That would have been insightful if the law hadn't eliminated insurance coverage for many Americans.

The Russian armies continuing to mass on Ukraine's borders?
Russian special forces and intelligence agents infiltrating Ukraine and instigating insurrection and incidents?
The Russians violating the Open Skies treaty to deny Western and US compliance inspection over-flights of Russia to hide their activity?
The UN finding that the Crimean election wasn't quite as free as claimed?
Putin admitting that the "little green men" in Crimea were, "surprise! surprise!," Russian soldiers after all?
Jews being told they must "register" in an area of Ukraine controlled by Russian separatists? which echoes the problems Russia has with National Socialists?
Russia taking up the "anti-fascist" fight after "defeating fascism" in Poland in 1939 (splitting it with the Germans), "defeating fascism" in Finland in 1940 (annexing Finnish territory), "defeating fascism" in Georgia in 2008 (taking territory from it), and now volunteering to "defeat fascism" in Ukraine despite the fact that Russia seems to be unable to defeat fascism at home?
That momentum is building in Ukraine's legislature for rearming with nuclear weapons which will ironically be accepting Putin's advice offered on Syria?

Most Ukrainians are neither loyal Russians nor fascists

No doubt there is more. Do you have an inside scoop? Is it, as I fear, that the US is at fault?

Leads to an honest question that cropped up... does the federal government have to abide by any sort of data-breach reporting laws (be they state or federal)?

(maybe they have their own, maybe they're exempt... I'm not a lawyer, but it'd be worth looking up...)

...at least according to the summary, wasn't this a little histrionic?

"Without the tuned mass damper, LeMessurier calculated that a storm powerful enough to take out the building hit New York every 16 years." In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse."

No, the "lack of a tuned mass damper" was already presupposing that the POWER was out. The power doesn't go out in NYC all that often, and even if it did...Would it have been impossible to have, I dunno, 5 backup diesel generators tested in rotation every day to provide emergency power to the tuned mass damper in the event of a coincidental power outage AND storm?

Great Cesar's ghost! You're against a government regulatory effort!?!?* Surely that must be a sign of the apocalypse! And during a blood moon to boot.

*And when did usefulness or futility become a concern?

And grains, don't forget whole grains. Oats, barley, wheat, etc. Filling and nutritious.

I will add this:

Beans and frozen vegetables are your friends. Get a crock pot. Make a crock of beans, divide them into servings and freeze them to use as needed. Beans are good nutrition. Meat and bean dishes go much further than just meat. A crock pot is also great for turning less expensive cuts of meat into a feast.

I find that frozen vegetables are much handier than canned, they keep nicely, and don't have all the added salt or other ingredients. Having them in the freezer makes adding vegetables to a dish, or making a side dish, very easy. You can easily have several different types or mixes to use as desired. Spinach in the omelet, mixed veggies in the stew, and so on. Getting those vegetables into your diet is better than just going for a burger and fries all the time.

Eggs are a great source of cheap protein, and sometimes they even go on sale. You can hard boil them to keep them longer.

Keep an eye out for sales on various fruits and vegetables, such as apples, sweet potatoes, or potatoes, and buy a bunch.

Frozen bread dough can be quite a bit cheaper than already baked loaves. Having some in the freezer during bad weather means you can have bread in case there is a run on the store (as sometimes happens) and the shelves are bare.

Raman can be tasty, filing, and tempting, but you might want to leave it as an occasional treat with all the fat and salt in the standard cheap stuff. Nutritionally you're probably better off with a potato.

You'll know you're developing the right mindset if you look at the price of a standard fast food "meal deal" and think to yourself: "I could buy a pound/half kilo of hamburger, a loaf of bread, and add a few pennies of potatoes and eat for 3-4 days for that! If I made a meat and bean stew it would be all week!"

Plan ahead. If you are going out, bring a container of water and a snack, such as an apple. That way you can avoid the temptation of soda and a candy bar. It's cheaper and better for you.

If you do it right, eating fairly cheaply can be healthy too.

I'm pretty sure that Russia has fixed that problem for the Europeans able to make a reasoned judgment that might have actually believed that. The ones that still believe that tend more towards viewing the world with a constant filter applied and it will take an actual occupation or perhaps bombing to adjust it.

spend 400 dollars for a vr headset then.

...which in turn gives them enough elbow-room to become a bit more belligerent, which in turn de-stabilizes the region. This in turn causes the US and Japan to have to spend their time doing something about it (China couldn't really give a frig, to be honest).

