Yeah, in fairness, NK would make more sense, tbh. It’s been so closed off for so long, that it increasing tourism after opening to it a few years back isn’t that surprising. But my point still stands regarding other countries that are extremely dangerous/even worse than the US in terms of safety.

I’m equally perplexed. So tourism to places like North Korea or places in active war like Libya or South Sudan have gone up?

which is why big blue states like California and Illinois and Massachusetts and New York also refuse to implement the far more efficient and equitable public health reforms common to countries in Europe with much smaller GDPs.

Those states do have a lot of benefits for low income families when it comes to healthcare that red states don’t offer.

But a big reason they don’t do universal healthcare, aside from billions of dollars in insurance and healthcare capital lobbying politicians, is because you need all the neighboring states to also be on board as well. Why would it be beneficial for me to have universal healthcare if I live on the state border and work in another state? If I get hurt and I need to go to the ER in the other state that doesn’t have universal healthcare, I’ll be super screwed when the bill finally hits. I bring this up because people in the US travel between states quite often.

But aside from that, I’d argue the biggest issue is that even though California and other blue states have large GDPs, they don’t usually have much money to spare. The fact that the Federal takes so much money from regular people in addition to State taxes, it wouldn’t be feasible to offer universal healthcare without buy-in at the national level.

The simple fact is, the healthcare system is broken. Costs are so high because they’ve been able to get away with it due to millions of people throwing money into insurance and not needing to use their insurance the majority of time outside of routine appointments. As a result, these companies had billions just sitting around and for-profit hospitals knew this. As such, it’s become a greedy race to the bottom.

A typical surgery even 40 years ago would not drastically hurt anyone financially. Yes, technology and medicine has drastically improved, and correct me if I’m wrong, but fixing a basic broken bone hasn’t changed much in the last 50+ years. So why does getting a broken leg fixed now cost thousands of dollars when it used to only cost maybe a couple hundred?

Greed, is my conclusion.

Are you referring to this photo?

Yes, he is definitely “groping” her here… Jfc.

And the kissing thing was definitely unacceptable, but hardly worth the amount of scandal it received.

She said Franken, a former “Saturday Night Live” cast member and liberal activist who was elected to the Senate in 2008 and won a second term in 2014, insisted on rehearsing the scene backstage.

“He said to me, ‘We need to rehearse the kiss.’ I laughed and ignored him. Then he said it again. I said something like, ‘Relax Al, this isn’t SNL. … We don’t need to rehearse the kiss’,” she wrote in a lengthy and detailed post on KABC’s website.

“He continued to insist, and I was beginning to get uncomfortable.”

Tweeden said she reluctantly agreed to rehearse the line leading up to the kiss and that’s when Franken “came at me, put his hand on the back of my head, mashed his lips against mine and aggressively stuck his tongue in my mouth.”

“I immediately pushed him away with both of my hands against his chest and told him if he ever did that to me again I wouldn’t be so nice about it the next time,” she said. “I felt disgusted and violated.”

Franken, through a spokesperson, responded: “I certainly don’t remember the rehearsal for the skit in the same way, but I send my sincerest apologies to Leeann.”

Edit: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/sen-al-franken-accused-forcibly-kissing-groping-woman-n821381

I will add that the GOP also amplified the issue 100x. The fact that Trump of all people was tweeting out against Franken is peak hypocrisy.

Chuck Schumer fucking sucks.

A hotel in Augusta, Georgia. I had to come into town for a 2 week training event for my job. Unfortunately, it was occurring at the same time as the Master’s tournament, so finding a hotel was virtually impossible. The one my work booked for me was easily in the top 3 grossest accommodations I’ve ever had, and I’ve deployed to combat zones in the Army. Waking up in the middle of the night to my bed and walls covered in roaches still haunts me to this day. And when I say covered, I don’t mean a few. I mean covered.

The judicial can only do so much. Congress being readily complicit makes this all much more difficult to combat.

Haven’t they been suspending habeas corpus this whole time? I thought that was the main reason behind the SCOTUS case, that they’re mass deporting people with zero due process?

This is the truth. Trump is their prophet. Why else does anyone think he posted a meme of himself as the Pope. They know they’ve created an unbreakable cult and there’s nothing that can be done to shatter the indoctrination his zealots are thoroughly infected with.

Context matters. Alito has done a shit ton more with the GOP than just their wife donating to them.

Now hold on, maybe they’re onto something. The highest levels of drug dealers most likely aren’t accepting cash, they’re laundering their money through legitimate fronts. Small time dealers setting up some simple LLC or something for a relatively small fee and funneling money through that could actually shield you better from local law enforcement. I’m pretty sure Cashapp and their ilk offer business accounts nowadays, haven’t checked myself.

We used to do tape backups up until about 6 years ago, but our higher headquarters decided they wanted to go all in on Rubrik instead. I will say that it is a lot easier to maintain and conduct restores from, and we have all of our various sites’ Rubriks backing up to each other for redundancy. But you’re definitely right that tape is far cheaper per GiB of storage than anything else.

My theory is that he’s always known Tesla was massively overvalued and it was only a matter of time before the company’s stock started correcting towards a more realistic value for the amount of profit it actually generates. As such, he needed to take drastic action(s) to find other gold mines for him to exploit to retain his wealth base.

