How about polar bears?

Fortunately or not, both the UK and France have thermonuclear teeth to bite back if the totally-not-a-Tsar tries. And as far as the UK goes, it's the same thermonuclear warheads, missiles and submarines as the USA, using the same procedures and with the same capabilities.

Maybe they're talking about the fediverse or something? Idk.

It's not necessarily imaging as in optics. Could be OPIR, encrypted comms, space to space ASAT, or any number of other things besides just earth imaging.

Those are amazing!

Sounds like you're the goalposts-mover here, shipmate, and it seems the rest of the readers here agree with me. Maybe this place ain't your venue.

It would totally make sense for some sailor to use it that way too after a night on liberty in port, but alas no.

Force of habit from almost a decade in the Navy, it's a term of "endearment" that was intended by politicians and bureaucrats to be a "polite" term that can be universally applied regardless of rank, but is usually applied out of exasperation when actual insult isn't warranted. Apologies for the unfamiliar term.

Shipmate, I'm pointing out that the system as it already stands is pretty much exactly as shit as they say it would become should the situation change. Each attempt to merely increase wages here and there is like putting a bandage on a gangrenous wound or a tumor, instead of realizing that the tumor itself needs to be surgically removed for all these symptoms - the American prison system, for-profit childcare, normalized hunger as a punishment for poverty and so on - to be actually treated. Believe it or not, I'm on your side.