Speculative end result? Putin can take the rest of the Ukraine and any of the other former Soviet states with less attention being paid to it.

Funny enough, that's because in places like Ontario the booze is controlled by a provincially mandated cartel. In Ontario's case beer is "run" by Brewers Retail AKA the beer companies themselves, and the LCBO(the provincial government). And sadly in Ontario's case, it isn't the tax that you're getting screwed over on, you're paying a indulgence tax. And instead of leveraging their buying power, everyone gets screwed over. There's actually a rather massive dustup right now over selling booze at corner stores/grocery like they do in the US right now. With the brewers retailers trying to go with the "but your teenagers will be drunken heathens!!!!eleventyone!!!!11111!" In a place like Alberta, the government buys the booze, but anyone can apply for a license and open their own shop to sell, providing they can pass the requirements to do so.

But funny enough, you can buy Canuck made beer and spirits cheaper in the US than you can in Canada.

Quite true, my city(funny how in Canada we call a city with ~35k people a city), we have 2 micro breweries. They're not well known by any stretch of the imagination but they're known well enough that the people who run them make money to keep them in operation and run a "brew your own" business on the side.

Agreed.

Dear GP:

* Wait until you're 35+, and start having a hard time getting up in the morning.

* As time progresses, you get to choose between family and your 50+ hour workweek (anything else leads to divorce, which even $100k/yr won't ameliorate.) Otherwise, you end up old, childless, and alone. You do not want that fate.

* In your 20's, burn-out is relatively unheard-of. In your 40's, it is something you'll spend a very huge chunk of your time trying to avoid at all costs.

* $100k/yr in Alabama might be nice, but $100k/yr in California ain't shit.

* Once you do reach your 40's, you'll start looking back a little.. and you may not like what you see. At nearly 45, I generally like the parts I see that didn't involve a cubicle (or desk). The only parts of my work history that I actually enjoy looking back at was either the USAF stint, or the teaching/professorial stint - not for the management (they mostly sucked ass), but for the feeling of awesomeness I get whenever I leaf through many of my former students' LinkedIn pages (or in the case of the USAF, times like whenever I stood on the flightline after fixing up a multi-million-dollar jet and gazed at the mountains nearby).

Long story short - you only get so much time to spend on this earth - do you want to spend it slaving away for some parade of uncaring asshats who think you're ultimately disposable, or do you want to actually do something you can look back on and go "holy shit that was cool!"?

This isn't 100 years ago - the companies have gotten smarter (and far more PR-savvy) since then.

Let me tell you how a certain progressive German company handled their union troubles here in the US...

They bought an oil-company spin-off called Shell Solar. In their Washington (state) site, the Machinists' Union decided that it would be a great time to ask for a raise, since things had been stagnant there for awhile wage-wise. The company said no. The Union threatened to strike, and it made a bit of noise in the local papers.. The company quickly agreed to the wage increases.

Not a handful of months later, the company decided to turn the WA production site into a warehouse, and gave the workers a choice: Either re-apply for jobs at lower wages in nearby right-to-work Oregon, or be out of a job. Two years later, the site was shuttered entirely.

So - still think unions are the way to go?

Well let's be realistic then shall we? Technically they're not beholden to anyone to not build on the West Bank, being that it was a captured territory. Useful point, that much of it was already bought previously and before 1940. And every time that they gave land up--end when it was fully productive the palestinians fully destroyed it, looted it, and went on their way instead of taking it over and using it to bolster their own economy.

Gaza and the West Bank are "open air prisons" of their own making. Their own making revolved around: Palestinians, sniping at civilians along the highways, strapping explosives to themselves and blowing themselves up at cafes, bus stops, and other crowded civilian areas, and so on. Of course we can't forget the "rock throwing" brigades either, or some of the other incidents.

Building is restricted because terrorist organizations love to build bunkers, and weapons munitions dumps within civilian structures, and in places near to the border with Israel, they like to build tunnels to try getting under border check points. In other cases to build smuggling tunnels into Egypt. In order to smuggle in whatever they can.

The reason that building materials are hard is see the last paragraph, the last time they allowed unfettered access to building materials it went right to the terrorist groups who used it for bunkers, and weapons dumps. Big shock right?

So, let me ask you. If you had a "neighbor" who was doing that to you, and not only that but was launching rockets on a regular basis at the entire southern part of your country, to the point where all of your civic buildings are now bomb hardened structures, and houses are now moving that way too, how long would you simply put up with that? Especially when they've been claiming that it's "all in the name of peace."