From a legal websie: "If the lawsuit resulted in a judgment, the bankruptcy will eliminate your liability as long as the debt qualifies for discharge. But keep in mind that if the judgment is for a nondischargeable debt, bankruptcy will not get rid of it." What are nondischargeable debts? Things like criminal penalties, fines, and restitution. I think his $2.1M judgement is classified as "restitution".

IF Nintendo lets him pay it off in monthly installments his payment will be only $3k/mo for the next 60 years. Most likely outcome: he ignores Nintendo and eventually gets jailed for non-payment, letting the tax payer support him for the rest of his life. Or, he changes his name, alters his looks, never ever uses a credit card or gets any photo id and lives the life of a hermit in Idaho.

I WAS an Amazon Prime member until I started comparing Amazon's "prime" price with those of other vendors on Amazon selling the same product. The other vendor's prices plus shipping were very close or equal to Amazon's "prime" price with "free" shipping. So, Amazon's Prime's $120/yr membership charge isn't worth it. (And I don't watch their movies)

I can also get "free" shipping by going through the checkout process (not the automatic checkout). Somewhere along the way I get the opportunity to choose a delivery date. Next day always includes an expensive charge for shipping, but usually one of the options is for shipping free on a specific day, a week or so in the future. I use that when I shop Amazon, which I do with less and less frequency these days.

Competition indeed! Spectrum gradually raised my 20Mbi connection price to $40/mo by repeatedly using the "your promotion has expired" scam. With no competition my choice was $60/m for a 40Mbi connection. Then, within the space of two months, Jan and Feb, they sent me TWO scam letters. The first said my new price would be $75/m for 40Mbi and the second said my price would be $120/m for 40Mbi. Spectrum was the only game in town but a new optical fiber company was laying glass and I anticipated they'd get to my neighborhood by late fall. After negotiating with the Spectrum salesperson he gave me a one year "promotional price" of $70/mo for 60Mbi.

When the fiber optic company hooked me up my options were 1GBi for $90/mo or 300 Mbi for $65/mo. Both asymmetrical with

IF I hook a cat6 cable from the cable modem to my eth0 port I can get about 800Gbi, but, I don't want a cable stretching across the living room floor or hanging from the wall or ceiling. Besides, most websites can't feed at 500Mbi, and many throttle to much less per connection.

It doesn't matter that the "guns" are no longer smoking. What mattered was that they were fired at the opposition at the time the opposition had a chance.

DR DOBBS Journal had an article about Win3.1 installing on top of DR DOS producing an "error" msg and then aborting the install. DR DOBBS tech staff replaced the part of the code with checked for DR DOS with NOP's and then did the install of Win3 on top of DR DOS without problems. Win3.1 ran fine on DR DOS, but too many people saw the "error" msg and replaced DR DOS with MS DOS and then installed Win3. DR DOBBS revealing Microsoft's dirty trick didn't abate the decline of DR DOS.

Do you remember this internal mantra at Microsoft? "MS DOS isn't done until Lotus Notes won't run." Just one of MANY dirty tricks by Gates and Microsoft.

Mother nature already takes care of increasing CO2. She uses TREES and other green plants. You do remember the photosynthesis cycle, don't you? The green plants breath in our CO2, add water and sunlight, and breathe out O2, which we need to breathe in to stay alive, and sugar, which we eat for energy.

Dr Alfred Bartlett, retired CU prof, stated that modern farming is nothing more than using land to convert OIL into food. You reduce or stop oil production and millions of people will starve, beginning with the "most vulnerable" and ending with YOU.

Like any chemical mixture, there are equilibrium constants. Material flows into a system and material flows out. The ratio of inflow and outflow is controlled by beginning values and half-life constants. The half-life of Carbon in the atmosphere has been known and measured for decades. Carbon12 has a half life of 4.5 years and C14 has a half life of 16.5 years. Claiming that CO2 remains in the atmosphere is ludicrous because there is no way to distinguish the CO2 that Nature generates from the CO2 that man generates, but the Bern model creates four bins and arbitrarily limits "man-made" CO2 from escaping three of the four bins. IF you change the data you can make it fit any model, and that is what the AGW folks are doing.

