-1 pedant.
You know the term 'extortionate' can be used as hyperbole, to refer to a price that's ridiculously high, right? It's a synonym for exorbitant.

That said, explain to me why AMC theaters have to charge $24/ticket while the Trylon can get by with $8 tickets?
From https://www.facebook.com/watch...
Trylon: "As a nonprofit cinema, keeping our ticket rate accessible to everyone is a priority, and we've kept our standard ticket at $8 for 15 years. In that time the cost of 35mm film rental, shipping, projection equipment and rights clearances have all risen dramatically. We hope to raise $7,000 to be used on film print booking. That way we can show more films on film while keeping our prices accessible."
Their goal is 50 asses in seats to make a showing break-even.
Maybe AMC is doing something wrong, eh?

Or maybe the problem is Hollywood, willing to pay some pretty dude $5 million to prance around and say some stuff that other people wrote, such that at the end of the day it costs $200m to make a very average film?

What's killing the film industry are the base assumptions of the film industry from top to bottom.

I'm going to confidently predict that within 2000 years, probably well under 500, we will have an alternative energy technology.

If I'm wrong, get back to me in 500y and I will happily admit my mistake.

Mass market theater prices are extortionate.
https://www.cabletv.com/entert...
Avg movie ticket price here in MN is $18 (I would have said higher, as https://www.amctheatres.com/mo... "Southdale" is a common mainstream theater and that's $22/ticket.

And then concessions - a large bucket of popcorn and large soda are another $30

OTOH you have delightful gems like Trylon - classic movies, etc, reruns, whole series like "Alfred Hitchcock films" or the Ghibli collections - https://www.trylon.org/
$8 for a seat. Concessions priced basically at what you'd buy them for in the store. Popcorn with coconut oil. Why the FUCK anyone would drop $50 to go to some shitty MCU film vs Citizen Kane at the Trylon, I don't know.

I am a cinephile, and genuinely enjoy the experience of going to see a film in a place with an audience, but I haven't been inside a massmarket theater for a decade. The only place worth the ticket price are specialty theaters like the Trylon & candidly, for a 100mile round trip that needs to be something I really want to see as I haven't been there since mid COVID.

I like it.
I would agree with 13 months of 28d, and one worldwide holiday day for new year.
I bet if you offered Trump that he could name the month he'd IMMEDIATELY insist on adding it.

I live in Minneapolis. Always have lived in MN, in the Twin Cities since 1979.
I haven't seen a single ICE guy that I'm aware of.

I walk around without a trace of anxiety, 2 miles around the lake every morning with one of my sons.

(Well, I admit I was a little anxious when the crazies started ironically blocking off streets and neighborhoods ... in defense of people who purposefully /ignored/ borders. But cops tore those down pretty quickly as they were actually breaking the law. Shrug.)

I have many coworkers from my European parent company coming to the US, as recently as early Feb, and they had absolutely no issues with immigration or border security. None.
My son works in a factory with about 200 mostly-immigrant workers. ICE apparently showed up, arrested 2 for being illegals with felony warrants in other states, and left the other 200-ish completely alone. Some of the other LEGAL immigrants were openly happy about ICE taking illegals away, since they all got here following the rules.

Downvote this all you like. I'm just reporting the reality of one of the 'hotspots' of immigration enforcement and civil conflict in the US. Europeans can decide whether they believe their media or a person who lives here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

After a fair amount of confusion and some academic arguments, DoD pushed hard to have this taken seriously.

"The Department of Defense (DoD) established the task force partly due to frustration over what DoD officials considered to be a sluggish and lackluster response by the CIA and Department of State.[39] Christopher C. Miller, who was acting defense secretary at the time, said in 2021 that "I knew CIA and Department of State were not taking this shit seriously and we wanted to shame them into it by establishing our task force."[39] Miller said that he began to consider the reports of mysterious symptoms to be a high priority in December 2020, after he conducted an interview with a person with major combat experience who detailed symptoms.[39]"

As late as 2022, CIA: "The study concluded that it was unlikely that a foreign power was responsible for the AHIs, and that the study had not yet found evidence of involvement by a state actor."

2023: Five of the seven agencies involved in generating the report concluded "the available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of US adversaries in causing the reported incidents" and that a foreign adversary's involvement was "very unlikely". One of the other agencies concluded that foreign involvement was "unlikely", and the seventh agency declined to make a finding.[127][130][129]

People seem to have trouble accepting that the universe doesn't function according to human preferences for decimalization, repetition, consistency.

Calendars, clocks are two points where we have tried to impose a rigor where there isn't one, meaning that any system is going to need kludges or compromises to function year after year.
The daylight savings time argument happens when people (reasonably, I think) question whether the costs outweigh the benefits, mainly because they haven't lived with the costs in their lives.

We can say "people before us had different needs" (or claim they were stupid, etc) the result being we can abandon the system they implemented. But of course that requires a Chesterton's Fence approach in the first place.

