Jonathan Yeah! posted:

http://i.imgur.com/CqiYh1v.gifv

Two Feet From Bread posted:

The Schadenfreude is me:

Last week I got a new laptop and was trying to find the Government contract for MS Office for personal computers so I could get some cheap office action. Couldn't find it, gave up, and settled for year of Office 365.

Today I was notified that the Government MS Office contract has been renewed and I can buy Office Pro Plus 2016 for $10.



Guess my wife is getting Office for Valentines day.

Ragequit posted:

Girl almost gets struck by lightning and the guy she is with immediately develops a speech impediment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEdAIonUBBM

Ragequit posted:

Girl almost gets struck by lightning and the guy she is with immediately develops a speech impediment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEdAIonUBBM

Panfilo posted:

"HOOL-MOH-GOL-BOW-BIGGA-BOGGA-WALNUM-BOGDISH-MISJOO!"

Australian for beer?

ekuNNN posted:

SubponticatePoster posted:

vanillaicecareer.gif

Ragequit posted:

Girl almost gets struck by lightning and the guy she is with immediately develops a speech impediment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEdAIonUBBM

Panfilo posted:

"HOOL-MOH-GOL-BOW-BIGGA-BOGGA-WALNUM-BOGDISH-MISJOO!"

Australian for beer?

Birb Katter posted:

As someone who is fluent in Strine he says

"Jesus, come back here. Oh my God baby that lightning bolt just missed you. Holy bloody mother of God, Jesus loving my God come back the lightning bolt nearly hit you"

Ragequit posted:

Girl almost gets struck by lightning and the guy she is with immediately develops a speech impediment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEdAIonUBBM

Birb Katter posted:

As someone who is fluent in Strine he says

"Jesus, come back here. Oh my God baby that lightning bolt just missed you. Holy bloody mother of God, Jesus loving my God come back the lightning bolt nearly hit you"

Baronjutter posted:

Is that an actual real accent or just an Australian with a heavy speech impediment / mild retardation?

Wasabi the J posted:

Email Microsoft with the information. They have handled it retroactively before for some of my soldiers.

Random Hajile posted:

I'll just assume it's "We'd better run, we'd better take cover."

DavidAlltheTime posted:

It was actually pretty easy to understand what he was saying. Is this like the bad tattoo thread where goons pretend to not be able to read lettering?

DavidAlltheTime posted:

It was actually pretty easy to understand what he was saying. Is this like the bad tattoo thread where goons pretend to not be able to read lettering?

Ragequit posted:

http://i.imgur.com/KTkPxO2.gifv

Ragequit posted:

http://i.imgur.com/KTkPxO2.gifv

Ragequit posted:

Yeah it's pretty easy initially, but the severe panic makes the guy harder to understand (which would be the case with nearly any accent) and it came out pretty funny. Are you a goon that "pretends" to not understand human emotion?

http://i.imgur.com/KTkPxO2.gifv

Baronjutter posted:

Is that an actual real accent or just an Australian with a heavy speech impediment / mild retardation?

Ragequit posted:

Yeah it's pretty easy initially, but the severe panic makes the guy harder to understand (which would be the case with nearly any accent) and it came out pretty funny. Are you a goon that "pretends" to not understand human emotion?

Birb Katter posted:

It's what we'd call a 'lebo' accent here. As long as you're not full blown rich white racist here you've heard that accent, sure it's a thick accent but it's not any different to say having a thick Irish accent or whatever. Even knowing what he was saying I found it hard with the subtitles, they throw you off a bit.

veedubfreak posted:

So, kinda like an Appalachian Mountain hillbilly or Peyton Manning?

veedubfreak posted:

So, kinda like an Appalachian Mountain hillbilly or Peyton Manning?

Tiggum posted:

In my experience they don't actually say Microsoft, they say they're calling for Windows support or something. And how do you think you're saving anyone

chitoryu12 posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03iwAY4KlIU

Avenging_Mikon posted:

Because if the agent is on the phone with me, he's unable to call anyone else. Simple physics. And I have absolutely had ones who say they're from Microsoft.

Baronjutter posted:

Is that an actual real accent or just an Australian with a heavy speech impediment / mild retardation?

Wampa Stompa posted:

I’m a born citizen of the United States and I recently spent some time in Toronto. Even though I was only there for about a week, my experience has caused me to completely reevaluate my conception of American society. Basically, it was surreal to be in what seemed to be a fundamentally functioning society, as opposed to an essentially dysfunctional one.

