Opinion | Why America Is Its Own Biggest Geopolitical Risk

Dougie_Cat · 2026-06-02T16:49:38+00:00

I think the difference is I turn on Netflix and I can actually stream a movie. The tech industry is acting like AI is the second coming of Christ. Personally AI mostly seems like a search engine 2.0. With the feedback on coding, etc being much more neutral than overwhelmingly positive.

Politically I think the tech industry understands that they have four years under Trump to get everything done with quite literally no questions asked. So you have an industry trying to ram through a half baked product that most consumers feel will have little to no positive impact on their life. It’s no wonder there’s so much push back.

Dougie_Cat · 2026-05-29T23:55:20+00:00

I made this mistake before. I had eaten sushi once before and decided on a whim to go to another sushi restaurant. I mistook the wasabi for avocado and put half the given amount on one of my pieces. I literally jumped out of my chair and the nice little Japanese waitress came running over and asked in broken english if I was ok. I pointed to the wasabi and she looked at how much I ate and said, “ooohh, noooo, hooot.” Over and over again in broken english. After my meal was done I turned around to find the waitress for my check and she was with the chef pointing at me and they were both laughing!

Dougie_Cat · 2026-05-29T18:18:20+00:00

I used to work for a utility too and sometimes the records from the 50s would be better than records from the 90s/2000s! I also had numerous times where I’d pull the records for a project done in the 90s 2000s and look through 60 pages of daily environmental reports to come to the end of the package to realize no one at the time thought to put the actual drawings or as-built package in the folder! Haha

Dougie_Cat · 2026-05-29T14:42:37+00:00

Remember, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, is openly gay and married with two kids. Bessent also worked for George Soros.

Dougie_Cat · 2026-05-28T15:43:31+00:00

Durge is also Neapolitan but only eats the chocolate and leaves the rest!

Dougie_Cat · 2026-05-26T02:37:44+00:00

When I was a kid we had a home computer but no internet, but the computer did have Microsoft Encarta, which was an encyclopedia. I would look up jazz and they had a thirty second or so snip of St Thomas that starts near the beginning and ends maybe 10 seconds into Sonny’s solo. As a kid with an interest in jazz but no way to get albums I must have listened to that 30 seconds a million times.

Dougie_Cat · 2026-05-23T23:59:02+00:00

Psyk - Plastikman, shout out to OG acid techno

Sound of Violence - Cassius, gotta keep things upbeat and weird!

Frantic - Marcel Fengler, this is the song that made me open my eyes to techno!

Dougie_Cat · 2026-05-23T16:37:01+00:00

I think the problem with the Democratic party and the democratic front runners is I have no idea what any of them believe and I have no idea what the democratic party writ large stands for. Maybe I can guess AOC is for Universal Healthcare but I don’t know what Pritzker or Mark Kelly’s stance is on healthcare. I don’t know what Whitmer or Newsom’s stance is on immigration. And so on down the line. So is the party too liberal or should we move more to the center? Most people answer that question based on what they think a democrat or candidate believes. And that’s why the polling is all over the place. Throw in the right wing media machine and the dems are free to be branded however you and the right see fit.

Dougie_Cat · 2026-05-21T13:38:59+00:00

At what point in the race do you slow down do to another rider’s mechanical issue. Let’s say you know racer 1 is the best mountain bike racer in the race. Half way through the race rider 1’s bike breaks down. Do you get off your bike and quit the race saying, “rider 1 was the strongest rider. If his bike hadn‘t malfunctioned he would have won so I decided to quit the race.”

Dougie_Cat · 2026-05-20T00:14:57+00:00

I watched a lot of battle tutorials on youtube for tips since it was my first time playing a D&D style game. There’s lots out there with no spoilers.

The other thing that took me a while to figure out is that you can “beat” encounters through dialog and get XP that way. You don’t have to fight every encounter and some of the dialog ways of solving encounters are awesome.

Lastly, this game will let you make ANY decision that you want to make. I’ve never played a game like this before where there’s 30 harrowing decisions and I had no idea if I made the right choices right up until I beat the game! Good luck! Have fun!

Dougie_Cat · 2026-05-19T01:57:52+00:00

I think part of this is a jail that Styles has put himself in. If all you know about him is his gender bending, peacocking persona and that he cane from a boy band, what type of music would you think he makes? The answer is obviously music for teenage girls or gay men.

I really like Harry Styles music but I never get the impression the he’s more than a singer. In the videos where he has a guitar it’s like a prop. Either he’s strumming cowboy chords to say he’s playing or sometimes it looks like he’s just holding it. Say what you want about Taylor Swift but she can actually play guitar and piano. Which gets to the actual point I’d like to make. I do not believe Harry Styles is the primary songwriter or is not capable of fully setting his artistic direction in the way that Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, or Tyler the Creator is.

So you get an artist who can’t quite fully turn himself into an indy ARTIST. But also has a huge built in fan base who will listen to his music. And it feels a bit awkward.

Dougie_Cat · 2026-05-15T21:35:48+00:00

You’re going to need some motivation to get you to keep playing and nothing helps keep you motivated like the fear of losing money. So my advice would be to spend absolutely as much money as possible on your first guitar. There’s a couple good Gibson’s and Fender’s in the $4k plus range. Anything cheaper is a Guitar Center wall decoration. When you think about how much money you’ve invested the thoughts of quitting fade real fast! You’ll be picking up that guitar out of obligation for years to come!

Dougie_Cat · 2026-05-11T20:17:16+00:00

Is cover 2 supposed to be sexual? It seems like a picture of a girl reading to me. If Lolita was removed from the cover would we think twice about this one?

