Agreed. Can we have this article taken off the internet? I don’t want it accessible from any of my connections.

Not entirely surprising I guess, but still a sad one. Somehow stayed just a touch under the radar despite some of the most iconic roles of the 80s and 90s.

”hope that our relationship will only grow stronger in the coming years”

This hits different given the rhetoric of her husband and his (nominal) boss.

Can’t be fiftieth in education if no one does the rankings!

Doesn’t really matter, as long as you add the sugar while the liquid is hot enough to go into supersaturated solution.

Then chill and add ice.

So, good for you, but the particular dynamics of being a colonial country that had a massive portion of its economy based on race-based slavery has resulted in an approach to diversity that has much deeper roots and has been wrestling with hard issues for much longer than Germany has, and Germany’s own record with dealing with identifiable minorities in the last hundred years has, shall we say, not always been great.

Many European countries are only now hitting levels of diversity America had fifty years ago, and America has been made of statistically significant communities with distinctive origins for hundreds of years, and this in a colonizing country where there is no historically continuous monoculture. Historically, people tend to become dicks to the “Other” among them when faced with hardship, and much of American history reflects that sort of thing, but also its aftermath and attempts to heal.

Diverse and defiantly distinctive communities formed and persisted because that was how people got by and found support and could make their way, admittedly often because opportunities to assimilate, into whatever soup of dimly remembered pan-European customs that passes for a privileged culture here, were intentionally blocked. Yet even if the reasons for them are shameful, they are real and important, and the American dialogue on race simply cannot be color-blind even when well-meaning. Instead, it has to be a dance, where people of goodwill celebrate both differences and similarities and do not set groups above one another but also do not pretend they don’t exist.

I wish more Americans would understand that our approach rarely translates well, and for fuck’s sake I wish we had fewer people who were stuck in the bad old days where reconciliation and healing were very much not priorities. That said, I also wish that people from countries with a very different cultural and historical experience would not assume that their countries have shit figured out, when a lot of it simply boils down to “we don’t have many people with darker skin shades here.”

I mean, it’s definitely certainly 100% true that when Russia breaks the ceasefire it will be Zelenskyy’s fault, personally, so the US will have no choice.

It’s true. Agent Orange and Couchfucker told me so.

I mean, people will still trade with the US, but no exporter is going to eat those tariffs out of the goodness of their heart or fear of the Orange Menace, so prices in the US will go up, likely a bit more than the amount of the tariffs as suddenly volumes are lower and administrative overhead is higher. Then the US economy slows in a way that will not rebound quickly, and investment in the US becomes much less attractive due to low customer buying power and the inability to move goods freely. All of this of course reduces the amount actually collected in tariffs. Reduced economic activity may ultimately have positive knock-on effects for many, but the direct economic impact worldwide, distributed, will definitely be negative.

I don’t see a single way this is good for anyone, aside from those who can directly benefit from access to the levers of power and/or just want to watch the country burn (or at a minimum, smolder).

Yeah, for the first several years of this motherboard and CPU, I ran it with the integrated graphics. Vega APUs were the new budget gaming hotness for a little while. :-) God, I’m old.

I’ll keep an eye out for good deals, and see what I can put together. Sounds like this is at least a non-crazy budget for what I’m after. Thanks!

Off the top of your head (because otherwise I’m happy to do my own research) would the Ryzen 5 5500 be worth the small premium over a 4500?

I have no hope for USA anymore. It’s gone steadily from bad to worse, and it seems like Americans never learn, ans especially like the Democrats never learn. Because they’ve done absolutely NOTHING to strengthen checks and balances or to strengthen democracy in USA.

This is a fair criticism, and is looking like a much bigger mistake than it seemed initially, and I think it’s telling the one single thing Obama spent the political capital on to get properly enshrined into statue is the one bit of his legacy that Trump is having the hardest time undoing. Constitutionally, we have fucked ourselves by thinking we could run the largest economy in the world on the legal equivalent of a “plan of a plan,” worshipping said high-level outline like it was holy writ, and then making surprise-pikachu face when a bad actor who’s not concerned about long-term stability starts shoving dynamite into its many cracks (pardon the mixed metaphor).

I hope you’re wrong, but I am not confident enough that you are to argue the point.

Yup. Whoever is next, and hopefully that will be in January 2029 if not earlier, is not going to have anything like the same influence that previous presidents have had. They will be able to deescalate short-term issues and generally provide a lull in the storm, but Trump has exposed the fragility of US power, and his base proves that America is an unreliable partner, so getting anything significant done that might cross administrations is going to be so much harder. Even if the next president is not insane and is without any above-average level of evil (neither is guaranteed), then that only helps temporarily. Hell, even if there’s some sea change in the electorate that makes democratic allies more optimistic, recovering from Trump 2 is going to mean the US looks inward for a time and there will be, if not a power vacuum, a serious low-pressure system that draws in disturbances.

Now, I’m not sad about the decline of American hegemony per se, but this is very much a “not like this” moment, and a slower unwinding would be better for stability. Our best case scenario here is that our allies understand the conflict inherent in the American ethos and work with us where practicable but also pursue the “strategic independence” we’ve been hearing about. I hope it’s Europe that steps up and reasserts itself, because barring a very unlikely leveling of the international order, your other options are China bulldozing the world for the financial benefit of the party, or Putin throwing bodies (both at enemies and out of windows), cutting off fossil fuels, and threatening nuclear war every time he doesn’t get his way.

For a while at least, attorneys at treasury were not allowed to use PACER because it charges nominal amounts per page to fund the Judicial branch. PACER is the one and only tool for researching and filing records in ongoing federal cases, which is to say, every single case that these lawyers would be working on.

It’s kinda bullshit that there is a fee at all, but it is what it is and has been standard operating procedure for 20+ years, and they just flip a switch and wait for the howling to begin, because they have no idea what is important and don’t care. This is just Xitter all over again, except now it’s the government of the largest economy and military in the world.

They literally said that they don’t want to tell, because it will lead to users gaming the system. 😒

The first term justices were all from the pre-existing Federalist Society list. It was full of overly partisan, reliable conservative activist judges, but they were generally people who’d arrived at their positions through arguments that, while arising from shitty first assumptions, one could cogently follow and even appreciate some of the mental gymnastics. They were either nominally qualified or on their way to being so. Alito (aka Great Value Scalia) has arguably been worse than the Trump Three; in retrospect I would have happily taken our chances with Harriet Miers.

I guarantee that Trump’s list for this term is much, much worse. Frankly I would assume Aileen Cannon is at the top of it.

There was a time when Clarence’s mindlessly textualist dissents were basically a drinking game for Law Students. Take a shot every time he mentions that something didn’t exist in 1789! He was also famous for never, ever asking questions in oral arguments. Then of course there are the famous complaints about salary. Dude simply does not give a fuck, but that kind of committed disdain for the institution ended up serving him well as the GOP sank down to meet him.

I mean at this point, Trump’s preferred end state is basically China except stupid and unpredictable.

They see such an obvious opportunity for increasing their soft power that they’re saying things here that might actually slow down a move towards a world where taking Taiwan by force is acceptable.