Toronto’s streets were clean, the mass transit ran like clockwork, there was far less advertising littering the landscape, the population was well-integrated racially and ethnically, and people, on the whole, seemed much happier, healthier, and smarter than their American counterparts. I walked through the entire city and didn’t feel unsafe or conspicuously well-off once; there were no pockets of urban decay or visible poverty. Nearly everyone I spoke to seemed well-educated and thoughtful, and was well versed on how their local, provincial, and federal government functioned. I looked up the statistics, and there’s an absurdly low crime rate and a very high standard of living. Additionally, Canada's educational system is ranked far ahead of the US despite about equal expenditure per student.[

The reason I went to Toronto was to attend a conference, and I sat in on a panel about the Canadian health care system where I learned a lot. While it isn’t perfect, the single-payer model Canada employs seems mostly effective and humane, and ensures that comparatively few citizens are left for dead. Even drug prices (which the government insurance doesn’t cover) are negotiated by the Canadian government and are orders of magnitude cheaper than they are in the US. Canada’s social safety net is also miles ahead of the US and the whole “if you’re poor or sick you deserve to be poor” mentality doesn’t seem to exist there. I know that there’s a significant issue of scale at play (the entirety of Canada is only ~35 million people as opposed to 319 mil in the US), but that doesn’t fully explain it. Canada just doesn’t seem to be a pathologically dysfunctional society in the same way that the US is.

The fundamental difference seems to me to be that the Canadian government is actually beholden to its constituents’ interests. The United States government is essentially an oligarchy at this point; the SDP electoral system ensures that dissatisfied citizens have no chance to elect outsider candidates, so the Democratic Republican elite is immune to all threats to their power. Because the parties are immovably entrenched, their candidates are funneled into an intra-party rat race with each other for electoral funding, which means whoever can suck corporate dick the hardest and with the least teeth will be elected. This leaves the door open for all manner of corporate abuse and predation of the American public, and the corporations have become so adept at manipulating the media that they’ve convinced the public that that’s how it should be. It’s revolting.

The Canadian government seems to actively protect its citizens’ interests and works to improve their quality of life. I attribute this to the parliamentary model, where citizens actually have voting options other than “the party in charge now” or “the party in charge two years ago.” As a result, candidates are way less beholden to corporate interest and way more beholden to voters.

Granted, I’m sure there’s more than a little of the old “grass is always greener” effect going on here, but I can’t escape from the conclusion that the United States is a dystopian hellhole designed to trap almost all of its citizens in an inescapable web of poverty and disenfranchisement. It’s a fundamentally predatory society where corporations prey upon the horrid living conditions they pay politicians to perpetuate. Labor rights are practically nonexistent compared to almost any other first world industrialized nation, and education has been utterly gutted, twisted into a perverse game of rote memorization and fill-in-the-multiple-choice-bubbles without concern for students’ futures. Most forms of higher education are scams designed to trap young people underneath insurmountable mountains of student debt while not offering any decent career prospects. Entire generations of our best and brightest individuals are being railroaded into lives of menial service jobs, while many of those who rise to positions of power are childish imbeciles capitalizing on Daddy’s connections. Essentially, if you’re born in the United States, there’s a very good chance that you’re just utterly hosed and there’s nothing you can do (short of joining the military in the right way) to unfuck your life. “Down here it's just winners and losers and don't get caught on the wrong side of that line.”

I’m incredibly lucky; I was born into relative wealth and managed to dodge nearly every bullet America had waiting for me, and I’m in a fairly stable, well-paying position now. And it’s totally possible to insulate yourself from the worst of all this societal sickness by sticking to the major, cosmopolitan cities. But still, knowing that I’m supporting this rotten society with my labor and citizenship makes me sick to my stomach. Am I alone in finding the prospect of staying in this sort of society morally abhorrent? I’m doing everything I can to change it (voting in local and federal elections, donating to lobbyist groups, and teaching young people how the society they live in works and how they can protect themselves), but these issues are so deeply entrenched that nothing short of a major famine or war will turn the tide. In most ways, I really like Sanders as a candidate and I’m doing my best to support his campaign, but there’s little chance he or anyone like him will ever rise to a position of real power.

I’m trying to come to terms with all this, which is why I’m making this thread. I’d be interested to hear other folks’ takes on this whole situation, especially any expatriates. At this point, I’m seriously considering emigrating within the next 6 years (I need to build up some savings first), either to Canada or the EU (since I have Irish citizenship), but until then I need to find some way to stay sane in an insane society. Probably it will involve listening to a lot of Harvey Milk and Springsteen’s “Nebraska,” if I had to guess.



tldr; I can’t escape the conclusion that the United States is objectively a dystopian hellhole designed to screw over its citizens, and that that won’t change any time soon. I’m looking for other people’s takes on this whole situation, stories of expatriates, and/or how you all cope with this knowledge.

Tequila Sunrise posted:

OP aren't you the dude that randomly threw someone's Citibike off a bridge just because you felt like it? Have you considered that you are not exactly a paragon of morality yourself?

Tequila Sunrise posted:

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3749675&userid=139946

Here it is. No story behind it that he talks about, but it was him. Also, while looking through his post history to find that post I found one where he asks how much a tattoo is, because he wanted a "fairly anatomically correct skull" on his forearm.

Op, it's time. How old are you. How fat are you.

a cop posted:

Wow what a big fat piece of poo poo! You've got some work to do, OP.

Ragequit posted:

http://i.imgur.com/KTkPxO2.gifv