not to worry.

I've developed a robot-cat to mock and distract them; the dogs will have no choice but to chase them endlessly!

And if that fails, each has four launchable tennis balls!

> Ford "Probe"

c'mon, now.

Those didn't sell domestically.

We exported them all to the Lizard People, of course.

(but the *real* oddity of that vehicle was that they somehow thought they were developing the new Mustang. After the previews got laughed off the stage, it was repurposed).

hawk

I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. If you want that, be prepared to cough up a five digit minimum retainer.

"the" ?

No, it's plural.

War powers is a good start.

The Fifth Amendment is another.

Then there's things like tariff powers and such.

There is no reasonable argument that it can't be barred from import, and similarly for its content.

The question is what, if any, compensation would have to be paid.

And the Vth would allow outright seizing it and paying just value, even if nothing else applied. With multiple eager bidders, the auction price would be a pretty good gauge of value.

"obviously unconstitutional" is just plain nonsense, and comes from the "the law *is* what I want it to be, because I am a priori correct on all matters" school of thought.

hawk, esq.

That one worked well for me, and it wasn't even my idea! My mother *suggested* that I leave my laundry when I came home for dinner that first weekend . . .

Of course, when I went south for law school, I was on my own, and my girlfriend (now wife) would actually break in to my apartment if I didn't hand the laundry over--apparently she was horrified by my wrinkles!

and now I reminisce about those lazy days of college, hanging around the laundry room . . . wait, what??? just what is *wrong* with these kids?

hawk, retired having fixed more washers than he's run loads of laundry

There is no universal solution. That's fundamentally the problem, people are looking for a panacea that covers all of the use-cases for flying and is low cost, and none exists nor do any appear visible on the horizon.

The solution is to whittle-away at the use of air travel where it's practical to do so, using technologies that can be powered through means that don't directly consume fossil fuels and may be powered indirectly through any number of means. For some places this means electrified railroads, even high-speed railroads if the nature of the corridors can justify them. For other places this means working to make electric automotive journeys more practical. But this requires a lot of work and cost.

For high-speed rail we've already seen studies that have identified the Boston/DC corridor and the Pacific corridor as potentially viable, and there have been mumblings about a Texas corridor. If the time required isn't massively different than flying due to the headaches of airports and if the passengers have more comfort and the ability to bring more luggage than they can when flying, then suddenly it can become attractive if the costs remain competitive. Which of course will mean understanding that it won't be a profit-maker at first, and possibly not ever. But if that subsidy is the price to pay to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels then so be it.

yeah.

unlicensed particle accelerators, or go home!

EM is for wimps . . .

Walmart coming to town was/is a double-edged sword.

It's indisputable that small businesses couldn't compete on price and got wiped out.

It seems clear (though not to the same level) that their wages were less than the jobs they displaced (though not nearly to the levels the unions claimed).

*However* . . . a while back, someone did a study about how much the *savings* to the public were.

It came out that the savings to a hypothetical worker who ended up with a wage loss of the levels claimed by the unions saved *significantly* more than that with lower prices, not just from walmart, but from the lower prices in town.

Whether this is *worth* the costs is a judgment call, for which opinions will vary (normative, rather than positive, economics).

doc hawk

There are still Walmarts where pickup is in store???

Parking lot pickup took over hear I don't know how long ago.

And then we got the walmart++ (or whatever it's called); untippable home delivery.

On the rare occasion that I'm inside it these days, it's generally because it's the closest grocery store (by a couple of miles; my neighborhood is so bad these days that it would qualify as a "food desert" without walmart) and we need something quick.

Delivery has been faster than amazon at least since 2020, and prices the same or lower than amazon.

>not least filtering in traffic so they're not going away anytime soon.

when two wheel vehicles get "filtered" from traffic, they tend to "go away" for extended periods, if not permanently . . .

word 5.1 and excel 4, Mac, were the last products out of Redmond that I saw any reason to buy (and I did).

At the time, Word on the Mac and Word for dos had *nothing* in common other than the name.

Well, they could *kind of* read one another's files--but you lost things like inserted charts in the process!

The Mac Word was the best available at the time (unless you needed certain things like WP), while the DOS/Windows version was a distance third, propped up only by the lack of a viable fourth.

Word 6, though, tossed the Mac version and imposed the second rate dos version on everyone. It was reported that a researcher found timing slugs in the Mac version so as to make it slower than the windows version.

Anyway, many things that worked and were useful in 5.1 (usable equations, anyone? plain text mail merge?) were gone in 6, replaced with glitz. And to add insult to injury, when word 6 opened a 5.1 file, it would rewrite it in 6 format *on opening*, and without seeking permission! I think it was even overriding RO status, as I recall having to use physical write protection on diskettes.

I used to be peripherally involved with a legacy system that had, with some effort, been converted recently from 8" floppies to those new-fangled 3.5" gadgets. It used a unique file system that required a particular format. I figured out a way to use Linux to format the floppies and write disk images. We noted a sharp drop in floppy quality after about 2008.

The system used more modern storage at runtime, but making it boot off something more modern (e.g. USB) would have required a boot ROM upgrade. This was within our technical capability - the people who had written the original boot ROM were long gone by then, of course - but it was more cost-effective to scrap the system and make something new to replace it. So we did.

...laura

It'll never happen, because the counter-argument is that the new buyer of that IP might turn around and leverage it.

I am a lawyer. In fact, I'm a bankruptcy lawyer. Nonetheless, this isn't legal advice, but a comment on procedure.

This wasn't a class action. There aren't big contingency fees.

The way a bankruptcy distribution of x% works is that each unsecured claimant gets a check for x% of the claim.

The attorneys get paid separately from the estate as an "administrative expense".

The unsecured creditors usually don't *have* attorneys, although in larger cases such as this, a creditor's committee is generally appointed, and it gets a lawyer paid from the estate as well.

Correct. The AZ vaccine still protected people from COVID-19, but carried more risk than other vaccines for COVID-19. Getting vaccinated is the right move for anyone that had no specific medical condition that made the vaccine more harmful than beneficial, but there's comparative risk, and serious side effects like blood clots are worth weighing if one has a choice of which vaccine to take.

It's not really all that different a concept than the situation with the Polio vaccines. Salk's killed, injected vaccine had the risk of secondary infection from the injection site and a few documented cases where the virus wasn't properly neutralized so it caused direct infection. Sabin's live, oral vaccine did on occasion lead to clusters of Polio outbreaks along with mutation of the Polio virus. Even as someone that hates needles with unbridled passion I'm more favorable to Salk's vaccine. The failure to prepare it properly leading to a few cases of Polio given to patients were very rare occurrences, while Sabin's vaccine lead to far greater numbers of clusters of Polio. But if I had been alive during the Polio epidemic and only Sabin's vaccine was available in my area I wouldn't have refused it.

Frankly with the serious side effects I'm surprised that it wasn't withdrawn from the market sooner, or its sales relegated to places that simply couldn't get vaccines with fewer side effects.