Welcome to Jackass! Today we’re installing municipal broadband.

The Simpsons’ version of Bill Clinton.

That’s the point. The US has effectively unlimited money, or let’s say unlimited liquidity, so their ability to repay is purely based on political issues. That they can’t get their shit together enough politically to avoid their own borrowing costs going up is extremely funny and embarrassing.

Look into design thinking and in particular ideation. There are lots of formal processes, exercises, activities, etc. that are used by individuals and teams in all sorts of contexts specifically for coming up with ideas. The process is usually one of throwing a bunch of things on the table, sorting through them, getting rid of most of them, elaborating on the ones that seem interesting, then following one to completion, or at least to some sort of first draft/prototype/mockup. You then decide whether or not you want to work on the draft further, or decide that it's a dead end and start from scratch. The thing with "ideas" is that all of them are terrible and only serve to help guide us towards doing something interesting. Creating things is an intensely iterative process, and what you start with is unlikely to look much like what you end up with after a number of iterations.

Ideas are also all derivative. There are no new ideas, just riffs on existing ones. Even most interesting and innovative works have been influenced by past works, or works from different disciplines, or inspired by nature. If you're looking to make a short comic, start by figuring out what works and artists and styles you like. Try recreating parts of them, or emulating them, or combining elements of them, and see if the results speak to you. That's one of the few actually useful applications of LLM AI. You can quickly test concepts, maintain some elements and discard others, do mashups, etc. When something grabs you, try to figure out what it is that resonates about it, then try to recreate it with your own spin.

Ultimately, ideas are just prompts for doing work, and having a good idea (to the extent that such a thing even exists) is far less important than being willing to test a number of ideas to find out what will motivate you to spend real time and effort on creating something.

chef's kiss

I was half joking, the British shows are usually pretty good in their own right, but there are a lot of successful American shows based on British ones (as well as a few flops). Whether they’re “better” is subjective, but it’s a longstanding phenomenon.

The Office is the best example, but there are others. Three’s Company and its spin-offs were based on a British series. Sanford and Son, as well. Veep was made my the same creative team as The Thick of It and is a clear spiritual successor. American Idol was based on Pop Idol, the latter only ran two seasons while the former is still going.

Some British shows stand on their own, even if remakes are attempted. The IT Crowd, Red Dwarf, they tried like three different shows to try unsuccessfully to recapture the magic of Fawlty Towers.

Regardless, without British television, American television wouldn’t be the same, and without American television, most people would never have heard of most British television.

Either way, death to America and Britain as per usual.

They’re pretty good at making television shows that get remade into better television shows by Americans. That’s something, I guess.

Yeah, it depends on the criteria. The Nazis were only around for a few years, whereas the British did their thing for centuries. The Nazis were a rookie prodigy who retired after a single red-hot season, the British were a multi-season MVP with way more points on the board.

I have a soft spot for it because they did an episode that added Larry Niven's Kzinti to the Star Trek universe. I know TAS isn't usually considered canon, but that was fun.

My apologies, I assumed 1 and 4 were about treatment of other users, rather than more broadly.