Well one small step would be to stop selling or dealing with subcontractors, will not fix it but does add an extra hurdle to things.

Technical issues? Go on-site to where the machine is supposed to be … have your own technicians look at the machines on site and report back.

But I guess those costs put pressure on the profits of the company.

It was a fluke indeed, no one really expected him to win, he himself the least, he was mostly there for the attention.

But once he was sworn in and the dust settled, the country was stuck with him and would need to ride it out. Problem is, Trump liked playing with the big boys, feeling important and enjoyed being gawked at on his golf course… Not to forget he could use the cash flow, billing the government millions, putting his friends and family in places they had no right to be, it was all useful, and he made himself useful for those keeping him in his seat.

But near 2020 Trump realized he needed to stay there or his world would come crumbling down from debt and his illegitimate activities hidden by his white house shine. So he would go and try to keep the position. Alas that decision did not come with enough time beforehand to cement his position. So they had no preparations on hand when the time was there and his force of headbobbers plainly was too small to push him past the election results.

But that was a lesson learned, and he and those helping him come with the 2025 plan, try to get as many pro-trumpers in useful positions before the election, years in advance, so that they can help push him back in the white house, no matter what the actual vote says…

And here we are; The judiciary system is heavily tilted towards stalling all Trump court cases beyond the elections. The electorate is slithering its way through covert adjustments of voter rules and registration zones. And the legislative shows all signs on this time really refusing to certify losing results.

Meanwhile Trump has a more focused mob now that he can rile up and has more solid plans/experience on what kind of action or roadblock is needed where.

I really do hope cooler heads will prevail. But the months before and after the switch to 2025 will be quite the ride. And possibly bring enormous changes for the whole world.

There is also Finland, which has around 34 guns per 100 inhabitants, amongst the highest of the western world. It has a cun culture of defense (against its untrustworthy Russian neighbor), hunting and sports. But there is strict registration and regulation. Though they can buy just about any type of gun, there is no open carry “for funsies”. Carrying/transporting the guns requires an immediate purpose and must be held, unloaded, in a case or pouch. (I am not Finnish so correct me if I am wrong)

I have a bit of a feeling it’s in the US a thing of “He has a gun, so I want a gun” that reinforces itself, and after a while gets people careless since it’s a fairly common thing.

In the UK there was a study where forbidding handheld guns, mainly pistols, did see a sharp decline in gun related crime but they did not banish it completely.

I don’t know the numbers but in the US it seems pistols make it easier to act upon one’s mental state … have a tiff with your neighbor? Go to his door with a gun on your belt. A car just cut you off? Explode in rage, pull up next to him/her on a traffic light and swing your pistol around, try doing that with a non automatic hunting rifle.

“To prevent future misuse of these client-lawyer documents I order them all destroyed forthwith”

I will not be suprised if they rule him immune in that very specific case, under his excuse that he was “defending democracy with the information he had at that time”.

It blocks full immunity for everything and gives Trump a free pass, the SC will retain power, and the US saves a little bit of face, on paper, in legitimizing the jan 6 troubles.

People have hope and heart for Star Wars … hope that got rekindled by a spark here and there like Andor and The Mandalorian’s early seasons. So the fans get pulled back in.

But soon after Disney brings pain again, and it is always on purpose, usually from very bad writing that should not have seen the green light, and lousy planning.

Granted there was toxicity and yes the level greatly increased when the sequels came out. But a lot of it was instigated by Disney, they started to spout the nonsense of “The Force Is Female” and “Star Wars has no strong women”, no one previously claimed the force to have a gender, or declared Leia a whimpering lass. But this was the Disney that promised a new hope for Star Wars when it was bought, and a conclusion to the story the “later” generation of fans were hoping for, to see how their old heroes had fared, after perhaps reading all the books the hopes were high. And it was all thrown in a puddle of mud and stomped on on purpose by Disney. The heroes were willfully destroyed, in movies that had no production planning and lousy writing. This is what made the mouthier fans angry.

