I say this as an American who voted 3 times against Trump, so I'm not a fan, but he's not wrong here. China basically runs WHO and it does whatever China wants whenever China wants it. China has threatened WHO members over allowing Taiwan to simply participate as an observer. Just so you know, various other non UN member entities are allowed to participate as observers, such as Puerto Rico.

This is lies and bullshit. Everybody knows that Canadians can't be denied health insurance by law. Nice job, Russian troll.

It is, but here's the problem. A little more than half of the USA doesn't care - at all. Some of them are Cult of Donald Trump members. They will always vote for him, even to their own harm. Some are Gen Z white males who got sick and tired of some loud mouths saying that every problem non-white males have is their fault. I get that, I really do. Some are dumbasses who think that the very second Trump is inaugurated prices will plummet to the point that food and gasoline are like 1/3 of what they cost now. Basically all it took to decide the election for Trump was a potentially empty promise that maybe they will get to take home more money and all it would cost them is the end of democracy. That was a trade many were willing to make. I'm a Gen Zer and I'm exhausted from dealing with all this bs of my moronic fellow citizens who don't care if we never have free elections again. Gen Z is pretty nihilistic because of how we were raised and if everything collapses and goes to crap, I'm just going to shrug.

This is why some companies do it. My most recent job was over a decade I spent with a company in the bottom half of the Fortune 500. A severance agreement with a bit still to go prevents me from talking about them by name. We used to use commercial Linux that we paid for. Why? So if anything ever went wrong with Linux, we would have some other company to blame for it. We had a lot of highly restrictive uptime agreements with customers with specific limited duration windows to do software upgrades in and we needed to be able to blame some other company if something happened that impacted those uptime agreements. My employer was hugely risk averse and often that led to good decisions but they also spent money they didn't have to like in this case. We never, ever had a Linux specific problem we had to get our vendor to help with when I was there.

God save us all from Cockney Rhyming Slang. That crap means whatever the hell the speaker thinks it means and whatever he teaches other people it means. Here's an example.

What the hell do you think I mean by saying this? I'm not British either, but I can make crap up.

Orange is sinister.

It means: Starmer is the prime minister.

So HTF does it mean that? Farmers grow oranges. Farmer rhymes with Starmer. The John Lennon song "Give Peace A Chance" mentions "....minsters and sinisters, banisters and canisters..." (Prime) minister rhymes with sinister and the words are next to each other in the song. I can give you absolute assurance that my incredibly moronic example is no more stupid and impossible to understand or has more obscure references behind it than the usual CRS does.

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: There is huge resistance in Muslim majority countries to admit to pilot suicide. EgyptAir Flight 990 is another example of this. The NTSB report says basically the relief first office deliberately took actions with his controls that made the plane go nose down, without offering a theory on why he did this. As far as I know, to this day EgyptAir insists that the crash wasn't deliberate. There is also probably some fear that the airline might be damaged financially from word getting out that they let a crazy pilot kill everybody on the plane.

In any event, while I doubt that MH370 will ever be found, my fear is that if it somehow is found, the black boxes will be ruined and we'll never know what happened.

I get what you are saying, but perhaps you don't know. Congress did fix it - sort of. But not like you want. They did finally codify real copyright expiration dates. Unfortunately they are generally 95 years. On the plus side, that does actually now require works to eventually enter the public domain, like Steamboat Willie. On the downside, it takes so long in the USA that almost nothing that enters the public domain has any value by the time it does so.

I can't speak to what the Internet Archive's game/goal is and it's worth noting that when people have taken on copyright lawsuits against them they usually hire really bad lawyers to defend them. But US copyright law is weird and technically speaking, records pressed in the USA before 1972 were never under federal copyright law but under various state copyright laws. This has led some - and perhaps the Internet Archive too - to argue that records before 1972 are in the public domain. Unfortunately, the morons at Naxos Records tried to make that argument in US courts and got slapped down pretty hard with the court ruling that EVERY recording ever made or released in the USA basically had permanent copyright due to New York state copyright law never expiring. You can read about the case under the name Capitol Records vs. Naxos. This ruling probably played a role in why the Music Modernization Act of 2018 was passed.

I've been a subscriber to SCMP for a few years although I live in the USA and don't love the CCP. I thought it might be useful in terms of investing to get information from there and I've been to Hong Kong a few times. I won't be renewing my subscription when it runs out. It is just a mouthpiece for the CCP now. And as one wise man said within the past year - "Investing in communism is a bad idea". They post a ton of crybaby stuff about how the USA is being so mean to them and everything the CCP does is fantastic and people who don't love the CCP are evil. I've had enough.

Actually, here in the USA, a lot of the investing is for a much sadder reason. Americans simply don't save for retirement, so a good chunk of the investing in bitcoin is an attempt by people who save little or nothing to suddenly get retirement money and to make up for the lack of saving discipline. I'm Gen X and a few of my high school classmates have already retired. Many still work. I get the impression that a lot of the ones still working have little or no savings for retirement. I have a good friend I met at work and we worked together for about 12 years before leaving that company. I believe he has literally never contributed at all to any IRA or 401K fund for retirement. There are a lot of Americans like him. I'm not sure it will really happen, but some in the Republican Party do really want to cut or eliminate Social Security and a lot of people have that as their only retirement income source. If that happens, I'd expect more desperate gambles into bitcoin.

