Please tell me that a lower circuit court can do this, and that we’re not depending on the SCOTUS to pull this off.

What, visit a website, read it, then comprehend it? What, like a book?! May as well ask them to make a phone call.

Yup. Consider the role of NORAD and the missile defense shield. USA is not only a poorly run meth lab, but it also provides armed security for the whole building.

As far as I can tell, the contingency plan is to continue pushing places like Dubai as a tourist destination and business hub. And, honestly, as long as that place continues to function as a major regional air-traffic hub, that might actually work.

Following the path of other regimes around the world, the USA builds their own “great firewall”, segmenting most people here away from the global internet. At around the same time, personal VPNs become explicitly illegal. We might also see the government seize control of at least one certificate registrar, if they don’t fire up their own, thereby “owning” TLS online.

On the upside, there’s a chance we will see more grass-roots efforts to reboot a lot of institutions that were co-opted by the rich. You’re just never going to hear about that through conventional channels. For instance: local newspapers with real journalism behind them. Or more small businesses with the intent to last, rather than sell. It’s possible that more of those things will be co-ops, union shops, or even Mondragon inspired. Either way, there’s a path forward for more community, real communication, and eventual prosperity, provided folks keep their heads and take things offline where necessary.

Once you’ve got that kind of money, I’m sure you have millions squirreled away here and there.

That’s kind of right. He likely has liquid funds stuffed away in all kinds of places, possibly in different currencies on different continents. The only way to put someone like this in the poorhouse is to bankrupt every single one of his investments, while simultaneously freezing all his funds internationally.

From a finance perspective, a billionaire is a few orders of magnitude beyond “escape velocity” from ever being poor. I think most of us would need a few tens-of-millions USD in cash to even consider achieving such a thing.

Another way to look at it is that the billions in “net worth” he has accumulated are just ablative armor for real spendable wealth. Consider the move he made with Twitter: the objective was controlling the platform and discourse on it, full stop. Losing tens of billions didn’t matter - it wasn’t real money in the first place (mostly stock) and wasn’t spendable in the conventional sense. DOGE is a similar play in that the kinds of unfair advantages being gained are worth at least what he’s losing.

The fact that Ask Jeeves isn’t an AI-only search engine is just beyond me. It was laughable that someone thought to personify a search engine 25 years ago, but now is pretty much the right time for that.

More than zero, which is too many for my taste.

Membrane keyboards are really the worst. I completely understand wanting to cost-cut to get units into schools and into the hands of kids, but that’s too much. It’s like someone saw a speak-and-spell and said “that’s the ticket.”

The 2600 depicted in the article thumbnail, was absolutely a beauty in its native environment of the late 1970’s:

It’s a needle in a haystack, but that’s a really valuable needle. It might actually be worth it.

Thank you. I’m wishing the same for myself and my fellow not-pants-on-head-crazy people in this madhouse.

Yours,

• Your downstairs, and trapped in a failed meth-lab of a country, neighbor

Here’s my resignation.

Either it’s your fault, it’s going to be your fault, or you’re cleaning this up. Bottom line: there’s a damn-near lethal amount of incompetence in the building and it’s time to part ways.

Same. I’ve got a real bad feeling about this.

Good point.

Now that you mention it, eggs fit the right conditions for this kind of scheme. They’re experiencing an abnormal spike in value, are highly perishable (somewhat inelastic demand), and probably are stored under low security since they were (recently) cheap. Just the right commodity for arbitrage before everyone involved wises up or things normalize.

I’m gonna hazard a guess that, while local sandwich shops have quality, speed, and razor-thin margins down to an artform, a major fast food franchise is better suited to the task. The major reason being: logistics. A country-wide chain is probably at or close to the scale needed to qualify as a military contractor in this capacity. Nevermind the quality of the food, we’re talking about the ability to move a stupendous amount of calories around. Assuming the photo is of a mobile kitchen, well, that would be the easiest part of all this.

Meanwhile, something familiar from home is bound to be a boost to morale.

People don’t realize what constraints props departments are under, or for that matter, how little it takes to impress a camera.

IMO, everyone should binge-watch Adam Savage’s YT channel before putting down serious money on a movie prop. A shocking amount of this stuff is basically made to survive the production time-frame, and little else.

Also: congrats with that brief brush with stardom. That’s hilarious. Next time, you should seriously lead with “I threw up on Matthew Broderick once.”

WASHINGTON, Feb 4 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said the U.S. would take over the war-ravaged Gaza Strip and develop it economically

The scope of this statement is a shock, but the motivation that led to it, isn’t. That said, I hate everything about this.

I’m not the first to bring this up, but it bears repeating. This is colonialism, plain and simple. That, in turn, is an outcome of unchecked capitalism. Practiced ideologically (i.e. as the guiding light in one’s life), it holds up “exploitation at all costs” as a virtue. Second to that is “give your competition no quarter.” Combined, that explains the current state of affairs.

We all may be used to thinking of colonialism as some thing that ended on one more more independence days in the last 300 years or so. In reality, the engines of commerce and industry that made that happen kept right on running. Since nation-state-sized real-estate deals like this don’t come along very often anymore, these animals are quick to react and pounce before someone else figures out how to exploit the situation.

As an aside: the attitudes and values that enabled things like the US westward expansion, slavery, classism, eradication of indigenous peoples, environmental destruction in the pursuit of minerals, pollution and litter from energy extraction, etc., are still alive and well in the population. Being this kind of evil is insanely profitable under the right conditions, which confers an outsized advantage to reproduction and social influence. Which is to say that it’s not the ideology of capitalism that propels these values to stay with us, but rather the other way around. It’s as though those colonists with exploitation in their hearts are still very much with us, and that’s something to keep an eye on.

I dumped that into ChatGPT to figure out what that would mean:

“Gold-progressing”: If “oro-” means gold, then “orogressive” could describe something advancing toward wealth, golden standards, or prosperity.

“Mountain-moving” or “Mountain-progressing”: If we go with the geological meaning, “orogressive” could mean progressing through or overcoming mountains—maybe symbolizing overcoming big challenges.

“Speech-advancing”: If “oro-” is tied to oral communication, “orogressive” might mean someone who is progressive in speech, rhetoric, or persuasion.

Honestly, all of those are ironically far more aspirational than “progressive”. I give it 4/5 stars for your newly-minted neologism.

Not sure where you’re from, but we have some problems that stand in the way of coordinating any kind of resistance. At least, not proactively.

In short: we have no living memory of domestic war, famine, epidemic, or wholesale financial hardship lasting longer than a few years. We’ve had tastes of those things, but they always effect people disproportionately, usually along class lines. So being proactive by taking up arms, or preparing for economic catastrophe, is literally unthinkable for most.

Meanwhile, the usual kind of political corruption that we’re accustomed to just came to an end, and is changing shape before our very eyes. Nobody knows what to do with that, yet.