No shit? Glad it’s “official,” I guess, but literally anyone left with basic arithmetic skills and common sense knew that gutting fed workers wasn’t going to even remotely be enough to make up $2 trillion. So many analysts had said as much all summer long when DOGE started being floated.

You also have to consider they have to get a contract and/or government employee team together to do the audit. If they go the contract route, that entails doing a Request For Proposal and the proper bidding process.

Government is slow because it’s supposed to be transparent with proper accountability along every step. DOGE/Trump/etc all comparing government to private business is extremely stupid for numerous reasons, because they both serve wildly different purposes and have vastly different objectives. Anyone that wants the government to be more like how a private business operates is a fucking idiot.

It’s apparent you all haven’t been auditors. These systems are massive, and a real audit (not the bullshit faux-audits that DOGE is supposedly doing) takes thousands and thousands of man-hours on massive systems. Yes, DOGE has only been around for less than a month, but they’ve setup unauthorized systems and servers all over the fucking government. I can imagine what they’ve done at the Treasury Dept is going to take a lot of careful work and study to trace everything and generate a full report with actual artifacts.

That being said, at my job, we’ve had to comply with spontaneous audits on our network of over 100,000 devices (servers, workstations, appliances, etc) and have had it all completed within 2 months with around ~50 people working full-time. August is a tad extreme, but I’m guessing with such a sensitive system, they’re going to want it to be extremely thorough.

Who the fuck, with any level of competence, would ever want to apply for a federal position after seeing this shit show?

That’s the point. Musk et. al. are foreign assets with orders to weaken NATO and the US at all costs. They are successfully accomplishing their orders. And once the US’s economy has spiraled and collapsed, the USD will no longer be a trusted currency used for global trade. Then it’s BRIC’s time to shine. That’s their dream, at least.

Sometimes this one place gives me $20 of food before closing when I only intended to spend $5 so the upsell kinda hurts

But that upsell is strictly self-inflicted. If it’s before closing, I can almost guarantee the staff are just hooking you up because a large amount of that food is just going to go to waste since most restaurants require things to get thrown away (e.g. if it’s a deli, some of the meats may have hit their shelf life limit).

I’d just tip what you can comfortably afford and what you feel isn’t insulting (e.g. tipping someone like $0.50 on a $20+ order). I always follow the 15-20% rule, and possibly higher in some circumstances. But I don’t know, I haven’t worked food in 20 years, so maybe the manners/expectations have changed nowadays. Also depends where you live.

Also, don’t forget that if the USD collapses along with the US itself, that BRIC (Brazil, Russia, Iran, China, etc) have been wanting the world to stop using the USD as trade currency for ages. It is no secret that the MAIN reason the US is still such a powerhouse is because of our stranglehold on the global economy. And the onnnnly way you can change that in the short term, is by destroying the US, it’s global credibility, and its economic stability.

Elon has always been a conman along with Trump, and the rest of the oligarchy have bent the knee to accepting crypto as a, “viable alternative to fiat.” BRIC setting these traitors up with lots of wealth using semi-anonymous crypto (who’s going the investigate it anyways, all the high tier LE agencies he just gutted) as a means to transfer funds away from the public eye. They don’t even need the USD to transfer the vast wealth.

As a sidenote: The main reason I think Elon is doing this, is because Tesla will probably fail in the next few years, collapsing his wealth foundation. Its stock value has been grossly overvalued for years (at one point it was valued more than all the other car manufacturers in the world that produce and sell 100x more vehicles than Tesla could ever hope to accomplish). Another possibility could be that he has been trying to rapidly expand Tesla’s manufacturing capabilities, he needs access to a fuckton of lithium for batteries, along with other metals such as cobalt for electronics. Luckily, China has made lots of headway in Africa (e.g. see the ongoing conflict in the Congo where the US is supporting one side and China the other) and central Asia where there are massive rare earth metals deposits.

The last possibility is just simply because he’s mad and wants to make us all suffer. It really could be that simple.

Bah, sorry for rambling. It’s all painfully clear, just pay at least some moderate attention to world news and look at what each country’s geopolitical advocacy has been for the last 10+ years and the signs are all there.

Dude, this is what’s driving me crazy. He. Does. Not. Care. Putin, China, and Co. all want NATO weakened. And a crippled US that has pissed off all its allies means a severely weakened NATO. It is abundantly clear from allllll the evidence presented over the last 15+ years that Trump is a fucking foreign asset. And the administration that’s bolstering him up this time around are a combination of foreign assets and religious fanatics that are too caught up in their own cult to realize they’re being used to destroy the US, rather than rebuild it in some glorious Christofascist New Gilead wonderland that they envision.

It’s so disgustingly obvious, especially the insanity that Elon Fuckrat is pulling. And if you go in any conservative forum, they’re just full steam ahead with the final downfall of US democracy, accusing all liberals of being melodramatic and cultivating conspiracy theories. They actually condone Elon forcing his way into government agencies and hooking up illegal servers to hijack the Federal Government’s primary payment distribution system, which in turn gives him the ability to stop payments on virtually everything the government pays for. He can literally cease all payments, including paying interest on our national debt, which could cripple the entire global economy due to the USD being the primary trade currency.

Fuck, man. I’ve been spiraling all week, it’s brutal to experience totalitarianism happening in real-time and seeing only a fraction of the population give a shit.