For those who live in the USA and never leave it - and I'm American and live in the USA so I am most definitely allowed to make that comment - they only care about the cost to fly. Everything else is negotiable. In other countries, there are nowhere near the number of airlines the USA has. Many countries have one major carrier and maybe there are a crappy regional carrier or two and that's it. Consolidation to survive is inevitable. Earlier in this century the USA had 6 major airlines, and that isn't counting Southwest as a "major" airline, and they had to consolidate down to 3 to survive. We need fewer low cost carriers. The government should have allowed Sprint (a bad airline) to merge with JetBlue (a good airline) because there's no room for them both in the market right now and JetBlue is going to be the survivor. I'm not really seeing how Spirit can survive more than 2-3 years. A liquidation bankruptcy seems like the eventual end down the road whereas if the merger had been allowed, maybe many jobs could have been saved.

I wish I had mod points to give you. I am a T-Mobile customer and I honestly expect that between now and 6 months from now they'll admit that the hackers got every bit of personal information T-Mobile had on their customers.

Another reason is that some if not all developing countries have really weak legal systems. I can't imagine anybody actually outsourcing to Russia any more, but the legal system there is extremely corrupt and if a foreign company tried to sue a Russian citizen in a Russian court, it wouldn't be difficult for the citizen to bribe the court to throw out the case. I've heard similar stories about India and how there are never any repercussions for Indian citizens who steal and sell information from foreign companies they work for.

It's hidden behind a paywall unfortunately so there's no point in providing a link, but within the past 4-6 weeks or so, the online sports website The Athletic did a profile of a guy who lost everything by sports gambling. He went into a lot of detail on what happened and his thought process during the gambling. He basically believed that he couldn't lose so when he did, he kept placing riskier and higher money bets to try to get back his losses. At times he did win, but that just fueled his belief that he could win his losses back. He got loans from reputable banks and credit unions to cover his losses and provide more money to gamble with. For example, let's say he's got $12,000 worth of losses. He'd just apply for a credit union loan for, say, $18,000 to cover the $12,000 losses and have $6000 to gamble with. And then if he loses the $6000, he gets a loan from a different bank or credit union for $25,000 to pay off the previous loan and still have some money to gamble with. It seemed to never occur to him that he could actually get worse off. Addiction is terrible and it often leads people in its grasp to make irrational decisions. It doesn't help that many gambling apps have celebrities pitch them or commercials without celebrities where the commercial implies that you simply can't lose at sports gambling and everybody around you is making money at it and able to offer you advice to help you win. See that guy in front of you at the grocery store check out line? He probably knows how many 3 point shots Miami is likely to hit tonight in their NBA game vs. Boston. They leave you with the impression that if you aren't gambling, you're passing up free money you could make gambling. For Americans, the late Pete Rose is an example of how addictive and destructive sports gambling can be. He got a life time ban from his sport and is ineligible to be elected to the baseball Hall Of Fame because he gambled on the sport while playing and managing in it. His ban allowed him to apply for forgiveness and reinstatement and his last appeal a few years ago ended with the ban continuing with the MLB commissioner stating that Rose was told in no uncertain terms that he had to stop all gambling on everything to have any chance at reinstatement and they could easily prove that he continued to gamble on various sports including MLB anyway. That's how addiction is.

Career (30+ years) IT guy here. I don't turn off computers in my house (currently have 2) unless I'm going out of town as I don't need to access them remotely. One of them is a Windoze box and it will install critical patches at night and reboot, but generally speaking if I'm in town, my computers are up. People act like the power costs for leaving them running all the time are astronomical, but they really aren't. Only in the summer do I ever pay $100 or more for electricity in a month.

Although I live in a large US metro area, my home town is a small town and I have a lot of friends on Facebook who still live there. They post all the time and I see their concerns. I think these 3 things played a role in Trump's win.
1) The economy or the perception that it's truly terrible and Trump can magically (somehow) turn it around. I don't know any former classmates who lost their jobs that live in my home town, but you would think that things are unbelievably terrible for them. They bitch non-stop about the price of gasoline, even though most of them drive maybe 10 miles a day at most. The bitch about the price of groceries, yet somehow they still have food. They are terrified of electric cars, yet as I said before, most drive 10 miles or less a day.
2) Biden letting a huge number of immigrants into the USA to apply for asylum is a far far bigger negative against the Democrats than anybody in the Democratic Party seems to realize. It is kind of crazy how many small town people, who have zero interaction with immigrants, are terrified of them. And the Dems don't get that the people who are actually most opposed to all immigration are the immigrants themselves. It's truly shocking how many legal immigrants or their kids want to close the door so nobody can follow them.
3) I'm not sure it played a big role, but there were really effective commercials that quoted Harris as saying the USA should pay for criminals to have free transgender surgeries. I looked into this and this has actually been US policy since 2019 and Trump was president then. But seeing her advocate for this from something she said maybe 3-4 years ago makes her look extremely out of touch. It looks like she will be the first candidate against Trump to lose the popular vote and it won't be close. This isn't a Reagan vs. Mondale defeat but it's a bad one for the Dems. Hard to see where they go from here.