On top of that Disney’s media output was only making it worse, and, as was later proven, a lot of the negativity some actors perceived was pushed on them by the media, not the fans (both John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran said as much, Gina Carano’s story falls in the same category, Disney attacked her through social media bots or so it is said), yet the blame landed firmly and only on toxic fans. Disney’s opening toxicity was always waved off.

Anyone daring to comment on the sexist remarks of the force being female or Rey being a Mary Sue was immediately stamped as toxic.

And for just about every tv show there was a remark or two from Disney far ahead of the release of the show that got the fans raging, Andor was just about the exception, that one had a lot of radio silence.

In all, I as a fan am bummed out there was/is toxicity, but I can’t swallow it no more that legit, polite, grievances and criticism are being cast off as being toxic and the Disney product is beyond reproach and can only be revered.

The Acolyte has shown cringely bad writing so far, from episode 1 to 3 it’s only gone downhill, and I think people should be allowed to comment on that, if it turns out to be the next Shakespeare at the end, well the first 3 definitely never will be.

No you’re right, the actors don’t have to, but then they ALSO don’t need to spout falsehoods about starwars like “Star Wars never had strong females”, or 'Anakin blew up the Death star" like it was gospel … as an actor for an IP if you don’t know anything about it just say so and don’t make toxic comments just to rile up people.

The actor playing the inquisitor in Kenobi said he knew nothing of star wars … I don’t recall anyone really flaming him personally for that (but the character was put through the wringer in writing).

I brought that up because if they don’t know anything about SW, why did Lucasfilm put them out on the interviews to spout as much nonsense as possible? That is plain wrong.

Interestingly, the creator of Andor was not even a SW fan but he properly read up on the material and did not let himself be used for someone else’s agenda by giving empty headed interviews.

Lawrence Kasdan had George Lucas beside him … The crew of The Acolyte have someone next to them who is almost saying George Lucas shouldn’t be Star Wars’ creator.

If the writers don’t know what entails star wars … then why get upset if star wars fans don’t recognize star wars in the product? It’s not a magical faerie dust the Disney team sprinkles over it post production. No matter how much they’d like that. A good writer studies its subject and writes about it with passion, if neither are done you get drivel like “the power of one, shallala, the power of two, mulalala, the power of thr’many-y”

Final point, if they boast the outrageous 180M (movie!) budget, and up to epsode 3 out of 8 (at ~30 minutes a pop) it gives you that, it does not bode well for the rest of the show and it’s a bad thing once again no one higher up pulled the brake on this… In you calling the complainers a fool (oops toxicity seeping in!), you absolutely miss the point, what is shown now is not up to the quality deserving such a budget, not even 30% at $60Million… but dividing it per episode would make you say it’s unfair too because each episode has different effects etc. Even reviewing the series per episode is a no-no then because one can’t see the whole series … so reasoning with you on that is moot.

Other flopped SW series had far less of a budget to work with, and with more budget for the Acolyte it promised a lot, but the team still put out subpar writing … again … and it is the again that people are upset about. So I will quote someone: “Who is more foolish, the fool, or the one following him?” … The people complaining are definitely not accepting the budgetary worth of the series so far.

In all, it is clear the people having heart for the IP are on the wrong side of the fence and their points and passions declared unsubstantial by the selfcentered other side.

But I bet if it does turn out to be amongst the best SciFi we have seen in a while there will be plenty of praise and no more complaints about the budget, anyone remember Andor?

Somehow I don’t see it happening this time. <cough>Rebel Moon<cough>

Ironic you say that because it’s proven that the actors and staff of The Acolyte (and some in the Kenobi series as well) never saw a bit of star wars and have no basic knowledge of the property.

So it is an issue that fans complain how badly written the Acolyte is for the budget, even if they only heard about it from others or seeing clips, but it is no issue the cast and staff don’t know a single thing about Star Wars lore but do force their own mind-canon of star wars on the fans … ?

I am going to leave this example here, it shows a then and now, and ask you, who is being toxic, where does the toxicity start, every time, far before a project is launched? Because there was no negative fan backlash before these interviews aired.

https://youtu.be/qCtwjmuXu2E?si=XJuu1SEtHCd_NKom

(No I am not affiliated with the channel, it just presents a striking example)

Also, tell me why hire such incompetent people shown here and such writers while there is an astronomical budget? Why shouldn’t people get angry about it?

