looks at the world and approaches problems which is then forgotten immediately.

Yeah, I'm sure it's some sort of expensive hobby he's addicted to, and perpetual project motorcycle would be my first guess.

You're thinking of Scandinavian regional delicacies and certain seasonal special dishes, none of which I've ever had the misfortune of smelling, and serving those to prisoners does sound pretty inhumane. All Scandinavian food outside of those that I've tried or heard of tasted or sounded delicious.

Yeah, a little of column A, a little from column B.

That is interesting. I imagined it more like an abstract physics problem than an actual scene. My ball was about 6 inches diameter, made of a nonspecific hard but not very dense material similar to, but not necessarily solid plastic, of no specific color. It was in the center of a table roughly 3 x 6 feet in surface at normal sitting table height, and was also of no specific color or material. The person was just the vague notion of a person applying a push slightly off from across the short axis of the table. The ball bounced slightly on the generic idea of a floor as it rolled away. My mind quickly supplied the additional details when requested, but not until then. (Yellow ball, wood table, etc). If I'd been asked in a way that didn't feel like a physics problem, but instead asked me to imagine a scene, I would already have had many of those details in my mental view.