You got that right, Putin's secret weapon is his bitch in the Oval Office. If only Ukraine had a song that would neuter that idiot.

"I want GUIs for all common tasks"

What you need is something like MacOS used to have with Commando and MPW, I see that AU/X has something similar and even called the same. You'd probably need a pipelining capability to it. As someone below mentioned, something common for you will differ for someone else.

"My feeling is that Dark Matter/Energy will go away when they discover the real explanation, but that's just me."

Brilliant!! You vote to replace the mere placeholders in our theories with something else and then declare the placeholders have gone away. Have you told anyone else about this? Or are we just privileged? Maybe you could write a paper for a physics journal and get back to us in how well it was received. Good luck!!

Well, Elmo says we can get 1 Million (or was it 1 Billion) people living on Mars by 2050 as a way to preserve humanity from the Hell he is helping to build on Earth. I'm all for it, starting with him. I vote we give him a hammer, some nails, some wood, etc., strap his ass to one of his rockets, and give him a fair sendoff. Go for it, Elmo, you know you can do it!!

Yes. Ukraine had a chance in 2022 because Putin sent a very small force assuming that he could convince Putin to agree to the peace deal where they'd stop killing Ukrainians in Donbass. And it would have worked if NATO hadn't offered to send all the money and weapons Ukraine wanted to keep the war going.

Ukraine then pushed the Russians back because the Ukrainian military outnumbered the Russian forces and suddenly they had Starlink for communications, US intelligence data to tell when where the Russians were, and all the weapons they could eat. But once they failed to push the Russians out of Ukraine it was just a matter of time for Putin to build up the available forces and ramp up weapons production. There was no way to win after that other than for NATO to send in troops, and no NATO government wants to do that.

Now either NATO will send in troops or Ukraine is going to get a much, much worse deal than they were offered in 2022 and it may not longer even exist as a viable country. Particularly if Putin takes Odessa as well and cuts rump Ukraine off from the Black Sea entirely.

I dug into the sources a bit. Apparently they were excluding white neighborhoods from checks, then somebody else was removing non-asian names before forwarding it for further investigation.

source.

Looking into the sources and tracing a bit:

source.

If they actually did this, well, that's like how the NRA forced most "may issue" states to be effectively "shall issue" for various weapon permits.

When the police can't come up with a good reason for denying the black woman's permit request when she has letters from a ex-boyfriend stalker threatening to kill her, who is due to be released from prison soon, but the white doctor living in a gated community gets it first thing, there are questions to be asked. Especially when permits for black people have a 99% reject rate while whites get them 90% of the time.

Just to be clear, I believe that part of the problem was that the city government was broke and basically in receivership. Ergo, the politicians in Flint were not actually in control of the water contracts, it was an emergency manager appointed by Governor Rick Snyder(R).

I remembered the broke part and not in control, looked up the specifics.

Basically, to cut costs, the manager stopped the practice of piping water from Detroit and started using the historically very polluted and corrosive Flint River, without adequate testing and treatment (itself actually a violation of federal law).
Because many of the homes still had lead service pipes, going from basic to acidic caused the protective oxidization on the pipes to dissolve, putting excessive lead into the water.

It eventually made national news, but by all measures, this is still a far better situation than what Tehran is facing.

Switching back to the old water source or adding more controls like running the water through a filter of crushed limestone to correct the PH fixes the issues in Flint. No such easy solution is possible for Tehran.

The U.S. was created out of the Enlightenment which rejected religion as being simply politics but with a mystical angle to fool the proles.

Nice one! Mar-a-Lago: where corruption is a sport.

Sorry, I didn't get that quite correct, they're Passive Autocatalytic Recombiners. They require no external power.

Europe does have some OTR trucking, with sleeper cabs, around the same size and usually a little smarter laid out than you'd typically find in a Freightliner, Mack or Pete. Cabovers are ubiquitous because they (sanely) regulate the length of road trains, of which the truck pulling it is part of that measurement, which means no room for a hood the size of a studio apartment hanging off the front.

Long haul trucking makes no sense. But you still do need to get that container from the rail yard to the loading dock.

I want the drugs you're having. Our rail cargo system is so broken that the only freight moving on it is not time sensitive or value. Most trains in the US? Unit trains of garbage or coal, military hardware, containers that already spent 8 weeks at sea getting here, aren't valuable and aren't needed on a deadline. The Class I railroads have done everything they can to kill off their own business for anything faster or more valuable. These same railroads have been actively closing routes to increase scarcity to keep prices high. Furthermore, their attempts at this, called Precision Scheduled Railroading, ends up stretching labor so thin and making trains so long that their own track systems can't support them, forcing entire subdivisions to only run one train at a time because the passing sidings are too short to let any other trains through when they're going. And when they stop, they block emergency services and cross traffic for miles, which, given the average size city in the US has a population of 5500, could very well Berlin Wall the city until they move.

This whole mess could have been avoided if the US nationalized the railroads under Conrail instead of just the Penn Central system.

Someone should tell literally everyone in the Mississippi River and Columbia River basins then, we're not seeing it. The worse the railroads get, the more barge traffic increases. Like, to the point where even really random seaports like the Port of Tulsa, Oklahoma is seeing steady growth.

Vans are also what the trailer pulled by a truck is called, even in the US. I should know, I drove the damn things to make ends meet during the Bush Depression.