KTLA also called this situation a “standoff” in its reporting, implying that the family had taken some action to threaten officers, which they absolutely did not.

Also, credit to the San Bernardino Sheriff’s department for their involvement in this incident. Once called, they followed the law (they did not assist federal officers in an immigration enforcement capacity) & they advocated to federal officers to de-escalate the situation.

Was it useful? That information had nothing at all to do with the author’s case of COVID.

I know I’m lucky – I’m in a senior position in my career, so it’s likely I’ll find something new for the same or similar salary.

Still, it was completely unprovoked. I had nothing but glowing performance reviews, nothing like an HR writeup or anything.

I’m to be dismissed from my job Jan 3.

I guess I have prospects. Still, it’s a hell of a kick in the teeth, I’ve never been involuntarily terminated from a job in my entire life.

Plenty of decent country before the 1990s. Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Ray Charles, the Statler Brothers, Mel Tillis, Roy Clark, John Denver, Willie Nelson. Later country artists with pop sensibilities like Kenny Rogers, Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, Reba McIntire.

I’d argue that Roy Clark ranks as one of the most talented American guitarists/banjoists of the 20th century, easily in the same class as Jimi Hendrix or Prince.

Today, look for specific types of country music (e.g. Bluegrass) to find more authentic stuff, or just bite the bullet and listen to stuff with different genre labels like “Americana” and “Folk”. A lot of good modern country music ends up in those genre classifications because the marketers can’t figure out how to fit it into the stadium country ecosystem.

Sure, I guess that’s a… very long term?.. solution to the OP’s problem.

I’d like a citation on the funding from Iran. Iran is mostly Shi’ite, and doesn’t generally get involved in Arab or Sunni affairs. And this article from 2021 (prior to the current conflict) points out that the bulk of Hamas funding comes from Qatar and Turkey, respectively.

FPTP

Can you explain in more detail? I’m unclear on what First Past the Post voting has to do with the OP’s concerns.

It’s very simple to not have capitalism

I think that if it was simple, we could point to more practical examples.

To make myself 100% clear: I am progressive, I want workers to unionize, I want government to support worker rights to the Nth degree, etc. That’s why I’m here. But I think a working solution is going to converge on something like the German model where corporate governance is a tripartite effort of company owners, unionized company workers, and government.

If there’s a version of this in which the things used to make stuff (from land to machines to patents) are not owned by some entity, I have yet to see it work. And ownership of the means of production IS capitalism. The “capital” in capitalism consists of that land and those machines and patents. Sure, there is room for workers’ cooperatives and such in this realm of owning entities, although I don’t know that it’s something we can force.

With respect to this:

and coops for buisnesses. This replaces CEOs and Bankers with democratic governance and isn’t authoritarian

I’m not really clear on how workers decide what to make, and how much to make, and where to get their inputs. That seems to me a classic case for corporate leadership. You can’t decide what to sell by a worker vote, except in some edge cases. I feel like that’s a classic path back to Soviet-era starvation: not enough people making food or toilet paper, way too many people making crazy military hardware, not enough middlemen/brokers/traders (who, it turns out, are kind of essential to market organization).

I could be convinced, but I want to see it actually work.

We are about to reach AI and Climate Change tipping points, and planned economies are about to become a must because of these things (inevitably)

You’re not wrong. I’ve often said that capitalism cannot plan in any meaningful sense. Nobody in the system cares about stability tomorrow if they can get rewarded today.

I feel that those who jump on anti-capitalism have no real idea how products are made, and how things are bought, sold, marketed.

There seems to be a sort naive belief that we can return to an era of cottage industry, and that somehow we’d still have iPhones and power plants and such without folks owning land and machines and patents. But even if you imagine a power plant built without capitalism – say, built by a beneficient government – the people building it are capitalists. The people mining the coal and shipping it to the plant are capitalists. They want money in return, so they can feed their families and establish their personal economic security, so that they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid, etc.

Folks say that history is just a record of the robber-barons robbing everybody, and I tend to agree. It seems likely that this is the case because only the robber-barons actually succeeded. I think the onus is on folks who claim we don’t need the robber-barons to show that a system CAN succeed without them.

I feel like the long term answer is to let the robber-barons do their thing, but only to a degree, and use government directed by democracy to keep the abuses of capitalism under control. This is difficult, but it seems to work in most wealthy countries, except for a glaring few. If there’s a better system, I have yet to see it in operation.

https://www.ynetnews.com/article/hyjgqqz11a

Your math is off somewhere. Wikipedia claims that NYC has 302 square miles of land, while Singapore has 283.

This article estimates that the cost of owning a car in NYC is $3000-$5000 per month. So, you pay for the privilege, perhaps not as much up front.

But NYC is surrounded by places you can drive to. Singapore is not. The mainland city of Johor Bahru is a relatively poor city of only 500K people, and beyond that it’s farmland until you get to the Malaysian captial, more than 4 hours away. So I wouldn’t expect the two cities to have the same preferences for car ownership in any case.

And it won’t need to exist locally on the phone anyway. Higher bandwidth cell and wifi signals mean more and more exotic AI processing can be offloaded onto cloud resources.

It’s great when you have an app that works well when not connected to a network, of course. But most phone buyers don’t really care.

It is tradition.

Is this news? Singapore is a city of 6 million on an island that is only 45km across at its widest point.

The sentence makes sense in context of the article. Detained in Dubai is asking the US State Department to warn travelers of the risk of unjust arrest and extortion, even though Ms. Polanco’s ordeal has ended.

ChatGPT, program a Metroidvania 2d retro 16 bit graphics video game featuring a naked Emilia Clarke.

Do people still use emacs to code, for example?

Umm. Yes.

If someone is making you feel like you might be in danger, that’s a threat. It doesn’t matter their intent

That’s a risible argument. The standard is what a “reasonable person” considers dangerous.

Whether an action is criminal can’t be based on each individual’s personal opinion of their own behavior. The perpetrator believing that they are right does not make it legal.

Capcom has absolute authority to price its games however they see fit.

If they make choices that put them out of business, that’s on them.