"I'd rather have questions that can't be answered and answers that can't be questioned" - Feynman

IOW, "Minority Report".

Punishment before a crime is ever committed, determined by an "algorithm" which codifies the bias of its creators. In China it is called the "Social Credit Score". You can't even get toilet paper at a public restroom of the facial ID algorithm identifies you as a person with a low score. Imagine walking home with a dirty butt, unable to even ride a bus or hire a taxi. Those with low scores soon learn to carry their own roll of TP and a canteen of water.

Your post is your opinion, which is no more nor less than what the OP's is. So, you too are a conspiracy theorist. See how easy that is.

In 1959, fresh out of high school, I got my first job loading boxes containing suitcases onto railway cars at Schwayder Bro's on South Broadway. The owner, Jesse Schwayder, had an office right next to the production floor. His office door was always open and you could walk in at any time to ask questions, makes suggestions or complain about something. Every Christmas he would take a certain percentage of the profits and distribute them to the employees, the amount being bases on the years of service. It generally amounted to a month's salary if business was good, two weeks if not.

The day shift back then usually ended about 5 or 5:30PM. About 3:30PM one summer day I saw a bunch of employees of Gates Rubber Co, which was on the West side of Broadway, opposite of Schwayder's, cross Broadway carrying signs. On the signs were claims like "Schwayder's Unfair to workers", etc... They began marching outside Schwayder's front entrance and along the Broadway side. I'd never heard anyone complain about pay or working conditions, but the marchers were making many such claims. This went on for a couple months. Some recent hires began claiming and complaining about various things, always with the solution that a Union would treat workers better. They stirred up such fuss that after about a year an election was held. The union was defeated. Then the marchers consisted of Gates employees and fired or laid off Schwayder employees.

After several elections the union was voted in. One could no longer walk into Jesse's office and talk. Employees had to take their complaints to the shop steward of the section they were in. The stewards, if they liked your request, would take it to the top union rep. If he liked it then he'd go see Jesse, otherwise you were talking to the wall. Christmas bonuses stopped. Employees were docked 2% of their annual wages as union dues IF they were union members. Not everyone joined the union. However, if you were not in the union you could NOT go to Jesse nor to a shop steward. You couldn't represent yourself and you had no representation. During economic slow periods anyone could be laid off except shop stewards or the top union rep. They had guaranteed jobs.

The union pushed for a closed shop. They eventually got it. First, those not in the union found their job performance criticized. Sound familiar? They were laid off or fired, not by Jesse, but by the shop stewards. Eventually, only union workers worked at Schwayders. It was a closed shop and voted itself to remain so. You can vote a union in but you can't vote it out. That, too, is familiar political outcome. Suitcase quality suffered, which affected sales, which affected revenue, which affected employment conditions. Getting too old to fight all the time, Jesse sold Schwayder's in 1971 and walked away. It was sold 5 times in the twenty years before it filed for bankruptcy in 2009.

Ya. That's why he put the last of his PayPal sales money into the forth and final attempt, if it failed, to lauch Falcon. It didn't fail and the rest is great history. The rocket companies who love money use the "cost plus" system of charging NASA for their one-off rockets. That led to the $500M per launch costs. Musk ate their lunch by getting launch costs down to $60 each with reusable boosters which SpaceX can build for $26M each. Now, with Startship, ALL of the rocket is reusable and made with inexpensive stainless steel, not some expensive esoteric spun carbon fiber stuff. Musk claims its operation launch costs will be around $2M per launch.

Meanwhile, in other news Blue Origins replicated its 1st launch for the 15th time yesterday, which added the novelty of having pseudo customers walk into the capsule, set on its seats, and then walk back out before the actual launch. Which, in reality, made the 15th launch essentially identical to the previous 14. The pseudo customers high fived each other for their successful capsule walk.

