Yeah, the original was greentext about gorillas

You do know the USAID’s budget is public and directed by Congress, not the CIA - right? And that they don’t send out folks directly but fund charities and NGOs to meet certain goals. In 2023 they spent $43.4 billion over 130 countries with $30 billion of that going to Ukraine. NGOs account for 52% of what they spent and among public international organizations almost all of the money spent goes to the World Food Program and the World Bank.

Current estimates on the effects of cutting USAID funding are one million children will go untreated for severe malnutrition, up to 166,000 people will die from malaria and 200,000 more children will be paralyzed by polio over the next decade.

But sure “CIA front” sounds so plausible.

Every part of the government (and tons of NGOs) got used as CIA fronts at various times. However, the preponderance of money spent has been humanitarian aid that has quite literally saved millions of lives. Saying it isn’t an aid organization is ridiculous. Sounds like your problem is (justifiably) with the CIA and not USAID. It was never perfect but there are plenty of people alive today because of the work it’s funded.

Yeah, it’s all hallucinations - it’s just that sometimes the hallucinations manage to approximate correctness, and it can’t tell one from the other.

There’s at least one study showing men get an 81% increase in money after a big award win, whereas woman get much, much less but usually something more and greater creative control of which projects they do. If they’re all lumped in the same category, men continue to win the awards and get pay bumps and women get nothing at all.

Not going to bother with an opinion on the adult film industry as that’s ostensibly a similar business but has hugely different economics. Not sure it’s really relevant to this discussion as generally, female performers in adult films go through much more difficulties than their male counterparts - they’re literally not doing the same job, whereas in the mainstream film industry they are.

“The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is an agency of the United States government that has been responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance.” Wikipedia

And I know this because my dad was the Assistant Administrator of USAID under Clinton. Their funding fell into the following general categories and funding levels:

But please continue with your wildly inaccurate statements by all means.

Yeah, all that tuberculosis treatment and prevention, emergency food aid, and vaccine work was all just a clever front for their real plan to take over niche social media platforms! How could we have been so blind?! 🙄

The current system is less than ideal, but at least with gendered awards, women have a shot at getting awards which translates into bigger future paychecks. What you’re proposing is that the same industry that currently ignores equal pay for women is somehow going to recognize them in a category against the men who are already getting paid more than them?!

If Hollywood considered them equal, they would be paid the same as men for similar roles. While that can happen, it’s still the exception. And usually only happens for women who’ve won awards.

When Hollywood stops basing pay on gender, then we can get rid of the gendered awards.

Wow, this was an actual thing https://archive.org/details/1954-10_IF

Respectfully, Buffy’s “Once More With Feeling” is incredible.

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Well, basically Microsoft bought the entire company and now acts as their publisher so better than Private Division but that’s all you can say 🤷🏼‍♂️

As for working with Private Division, Obsidian didn’t have a lot of options at the time - they were basically short on cash and couldn’t find anyone to front the money to make the game. They took the deal they could and the success of Outer Worlds contributed to Microsoft being willing to pick them up which in turn led to Obsidian being able to continue to make games.

I don’t know about the unpatched bugs, but the Spacer’s Choice edition was put out by their old publisher Private Division – Obsidian had no say in it and didn’t contribute anything to it. Private Division paid a third party developer to do Spacer’s Choice Edition and the Switch port.

Black gospel music has often been the only Christian-oriented music that really did it for me. A lot of blues, soul, etc was created by folks who got their start in black gospel music, and used what they learned there in secular genres. Hugely influential in so many different types of music.

Unlike Jefferson, I don’t believe there were any contemporaneous accounts of it, and there’s never been any DNA evidence to confirm it. I mean Jackson was undoubtedly an asshole and believed in the institution of slavery (and I believe treated enslaved people inhumanely), but as far as I understood it, not for this in particular.

I believe you’re thinking Jefferson though Jackson did own enslaved people

Would’ve been 100% funnier if they were talking about Henry Winkler.

The Man With One Red Shoe is much worse than Joe Versus the Volcano. And if made for TV movies count, you have to throw in Mazes and Monsters. Oh and Bonfire of the Vanities was a famous flop. And Volunteers was pretty bad. People forget how bad some of his early stuff was.

Hell, both Forrest Gump and Castaway were tremendously overrated. Also the unwatchable Cloud Atlas and the stupid Dan Brown movies.

<suddenly dawns on me that Tom Hanks makes a lot of bad movies>

…Trump may escalate pressure on allies by leveraging America’s financial dominance

“America’s financial dominance”?! Unless he has a time machine, not quite sure how that’s going to happen.