Jesus Christ man, does anything in your day not somehow involve thinking about Trump?

Checks are a last vestige of a higher trust society.

I work for a European firm and they (their auditors) despise checks and can't comprehend how America can be so backward as to still use them.

Ironically we just had a customer involved in seven-digit fraud payments ...which couldn't have happened without electronic payments. Had they been "allowed" to pay us in checks like they used to, it simply couldn't have happened.

I'm not sure listing another random rule that allows the German state to arrest people is a "win".

In a way this is good news.
Seriously.

If Russia expected to win this conflict, it's unlikely even they are dumb enough to cause major nuclear leaks in territory they expect to hold.

It's possible this is a clue that they DON'T expect to do so, and we've advanced to the "well if I can't have it nobody can" scorched earth stage, which is very Russian.

Trump says thanks for letting him live free in there.

... For our elected officials, that is.

"There are serious effects now"
Really?

As far as I can tell, the "current serious effects" are always handwavy either wrong or framing-dependent bullshit like:
1) "there's a drought in California" (entirely disregarding that we happen to have settled it in an extremely wet phase, while for the last 1000+ years the US SW has been much drier for *centuries* at a time), or
2) every time it rains in Charleston "global warming is making hurricanes worse" or "...more frequent" or both (both of which have been repeatedly debunked as an artifact of our North-Atlantic-Data focus, in regards to both 'severe' storms and total hurricane energy, EITHER in the NAtl or globally), or
3) the 'look at all the people that die from heat!' (invariably after a hot week in summer; again routinely and repeatedly debunked by statistics that show 6-10x more people die from cold than heat whether we're talking regionally or global scales).

So please, elaborate these 'serious effects NOW'? What did I miss? The 'sinking islands' that aren't actually sinking?

Not everyone lives in a fantastically rich petrostate.

Would this be the Starlink system Musk rushed to Ukraine and afaik continues to allow UKR to use free if charge? (I believe that some donor nations do pay sub fees for the systems they've purchased for Ukr, to be clear.)

Musk repeatedly said that he won't allow Starlink to be used to support offensive operations. Yes, sometimes free gifts come with strings attached.

Your insistence that because Musk doesn't do everything Ukraine wants without question, "we know where his sympathies lie" is childish.

Yes, I can see the argument that an offensive to retake Ukr territory should be allowed, but I can also see the argument that it is an offensive. Musk, a rather pacifistic person who routinely gets collywobbles when confirmed with violence as pacifists often do, probably sees it that way (and your own linked article mentioned that Biden military & intel people at the time thought Putin 's retaliatory threats were increasingly credible). My guess is that he was confronted with Russian threats to himself or his companies globally.

Would it be better if Starlink just entirely shut down all service to the region? Would that be better for Ukraine?
If that's not what you want, then maybe shut the fuck up?

What is happening to Ukraine is terrible. Ukraine's defense against a sociopathic neighbor has been heroic. That doesn't mean everyone, everywhere, 24/7 makes "what's best for Ukraine" their priority.

And?

And you bet people will be waiting in line on day one to buy it...

John Money was the first of the batshit legion (that I'm aware of; his entire oeuvre sickens me so pardon if I haven't delved too deeply) to believe gender was distinct from actual sex.

"My deeply flawed views" are the facts that stand unchanging, despite fads.
Humans are either xx or xy chromosomes, producing large or small gametes respectively.

The tiny percent that aren't that, are mutations that happened to survive, like people being born without eyes or legless or conjoined. None of them are to be brutalized, none of them are to be treated with anything but respect and sympathy; it doesn't make them normal except insofar as 'mutations' in heterosexual reproduction are normal.

Give up; your bullshit carried through the crazy-years of 2020-2024, but nature is healing. Fucked up ideological gaslighting is fading before things like actual facts. We're calling MAPs pedophiles again, and people are recognizing how wrong were the lies that fueled Mengele-like brutal transgender experiments on CHILDREN, ruining their fucking lives. You can't "undo" castration chemicals given to prepubescent teens. You can't just wear a girl-mask and insist you're a woman. If you believe that, you need help and counseling, not endorsement.

...which makes it super convenient when you can just use that label on everyone, right?

No it isn't. Neither a teeny little collection of actual hermaphrodites and genetic sports, nor male fetishplay justifies the rewriting of common sense.

Humans are divided into two sexes, except when something goes WRONG.

Your view is complete bullshit, an ideology-cloaked-in-"science" promulgated by John Money, a sadistic pedophile whose kinks ended up destroying at least one family with BOTH sons suiciding eventually from his "therapies" but hey, at least he took ample photos when he compelled them to play sex games with each other, right?

The populations lack of a grasp on reality is awful, but not surprising.

We just spent what, 4 years with every official agency, every mainstream media outlet, even MEDICAL professionals saying - nay, insisting - that putting on makeup or a dress could make a man literally a woman. That chopping off a child's genitals and replacing them with a simulacrum would do the same.

Don't blame chatgpt for the general public's lack of grasp on reality. That has been the product of carefully crafted propaganda.

Oh btw, every angry downvote just emphasizes my point.