That extremely low level of innovations is probably why SpaceX won the Lunar Lander contract over Blue Origin.

acting on behalf of the government. Once could even consider CNN and such as propaganda arms of the DNC. The Atlantic Monthly had an article describing China's use of the software Google wrote for them which created their "Social Credit System". We are almost at that condition here in America.

https://www.theatlantic.com/in...

The social websites in this country have been in a long campaign to silence opinions that differ from the narrative they allow. If your opinion promotes the Constitution and the Bill of Rights then you get censored. The methodology is simple. If your opinion is in praise of socialism or Marxism or the politicians which push them then it is allowed. Unapproved opinions are labeled "hate speech" or "racists". In fact, according the the Marxists, being White is being a racists. It has become so ludicrous that even inanimate objects are called racists. With buildings, cars and police cars burning and police and people being shot and murdered, the city riots by the BLM and Antifa rioters are called "mostly peaceful". When the capital guards open the gates and allow some people into the capital and some fool wearing a buffalo hat with horns acts like an idiot and is allowed to steal some stuff the media calls it the "worst riot in our history". Only one person died as a result of the "riot" in DC, an unarmed ex female soldier, shot by a overzealous guard. Fences went up and Nat Guard was deployed to protect our politicians from dangers which never materialized. Meanwhile, fences went up in the center of several cities, manned by armed AntiFa "guards", who have killed more than one person, and the city fathers defund the police and wonder why crimes of violence increase several fold and citizens rush to buy guns to protect themselves, an act which Biden wants to outlaw.

IF you have ever owned your own business you'd know why. It's simple. When the local, state and federal governments raise business taxes a prudent business owner will raise the price of their products proportionally. The equation is as follows:

Profits = Revenue - costs -payroll - taxes

If the business can't create profits >= 10% then the owner would be wiser to invest in the stock market, where average gains over the last 55 years have been around 10% per annum. The market limits to how high the business can raise the prices on its goods or services. That's called competition. IF the market won't let the business raise prices high enough to generate at least a 10% return on the owner's investment then the business has to improve its efficiency or it is going broke and the employees will be let go.

So, it is a myth that business pay taxes. They merely act as tax collectors for the government. When the gov raises taxes on businesses the businesses raise their prices and their customers pay for the tax increases which are reflected in the increased prices of the businesses products a/o services.

https://earth.stanford.edu/news/covid-lockdown-causes-record-drop-carbon-emissions-2020#gs.ysrgrc

"A drop of almost two and a half billion tons of CO2 this year is like taking 500 million cars off the world’s roads for the year. Good things are happening as more states and countries make ambitious climate commitments and real progress." said Jackson, a professor of Earth system science in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences*

7% Lower than in 2019. China has been lagging behind in CO2 production but they'll make it up this year by building over 70 Coal powered generating plants.

" From the low point, in 2006, when it imported 60% of its oil [from the Middle East], the US became an oil powerhouse – eclipsing both Saudi Arabia and Russia – and by the end of 2015, was the world’s largest producer of natural gas."

Hydrolic fracking was combined with horizontal drilling to make the US an energy exporter. Horizontal drilling had two main features: 1) a single well head could extract oil and gas from all directions for a distance of 2 miles or more, which is equivalent to a section of land 3.5 miles on a side, or about 12 sq miles, and: 2) it could extract oil and gas from formations that were too narrow vertically for conventional drilling methods.

The new technology also made it easy to open retired well heads and extract oil and gas that was left behind by the old drilling methods. The only fly in the ointment was that in some political jurisdictions laws were passed which required that retired well be filled with concrete, making the process of re-drilling them too expensive. Biden wants to use that fly, and his EO for halting oil and natural gas leases on public lands and waters, to make America permanently dependent on foreign sources for our oil.