And also ask plain why, why insult your fanbase and your product like that and play innocent when the fans pick up their pitchforks.

This is a billion dollar company that IS ABLE to produce quality content, but it chooses to pump out this junk every time, why?

Disney has been caught using bots to mess with things before, I give it a fair chance that it’s now also hired bots for this, need to uphold the blame towards the “fans”.

I can’t easily imagine a lot of fans attacking ratings for a totally unrelated show, but bots being given just a title? Yeah …

Cancelation fees (and steep ones at that) on digital goods/“services” … shows how far things sunk towards the lower hells.

If you had a proper healthcare system you wouldn’t get crazy bills at all…

But people exploiting it start screaming “socianism!” and everyone starts booing and suddenly forgets it’s plain how a nationwide insurance works.

It’s so weird …they want a gun “for self defense” but it firing once per second is not enough. So the goal shifts to something that fires 3x per second … “now that is stopping power”. But it does not stop firmly enough, need to find a way to fire that same small gun 9x or 27x per second, now that is self defense!

If someone invents a two handed minigun that goes 100rps and is not unweildy I bet some of the gun nuts will want it legalized to use as domestic weapon for self defense. Because hey, hitting someone with 100 bullets might stop them, right?

The thing is, Disney is every time the one that starts the flames, years in advance, probably as a vector for what they know will be a disastrous product…

Taking the Acolyte as an example: They had the Cast make derogatory remarks about the fans and Star Wars in general (“Star Wars does not have strong women” conveniently forgot about Leia?) full years before any part of the Acolyte was finished. … why??

They even had cast members who clearly did not know anything about Star Wars (“Anakin blew up the Death Star”) proclaim their “wisdom” as stated fact. (“Star Wars has no good and evil”)

Why are fans not allowed to be angry?

Fans don’t care about diverse lesbian witch covens, they shrug it off, SW is filled with all kinds of aliens, it’s Disney that keeps pointing it out, look! Look! Look upon our glorious lesbian witches, they are what Star Wars is now!

What we do care about is atrocious writing, writing so bad it looks like an 11 year old’s fanfic, writing stuff that does not fit in the SW universe… but we need to swallow the stinking mess and smile because it is written by a lgbtq person who claims to know better than George Lucas…

$180M worth of wasted potential that may not be criticized or you’ll be declared a toxic fan.

“The force is female”, strange, no one declared it to be male, it never had a gender, why suddenly this gendered labeling? Quite weird that protesting against such sexist remarks is considered toxic…

Another small example, one of the high republic books from a few years ago had, in all seriousness, a chunk of inanimate rock as a “jedi navigator/pilot”. And fans are not allowed to be angry about that?

Concluding, it’s not the fans who are toxic, the toxicity originated each time from within Disney’s Lucasfilm.

Hmm what am I missing here…

Spotify is raising prices because it wants to sell product “B” next to “A” that it already had. But now the management of Product A is claiming that the extra money from raised prices belongs to them because spotify was selling A first?

That is quite ballsy … granted I expected nothing less from the greedy music industry, but this is quite on a new level.

I’ll add to that, they also got free “education” to learn skills needed for their “job” and how to adress their “superiors”.

Yes, please, pretty please, with a cherry on top, lift my gag order so I can lay out “wishes” that should happen to the mean unfair people that got me convicted.

But then when something happens I get to loudly say “I don’t believe my people did this!”

There was a time once where people with such delusions would be taken to a mental institution, especially when they are a threat to public safety.

…

Well I think the judge usually considers the defendant’s job. And that is where he’ll not get house arrest or community service… his lawyers will correctly argue that Trump is campaigning for his job as president, so is expected to be in different states almost daily and or travelling a lot for at least 6 more months. Thus it would be an unfair sentencing if it limited him to earn a buck.

Same will be argued for prison time but ofcourse that is a whole different ballgame and a judge could finalize that sentence but put it on a delay for like 2025.