I think what is happening is that Ukraine believes that signing the deal will result in a range of outcomes from neutral to positive, depending how and when the US renegs on their side of it. But without the deal the outcomes range from neutral to very negative, so making the deal is the clear right move even if you believe it won’t do anything.

It sounds funny but it actually is more real than you might think

In Southern California there’s a bunch of toll roads for the rich people in Orange County they call The Toll Roads.

You can’t just post XKCD without the title text.

https://xkcd.com/1520/

Title text: I’M SORRY, FROM YOUR YEARS OF CONDESCENDING TOWARD THE ‘SQUISHY SCIENCES’, I ASSUMED YOU’D BE A LITTLE HARDER.

The protests didn’t make nearly any national news. Hope the next ones go better.

Google TV is the easiest to get rid of ads on. I have a Sony and a Hisense both no ads.

Look up and use the Projectivy Launcher.

You’ll also want to sideload an app that forces the default launcher to Projectivy (can’t recall the name) because they don’t allow changing it through the stock OS. Projectivy tries to use accessibility settings to take over on its own, but it breaks some other features so I don’t use them.

That’s part of their plan. They start by more aggressively tracking down, arresting, and deporting the people with the most severe criminal records who have probably been already already convicted of a deportable offense. They can go around saying how they’ve got these actual criminals that “Biden allowed to stay” and be telling enough of the truth that it works.

The next step is to start going after people with mild criminal records, maybe shoplifting or an assault charge from a bar fight. People who wouldn’t normally be eligible to deport. People who are here maybe legally maybe not.

Then they start revoking legal status from people by just accusing them of petty crimes and deporting them without due process. This is what the new law they just passed with Democrats support allows the government to do now.

Your monopoly money buys more eggs than our real money?! Now I’ve seen everything!

We need lots and lots of lawyers on our side to fight this stuff. Sometimes we will lose in court, but often we won’t. A lot of judges actually do believe in the rule of law. Not everything will make it to the Supreme Court and not everything that does make it there will be upheld.

If we don’t fight things in court, nothing stops them from taking effect, so that is priority number 1 in terms of funding. We need to pay good lawyers good money or else they’ll watch the US crumble with the rest of us.

Rug puller. He got his, now anyone else can fuck off.

SLAM

Oh, honey, oh no

All of the fires are :(

While the palisades fire is showing a lot of very rich folks that their money doesn’t make them immune to fire, there are a lot of relatively regular people who were barely hanging on to their homes in a very expensive area who lost everything and could be financially ruined forever.

Don’t get me wrong, vanishinlgy few of those in the palisades were poor before the fire. But a lot could be now if they were uninsured or if their insurance fucks them over.

There’s a bunch of apartment buildings in the area that burned down too. Families who were protected by rent control lost their apartment and now where do they go?

Sure, but we aren’t quite at Cuban missile crisis levels of heat either.

I’m soooo sorry I didn’t specify that it would need to be invoked against a significant nation-state and that a concept like terrorism doesn’t count. I understand that could be very confusing otherwise.

It’s just the second cold war. You’ll know WW3 started when NATO invokes Article 5. Until then, it’s all just proxies.

In the first cold war there were proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc. Now it’s Ukraine and Israel/Syria/Lebanon.

I’ve ridden Amtrak but I’ve also seen videos about how Via Rail is basically unusable. Amtrak has improved significantly in the past decade as well, while Via seemingly regressed (again, Via info is based on other people’s experiences, not mine).

Hooooboy is Via Rail going to impress you with how terrible it can be.

You better get out those tissues. They’re already starting https://www.lg.com/us/smart-monitors

Sony. I got last year’s open box for close to 1k. It runs Android so I have a ad free launcher called Projectivy and can sideload apps as well.

My brain absolutely refused to read

Jeanut Putter and Belly

as it was written.