Dr. Alfred Bartlett wrote that "Modern farming is nothing more than a way of using land to convert OIL into food. It takes 7 times more energy to bring a slice of bread to our table than we get when we eat it."

Agriculture in America REQUIRES a fuel with a HIGH energy density in order to plow, sow, treat, water and harvest crops, transport them to producers of food stuffs which then transport the final products to stores around the country and the world. Only a diesel (or turbine) engine has that density and efficiency. There does NOT exist an electric motor that can match the diesel engine for 24/7/365 uptime and power.

Nor is there enough Lithium in the world to convert all of our farm equipment to battery power even if such a motor existed. To make matters worse, the prime sources of Lithium are Brazil and China.

While projections of how long coal and oil will last have been pessimistic, we will eventually run out of them. US oil production did peak in 1970, as Dr Hubbard predicted, but Hubbard had no way of knowing that technical developments would make his prediction meaningless. Meanwhile, covering the land with wind turbines and solar farms doesn't work well for us when the wind doesn't blow and the Sun doesn't shine. The recent debacle in Texas showed the storage of energy developed by wind and solar was woefully inadequate, if not financially impracticable. After all, wind turbines and solar collectors are still made in plants energized by fossil fuels, and their life times are less than that of a coal or gas fired power plant.

Also, if your idea of "helping the planet" is to starve millions of its inhabitants by switching farming to wind and solar then you should take a look at your own values, or demonstrate your dedication by offing yourself to "save the planet".

https://swprs.org/face-masks-e...

Masks work, many people and experts say. Which kind of masks work? The ones made out of ordinary cotton cloth, which one sees a LOT of people wearing? Bandanas? Scarfs? The Chinese KN95 masks, half of which failed filtration testing? Any mask? None of them? Few people who say "Masks work!" and shout down "deniers" qualify their claims. Many become "Karens" or "Kens", shouting insanely and even attacking those who do not agree with them.

Consider the mask mandates. Thirty five states imposed them, but the rest did not. The infection curves, based on PCR tests using inflated Ct values > 35, show 3 peaks and supposedly a 4th peak recently appearing, AFTER the media predicted it. The Johns-Hopkins website

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/da...

shows the curves of all 50 states. The x-axis for all states is the same but the y-axis units are not the same magnitude. So, one graph with the same peak height as another may represent 10 times more infections than the other. However, masks mandates have been imposed when the curves were flat, when they were rising, at the peaks, and when they were falling. If the masks worked then one could expect to see a decline in new cases two weeks, more or less, following the imposition of the mandate. Such declines are not noticeable in any state curve, regardless of where on the curve they were imposed. At the lease one would hope that the curves for states with mask mandates looked better than those without mandates. Such is not the case. For larger graphs showing daily infection rates one can access state maps through

https://www.worldometers.info/...

However, the masks, social distancing and lock downs did flatten the economy and impoverished an untold number of Americans. The fallout from that flatting will be felt for years.

IF you go to worldometers also check the "Daily New Deaths", which is below 10 for many states, while "Daily New Cases" can be thousands or tens of thousands.

In March of 2020 Dr Fauci said masks do not work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Dr. Fauci said masks may stop the occasional droplet but would have no effect on particles the size of viruses. That's because the best masks, N95, filter only 95% of particulate matter 2.5 microns or greater in diameter. A Covid virus particle is 0.1 microns. Miraculously, according to current lore, as the particles get smaller the N95 gets more efficient.

On April 3, 2020, the CDC recommended the wearing of masks. A month later the CDC wrote in a paper, published in May of 2020, a study from RCT papers about masks written between 1946 and July of 2018, that masks did not work : https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/arti...

Some experts, especially those who are retired and whose income or livelihood cannot be threatened by media attacks, doxing or feckless bosses, write more freely: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/new...

Kansas deliberately attempted to deceive its citizens while trying to intimidate all its counties into imposing mask mandates: https://sentinelksmo.org/more-...

Kary Mullis said this about Ct values, with Cycle Thresholds above 35 one can find anything in anybody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...