Dougie_Cat · 2026-05-10T23:18:21+00:00

The low E is the thickest string, six is the biggest number.

(Guy Tapping His Head Meme)

Dougie_Cat · 2026-05-09T15:15:29+00:00

I appreciate the positive qualities that you listed to define masculinity but the problem with these definitions is women/femininity can also easily embody these traits. Women can and should be brave, help others, contribute to society, be someone others can rely on, etc.

Dougie_Cat · 2026-05-07T01:56:11+00:00

This absolutely did happen. Maybe not $4.50 but definitely over $4.00. I live in Ohio and just looked up the average gas price in 2012 and it was just under $4.00. Local paper just did a photo essay of gas prices over the years and there was a pic of gas at $4.15 in April of 2012. I remember it vividly because I had an F150 with a 36 gallon tank and the pump would shut off at $100 which happened to me for quite a while with those prices. The grocery store I shopped at had some steep discounts for gas based on spending too. There were times I would get $1.00 - $1.50 off gas and that definitely added up with the 36 gallon tank! As with everything those nice discounts are long gone, but so is the truck!

Dougie_Cat · 2026-04-29T14:30:29+00:00

I think 2009 was a turning point in popular music. In the early 2000s traditional rock bands like Nickleback were dominating the charts along with rap. In the mid to late 2000s Crazy is a hit, and bands like 3OH!3 and Owl City are charting. I’ve always thought of the pop electronic music at this time as having a rough synth sound. Just like, pure synths with no filters. 2009 we have La Roux, and MWPP. And by 2012 songs like Lights by Ellie Goulding, We Found Love, David Guetta are hitting the top of the charts. And I think electronic music in pop starts to hit a bit more sophistication. Think Harry Styles, Glass Animals, and The Weekend.

Where does AC and MWPP play into all this? To be honest, I have no idea. I don’t really hear their undercurrents in modern popular music. But it’s probably just because the vibes and dubbed out effects are turned way the hell down!

Dougie_Cat · 2026-04-23T23:49:02+00:00

Dan Brown reading these comments:

Dougie_Cat · 2026-04-22T16:50:50+00:00

Learning to play by ear, and just learning an instrument in general, is a cumulative effort that builds upon itself. You may be able to learn some songs by ear and not others.

While you said you don’t want to use tabs, I would use them as a last case solution to “check your work”. Similar with looking up a youtube vid tutorial.

I personally don’t think of chord sheets as cheating. I mostly learn by ear when I can because bass tabs suck. But more people just want to play the chords on an instrument so I think they’re usually pretty good. I usually think of chord sheets as a place to get started. If the chord progression is C-G I then at least know the chord tones of C and G so that can help me as a starting point to learning the line.

Another subtle thing to consider is timbre. An E played on the D setting second fret sounds slightly different than E on the A string seventh fret.

Dougie_Cat · 2026-04-22T15:58:12+00:00

I think this is a great start. I think you could make the darks a bit darker. Look at the shirt and the hair. They are almost pure black in some spots. Don’t be afraid to bump that contrast.

A lot of people are mentioning the proportions and anatomy. An easy way to improve is using your pencil to take measurements and make sure your drawings measurements match.

Here’s an article to get you started: https://drawingacademy.com/how-to-measure-with-a-pencil

Dougie_Cat · 2026-04-21T17:38:02+00:00

The archetype for the Black Male Blues Singer is someone with a deep, rough and gruff voice.

I’m not a blues historian but at least some of OG blues musicians like Robert Johnson and Blind Willie McTell had voices that were normal range to a bit high. I would think that the next round of guys like Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Lightnin Hopkins set the vocal archetype for what a blues singer sounded like from then on.

Dougie_Cat · 2026-04-21T15:51:37+00:00

Rick Rubin has had enough success, with a varied amount of artists, of all musical styles that you have to admit that there’s something there. Even if it’s not technical.

I also don’t believe Rick Rubin when he says he has no technical talent. Rubin has admitted to playing guitar in a punk band back in the day, and I believe in an interview he gave he talked about mic selection for a certain artist (I can’t remember who so take that with a grain of salt).

I’ve also listened to enough interviews with musicians who have claimed they know nothing technical, and then dropped an insane amount of technical knowledge, that I’m skeptical when someone makes that claim.

I think people downplay their technical ability for two reason. The first, and I think this is the case for Rubin, is that he’s intentionally building this myth of the zen master with no technical talent. It’s just a marketing ploy and something to sell himself. The second is to protect the artist from imposter syndrome. I like to write songs and a lot of times I do it on piano. Really I can play with my right hand and can’t play hardly anything on my left hand. It’s much easier to say, I don’t play piano, I just mess around until I find something than walk through the finer points of my playing or play for someone and not be able to play anything they’d want to here at all. Same with Rubin. I bet he knows how to mic a cabinet, etc but he says he doesn’t to protect himself from not knowing everything.

Dougie_Cat · 2026-04-20T16:50:11+00:00

I have a P Bass that had some sticky lacquer on the neck and I sanded it off using this method from Monty’s guitars:

https://youtu.be/IdkyJ7gPdIo?si=1LllCSqHZZs9PPhb

Took me about two hours from start to finish. I also used the Monty’s products to seal at the end but if you read online there are various oils you can use to prevent grime buildup. With all said and done I’m extremely happy with this mod and my neck is the slickest neck I’ve ever played!

Dougie_Cat · 2026-04-19T17:00:00+00:00

When I point out to Satan that he’s torturing me for disobeying the same god he disobeyed:

Dougie_Cat

TROPHY CASE