Nice of you to mention this, I didn't even know there was such a thing. Googling how to migrate from 'usual firefox' to ESR to genuinely refuse constant updates and meaningless chrome.
Fuck if it gets rid of the 'ai bar' I'll be giddy.
EDIT: hm, first google suggests its more challenging than I hoped.

Anyway, THANKS

Aside from the GENUINE announcements by Iran's leaders about their
- goals for nuclear weapons
- willingness to use nukes when they have them
- impending development of nuclear weapons
?

Yeah, sure, I guess this is entirely made up.
If Trump was using this to distract from Epstein, why did the US bomb iran some weeks ago, and then essentially shift forces OUT of the region to other theaters? Why not stay on-subject with Iran then?

The story as framed here is a lie, throwing Trump's name in there is pure political spin.
There are no computer 'problems'. In fact, this discussion resulted in fantastic news for importers.

This is a misrepresentation of the discussion that has been resulting since the Supremes struck down the IEEPA tariffs.

The ACE system is not really meant for processing refunds; customs refunds normally are a result of protests. The funds are transferred back to the importer ideally by ACH, and relatively recently (literally the start of Feb 2026) Customs has told importers that they have to enable that capability (by providing ACH info in ACE, so it works) but fewer than 25000 out of the 350000 or so importers have done so.

Our firm has done so, it's not hard, but the ACE system is definitely not simple to use. It always has been (like, in my experience, most government systems). ACE isn't really meant to be a user-dashboard, but more of a functional piece of internal-gov't software that now users have access to. Lots of functionality, shit UI, even shittier documentation.

Anyway, since the Supremes ruling said nothing about refunds, the determination there was passed back to the CIT (which is really the appropriate and knowledgeable venue for this). The open question was somewhat IF there were going to be refunds (we're talking about $175bn in a debt-govt), but more about how these would happen. Would each importer have to formally PROTEST each liquidated import for their refund? This would be the 'usual' way but is clearly unwieldy for the scale of this.

In their closed-door meeting with DHS/Customs Fri 6th, customs advised that ACE doesn't current have the functionality to automate the refund process but they could get it programmed in 45d.

Unlike the way this story is presented, for importers THIS IS FUCKING GREAT NEWS.
Automated refunds a) confirm we ARE getting refunds, b) mean we don't have to formally protest in our case 1600+ entries since the April tariffs. The CIT originally ruled that customs had to give us back our tariffs urgently, but as this is SUCH good news generally, they're expected to grant customs the 45d.

This isn't that the system is BROKEN, as reported.
This is about a system that wasn't ever designed to do a thing, can be amended to do a thing that will get my company back something like $10m AUTOMATICALLY and save us easily $200k in service fees for individualized protests not to say countless hours building the document trail for each protest.

This summary, in short, is tendentious-slanted bullshit. Slashdot in 2026 /shock

Source: I've been in int'l logistics for more than 35 years. I run a US logistics office for a EU multinational, we run 18 US warehouses, and have somewhere around 1000 import entries a year. We've had about 2000 entries since 1/1/25, according to my latest ACE report.

Many public spaces as well as aircraft already have general rules against disruptive behavior.

It's taken this long to infect airlines because for the longest time (and still, to some degree) they still enforced the rules: behave, or you're getting thrown off the plane.

Now, even the airlines seem afflicted by inaction. Whether it's a fear of the omnipresent lawsuit (particularly if the person being disciplined is a "victim class" you're pretty nearly guaranteed legal challenges) or people with the authority to do something are just growing tired of having to constantly exercise it and fight about the stupidest things.

The reality is that if people aren't largely self-disciplining, the vastly outnumbered authorities ultimately can't make them behave.

To this specific point (headphones) I almost entirely blame phone manufacturers for omitting headphone plugs. You used to be able to get by with $5 earbuds (hell they used to give you earbuds with the phone). Now I imagine, even though people drop $1000 for a phone, $100 for Bluetooth earbuds is still pricey.

I genuinely don't understand how this was the root assumption.

Everyone has to pay for their electricity - if I use 12,000 kwH, I pay for 12,000 kwH.
If a data center uses 12,000 mwH, why wouldn't they pay (roughly) 1000x what I pay?

Well put.

The cowardice of our only directly-democratically-elected members of government, and their deferment to an almost-imperial-level of Presidential authority has been the narrative basically throughout the entire postwar era.

Frankly, the last time Congress bothered to meaningfully & openly clash with the president was the McCarthy Hearings & Eisenhower (although you could reasonably argue Watergate, I'd submit that a) that's sort of a different thing, and b) congress was dragged into that kicking and screaming)

If there's one shining result of the Trump presidency, it might be that Congress wakes up to its constitutional duties and authority. Yes, that will result in a much-less-effective Federal government, much slower to respond, and less prone to the tides of populism. Some small-government types would see that as preferable....

Considering Ghislane's father Robert Maxwell nee Jan Abraham Ludvik (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell) was widely believed to be either an agent for or active supporter of Israel and the Mossad....I'm going to rather confidently guess the Mossad knows EXACTLY what was happening, where, when, and with whom on Mr Epstein's island.