Easy.

A CEO is accountable to shareholders. A president is accountable to no one (at least while in office, per SCOTUS).

Alternatively, the CEO affects investments; a president is the investment.

I thought that was a Mallrats reference. Besides, they get the Subaru once they move in together.

Is he going to make it, doc?

cries

The social “harm,” in the case of the Mormons, was that Brigham Young declared polygamy a requirement for going to heaven, which meant that every man needed at least two wives. Older and more established “patriarchs” would marry anyone from literal children to widows and divorcees. This led to some dubious practices for “acquiring wives” since the population can only support so many one-to-many marriages. Additionally, the Church originally would only sanction marriages within the Church, so you’d have to find not one, but multiple women of your own localized cult to marry. Divorce among Mormons during this time was actually common (which probably didn’t help their case with the other Christians back east who deemed divorce a social problem).

The scale of polygamy in Utah during that time was staggering and Brigham Young had around 56 wives (the number is disputed and changes depending on the source and the criteria). Naturally, this formal, institutionalized approach to polygamy created an environment where abuse was rampant. Anna Eliza Young, one of Brigham’s 56 wives, even sued him for neglect and abuse after they divorced. She was then excommunicated from the LDS church after divorcing him.

But the real reason Mormon polygamy was soecifixally outlawed was because Brigham Young was an autocrat and was well on his way to building a rival country in Utah. The US obviously wanted Utah to remain a territory, but the Mormons were pushing for the creation of their Zion (the Biblical refuge from persecution and wandering, similar to but not the same as the state of Israel; this ventures off deep into Mormon theology territory and it’s best not to go there). The US civil war was also going on and the Union figured that a territory going rogue and establishing a new landlocked country wasn’t ideal. So even though Mormon polygamy became federally prohibited it wasn’t enforced until Utah petitioned to become a US state.

All of this to say that, historically, the anti-Mormon and anti-polygamy laws in the US require a bit of context to unpack. In general, the US should probably relax its legal position on bigamy and polygamy, but in the end, as another poster pointed out, polygamy makes property claims and inheritance more legally complicated (especially when crossing state lines as is often the case in bigamy). Social attitudes still have a ways to go before anyone will bother with reversing the various anti-polygamy laws from the 19th century.

8 fluid ounces is a cup, 4 cups is a quart, 4 quarts is a gallon. Most canned drinks are 12 fl. oz, or 3/4 of a pint.

8 ounces is half a pound.

It makes perfect sense!

Certain strains of Christianity in the US are really apocalypse cults. Somewhere in the story there’s something about being persecuted and being threatened with death unless you renounce Christ.

They need to be persecuted because it reinforces the idea that they are living in the end times and therefore closer to rapture or whatever.

Edit: persecution is also a key part of Christianity’s origin story (Peter being crucified for his belief, Christians being fed to the lions in Rome, etc.).

There’s a movement within black metal that calls itself “National Socialist Black Metal” (NSBM). It’s what happens when any group of dickheads insert themselves into an existing scene or genre. Similar thing happened to skinhead punks in England in the 80s.

Some times it boils down to here’s a black metal band comprised solely of neo-Nazis and while they sing songs about trolls and despair they also do Nazi shit in their spare time. This only fuels the assertion you made earlier because a lot of times you can’t even tell they are NSBM from the music, you have to have read an interview, listened to their stage banter, or looked up a list of known NSBM-adjacent bands.

I gave it a go with “Chattahoochee” by Alan Jackson:

Well, ding dang doodle dingle dangle doodle
Ding dang dingle dangle doodle dangle
Ding dang doodle dingle Georgia asphalt
Dingle dangle doo but we dangle dingle doo

And “Thunder Rolls” by Garth Brooks:

The dangle rolls
and the dingle strikes
another dingle dangle doo
on a dingle doodle diiiiing
as the dingle doodle doOooo
dangle dingle ding
dingle dangle heart
the dangle rolls

This movie is an onion.

If we’re being charitable in our reading of Bear, he’s only sympathetic because he’s not outright evil. But really he represents a lazy evil that emerges from mediocrity and cowardice. There is a mild redemption arc at work, but the film doesn’t let us accept Bear’s resolution. The audience always knows that he’s not the true victim but the film also makes the point to demonstrate that nothing is ever as straightforward as we want it to be. Watching demands a lot from the viewer.

It might be possible that dice took over in usage because most people are never introduced to the concept of dice being singular. Very few mainstream dice based games from my childhood used less than two dice: Monopoly, Yahtzee, Farkle, Risk, Parcheesi, Backgammon. Trouble is the only one I remember that used a single die and that game didn’t even let you roll it.

I think the tipping point was in the early 2010s when all of a sudden everyone and everything hitched their wagons to Facebook. Facebook as SSO, Facebook messenger instead of email or SMS, Facebook marketplace dethroning Craig’s List, etc. Once people from elderly relatives to local business centralized all of their online identity into Facebook, it was over. To this day, Facebook is still the only way to see info for community events and small businesses (and instagram is the platform Facebook used to sequester musicians and artists).

It didn’t have to be Facebook, of course, but there needed to be a networked service that people trusted enough to give it every thing. Remember check-ins? People would post their location at restaurants, jobs, theaters, and shops. Public profiles that listed jobs, homes, family members and relationships, pets, children’s photos, and hobbies all under real names (I remember when Facebook started the purge of pseudonyms and aliases).

I deleted my Facebook account over a decade ago and people panicked and warned me that it was a bad idea. The craziest thing someone said to me was that it would make me un-hire-able since there’d be nothing for people to snoop to see if I was a good fit. The only “bad” thing that happened is that I lost contact with some old acquaintances, but that’s just life.

Regardless of all the other tech stuff in the past 20 years, I think that convincing people that it was okay to let a company like Facebook exist will the explicit goal to transparently harvest personal data was what opened the floodgates. Facebook (and other social media) demonstrated that people will willingly exchange privacy for digital errata. Once governments and corporations saw that, the future wrote itself.