This is so not true. China is anything but a reliable partner. In the latter part of the previous decade, the Chinese government cracked down on the rapidly rising Chinese FinTech industry because a small number of CEOs in the industry, including Jack Ma, said things they didn't like. You know how you basically don't hear anything from Jack Ma anymore and how he is retired from Alibaba? This is why. The government clapped down that industry hard. The companies involved have never really recovered from it, with their stock prices stagnating. It's because investors realized that at any time, the Chinese government can and will intervene in the stock market to make a point about how in charge they are. A few years ago the government had to say publicly that they are totally not going to interfere in businesses again, please come back noble investors. All I can say is a really smart man said last year that investing in communism is a bad idea.

I'm a big sci fi fan in general. I am much less critical of just about anything I watch than many/most people. Having said that, I watched all of Alien: Earth and I did not love it. Some of the actors were really good, but there were too many episodes and overall it just wasn't all that interesting to me. But I'm not surprised at all that Disney renewed it and threw money at the creator because they really don't know what they are doing in running that company any more. It is possible that for whatever reason it got a crap ton of views. And we've seen in the past that some Disney series get a crap ton of views even though nobody likes them. The Acolyte became their 2nd most watched series of 2024 once they canceled it and nobody liked that show. Percy Jackson and the Olympians gets a ton of views, but I honestly don't know anybody who watches that. Maybe it's aimed at tweens. Marvel keeps giving us shows nobody asked for with fringe comic book characters like Iron Heart and the upcoming Wonder Man. So it makes perfect sense that they would throw a ton of money at a streaming series that just wasn't all that good and bring it back for more of the same. I'm really not sure I'm going to come back for season 2. I'm starting to get really tired of feeling like I have to watch something that isn't actually very good just because it's in a genre I like.

So fake it until they give you a $1T pay package.

They did fake it. The "robot" was a guy in a robot suit, unfortunately, the guy in the robot suit got completely shitfaced.

US ciitizen here. That's important to what I have to say. While this all sounds great, you clearly don't know that many times the US government says they will accept something as proof of ID but in reality they won't accept it, even though their own website says they will. And there's nothing in what you quoted that guarantees that such alternate ID process can be done in time to actually make your flight.

About 20 years ago, I had to fill out a government form and I was required to show 2 proofs of who I was. Their own website said that they would accept a birth certificate as proof. I had it! Not only did I have a birth certificate, for another reason I had actually gotten it certified by my birth state and the US Secretary of State. You'd think having Colin Powell certify it would be good enough, right? Nope. They refused to accept it with no explanation. Talked to a friend who had done the same thing recently and he used copy of his passport as proof of ID, which they accepted. So I sent them a copy of my passport's main pages and I was good to go. So good luck with that whole thing of TSA having "other" ways to identify you.

Honestly the issue with the story is Ken Paxton, he literally has negative credibility. I know virtually nothing about Roblox or this case, but if Paxton is the first AG to pursue it my automatic assumption is he's prosecuting them because they either failed to give him a bribe or he thought they were helping Democrats register to vote or something.

And you can't post that if you understand nuance.

I agree it was a terrible terrible decision, I hated it at the time and I believe it's been responsible for millions of deaths, but I think the motive wasn't as bad as you suspect.

Basically, the Middle East outside of Israel was a bunch of dictatorships, some theocratic, some military, and many awkwardly allied to the US, but none of the Arab nations had a functioning liberal Democracy.

The neocons believed that they could go in, overthrow the dictator, and a functioning Democracy would pop up in it's place and they'd have a grateful ally, one whom they didn't need to look away as they went around murdering dissidents.

The initial returns on Afghanistan seemed to support the idea is would work, the Taliban melted away from the major urban centres and there was a government in its place.

WMDs and terrorists were both an excuse to go in and try this grand experiment in one of the few friendless dictatorships in the Middle East (the other being Iran, which they were planning, but was a much tougher target).

The problem of course was arrogance, they failed to understand the country they were attempting to launch a revolution in, and they failed to realize the kind of situation you needed for a Democracy to take place.

I think if they just stayed focused on Afghanistan, and basically ruled them by edict for a decade while they nurtured local political actors, then they might have had a shot.

But instead, it was an incompetent administration attempting to implement an extraordinarily ambitious and difficult plan.

This is Vancouver, so I don't think they're too concerned about the winter.

Because the extremely polarizing Elon Musk bought Twitter with the intention of making it a having for the far right.

Perhaps the site survives is politics and meddling, but I don't think we've ever seen a major social media platform this vulnerable since MySpace.

We year about it because people are rightfully interested.

The percentage of adults who report taking this class of medicine specifically for weight loss has increased to 12.4%, compared with 5.8% in February 2024 when Gallup first measured it. Usage among women (15.2%) continues to outpace men (9.7%), but both groups have more than doubled their use in the past year.

It's crazy that more than 10% of Americans are taking these drugs. Especially since it sounds like a lot of insurance plans don't cover it (which actually seems surprising considering how much obesity related conditions must cost in healthcare).

I don't know these people and I'm not going to dive into their defunct marriage. But I can tell you the following.

Tracking minor children and making them account for their screen time isn't necessarily a bad thing. And I can promise you that if the mother was doing this and her ex-husband said that this was "evil" she would arguing that it wasn't.

Women will sometimes do anything to get back at their ex when relationships end. Early in my career, a lady in what I will call a sister office (her manager and my manager had the same manager) had a daughter who got divorced. The daughter and her ex-husband had 2 daughters in the marriage. The lady's daughter got the kids on a custodial visit (the ex-husband actually had custody) and killed them both and then herself just to get back at the ex-husband. So I'm not really moved by some ex-wife crying how unfair her ex-husband is.

Ignoring the whole fact that we don't even know how they set up these bots to trade, it looks pretty damn random.

I'm not kidding about this. I didn't see your subject but I saw what you posted and I thought that might be what Animal Farm looked like in Welsh.

Even if it's higher, it's only possible for someone who is single, or a single earner family.

The only way to do that at scale is to remove half the population (presumably women) from the workforce.