I'd be surprised if they did. Air conditioning isn't much of a thing in northern Europe, the climate is mild enough that it isn't generally necessary.

Standards.

It takes a special kind of "business genius" to lose money on both casinos and New York City real estate, that's for sure. I grew up in NYC and knew who he was when I was a child, and I was shocked during the primaries in 2016 that people were actually voting for him based on the premise that he was some kind of financial savant.

With that said, if you actually read the article you're posting, it isn't as simple as you make it out to be. The article claims that, at the time the statement “Had Trump done nothing but invest the money his father gave him in an index fund that tracks the Standard & Poor’s 500, he would be worth $1.96 billion today” was made by the New York Times in 2018, his net worth was actually estimated at $3.1B--in other words, not only had he outperformed the S&P, he had done so significantly.

It was not until 2021 that the index fund returns would have exceeded his net worth, and the chart makes it pretty clear that the reason is that he has not recovered from the COVID economy (and, presumably, it reflects the costs of lawsuits etc).

If "the damage is so great that governments will be able to provide bailouts" then this suggests that whatever "ism" you choose to mention is going to be equally fucked, here. So why are the alarm bells ringing for capitalism in particular? Is socialism going to somehow magically solve this problem?

Walt wasn't even born until 15 years after the Berne convention set a minimum term of 50 years. The Sonny Bono Act in the US came five years after the EU extended copyright to Life of the author + 70 years.

I'm not saying the Mouse isn't an enthusiastic supporter of extending copyright terms and didn't lobby for the Sonny Bono Act, but to place the blame for how fucked up modern copyright is solely at the feet of Disney is just not accurate.

I've been posting here with this account and this account only for two and a half decades. I don't have alts, never have, and never will.

What part of "the county election commissions are responsible for polling locations and equipment" are you having difficulty understanding? Don't bother responding, I've got to agree with the guy above in that you're just a troll.

They are indeed not, and I never claimed they were. They do, however, work directly for the people who decide where the voting machines go, who are either elected or appointed officials of the county in question. Not some nebulous "higher up" that you keep referring to.

I've disagreed with the republicans on numerous issues for decades. The last republican presidential candidate I voted for was GWB in 2000 when he ran for his first term. Plenty of them are batshit crazy, and the only republicans I voted for last year weren't incumbents. That doesn't make you any less wrong about your bullshit.

I have seen you post a lot of crazy shit over the years, but the above takes the cake.

Again, the stuff you are complaining about is controlled by the county election commissions. There is no "higher up" that is limiting access to machines or deciding how many polling locations are in the district. This is, again, decided by the county election commissions--so if you find "entire cities with 1 polling location" then you need look no further than the color on the map in those precincts to determine whose fault that is. Blue areas with long lines because no polling locations and not enough machines? Then it's blue politicians who made that happen.

The date of enactment is set to January 1st, 2031, so even if it passed this bill is meaningless for more than half a decade.

It's interesting that, in the US, the actual mechanism of voting is controlled not by the federal or state governments, but by county election commissions. So "left leaning" districts with long lines are typically self inflicted--they are the cause of and have the power to resolve these issues, the problems are not (usually) imposed by evil republicans lurking in the shadows. This is like screaming about the butterfly ballot from 2000 when it was designed by a democrat-controlled election committee.

Here in deep red semi-rural east Tennessee, the longest I've ever waited to vote was about 20 minutes (in 2024, and, oddly enough, during early voting). Our county has electronic voting machines that are fast and easy to use, and they are also secure (the machine prints a paper audit trail that is displayed behind glass to the voter so they can approve/reject before tallying their vote). We get preliminary counts almost immediately and a fully auditable paper record to verify there were no shenanigans.

Darth Cheeto doesn't have to do anything here. The normal operations of a bankruptcy court are already enough to make drastic changes to the obligations of the estate.

That's simply not true. When this goes to the bankruptcy court, the court can (and will) remove contractual obligations from the estate.

IIRC, the interests of the mormons in genealogy is so they can find family members and baptize them post mortem (IIRC, the premise is that dead you will have the opportunity to accept this and join them in the afterlife, or refuse it and go back to nothingness). I don't believe they have any purpose further than this, which makes the above a minor concern at best.

I said "pretty much" forced the publishers to sue. Shall I restate that to "they invited the publishers to sue?"

No, obviously not, but there was plenty of stuff on the Archive that was less than your utopic five year threshold that they were lending out via format shifting on the premise that they had a physical copy that corresponded to the electronic copy they were lending out for a limited time, protected by DRM. It was a reasonable position for them to hold--the Supreme Court held in Betamax that time shifting was fair use, and format shifting is a necessary component of time shifting (in the contemporary of the decision, the format would shift from OTA -> magnetic tape).

The publishers did not sue because the possible downsides of a loss (format shifting protected by binding precedent) far outweighed the potential upside of a win (preventing a library from lending out a relatively small quantity of books to a relatively small quantity of readers). However, when the Archive unilaterally simply decided copyright law was null and void, and they would lend out their collection regardless of the number of copies they possessed, they "invited the publishers to sue them" with a set of facts that could not have been better for the publishers if they had invented the scenario themselves.

The (entirely predictable, from filing of suit to eventual decision) results of their colossal idiocy are absolutely, 100%, the fault of the Archive. They have set back the idea of legal protections for format shifting to a possibly unrecoverable extent, and did so by creating the exact handwringing scenario the publishers always predicted would come to pass. Fuck those guys for the damage they did, and fuck them even harder for making surprised Pikachu face when the (entirely predictable, from filing of suit to eventual decision) consequences came.

The idiots at the Archive invited this outcome by saying "copyright is no longer a thing because Covid" which pretty much forced the publishers to sue, and to do so with a set of facts that was almost tailor made for their purposes to kill format shifting.

This is seven years old and relates to Alexa rather than Siri, but damn if it doesn't capture just how awful these things are.