He did make that AI video where he dropped shit from a plane on protestors, so guess you are probably right.

They can’t count on a jury that hates insurance companies. You would be surprised how many folks might be neutral on it, and jury selection can spend as much time as they want trying to find those people. Last time I might have served the lawyers dismiaaed essentially the entire jury twice over before accepting and that was over some anonymous little civil suit.

With respect to the family man angle, well there’s not much to be done on that front by the defense. “He was a dick who had it coming” isn’t a legal defense and even if attempted, people would probably think it is a bad look to try to smear the reputation of a dead man.

On the Internet circle jerks, a folk hero getting off seems really neat and with enough celebration seems even probable. Reality is not so.

Just wish it cut both ways, that health care executives be more accountable for lives lost due to their misbehaviors.

For midterms for the house, sure there are

They already rigged districts and can focus such efforts on a handful of districts. Similar story for statewide elections, interfere with a single big city in a state and that could assure a senator.

“resounding success” but given up as a bad idea.

The fact that it could possibly “work” was not really in question, it was whether it would be worth the costs and drawbacks. It was not.

But either way you are right, space even worse than water with no benefit compared to ocean.

The distinction is that a rural american can believe they are a right-wing and no one will deny them that affiliation. So the framing of ‘left vs right’ captures those rural america folks.

They cannot possibly consider themselves on the inside among the billionaire class, and Epstein class is a good pejorative to highlight precisely how much those folks get away with that rural americans don’t see.

You are factually correct, that the entirety of the ‘right’ in practice is controlled by those hyper wealthy interests, but the framing should focus on the owner class’s misbehavior to everyone’s detriment rather than implicitly excluding whatever other conservative values the population may possess.

Note that it stipulates passport or birth certificate and perhaps marriage certificate, and gives them leeway to waive these requirements. It’s rationalized by “voter identity”, but a birth certificate doesn’t prove your identity, even if you can validate it (mine is a rotting old piece of paper with an embossed stamp, seems easy enough to fake), it would only mean a person was born with the name that you claim to have.

For many people, the specifically requested documents are lost or they never had them.

Now if this was a “need to establish a fair voter id system and issue cards to all voters with a reasonable timeline to actually pull this off”, then the argument could be made. But it is a last minute “better have you birth certificate right now, no time to get replacements from the government, don’t vote instead, unless we decide you are ok, then you can vote anyway”.

Particularly the leeway to not require the document is similar to another voter suppression method of the past. “Pass a literacy test to vote”, which might sound like an …ok… idea, except the tests were designed to be impossible to pass, with bad wording, multiple plausibly correct options, etc. But at least it was unfair to everyone, right? Oh, if your grandfather could vote, you are exempted. So a lot of black people were conveniently blocked from exemption on a test that claimed to support educated voting but was just designed to ti fail everyone that would be required to take it.

He didn’t particularly benefit, his trajectory could have been just as productive under the Soviet government. It’s not like he was a total outsider. If anything it might have stalled his political career advancement a few years.

Putin is old and generally well hidden. He likely doesn’t see that he has that much to lose, when it comes down to it.

Yeah, that doesn’t account for his loss in the opening days, when the NATO nations were clearly preparing to write off the conquest of Ukraine as a terrible thing but do nothing substantive about it.

Putin wanted to be cemented in history as bringing back a powerful Russia, and now he has an embarrassment. Dude is 73 and knows he has fewer years ahead than behind and it is now or never for his legacy.

He might not be afraid for his safety or his people, but for his legacy.

Far as I have heard, Ukraine was the industrial and agricultural backbone of USSR.

Beyond that, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics, notably on Ukraine. They see Ukraine as a key political necessity for resurrecting the power structure that they see as having been lost in the early 90s. Read about UK and US and you’ll see a lot of familiar material there in terms of what Russia has actively worked toward.

Yeah, in the opening days of the invasion, the western powers were primed to wag their fingers and write sternly worded letters at the presumptive conquest of Ukraine. They weren’t happy, but I think they were all too ready to just let it happen.

Only after Ukraine showed that it actually had some capability and will to successfully resist, then it became worthwhile for more substantial, though still indirect support from a lot of NATO nations.

While the US certainly does that broadly, Putin is not the beneficiary of such a ploy. That’s one of the few major bad things in global politics that the US did not do.

We need to stop worshipping a piece of paper

You might imagine a streamlined better outcome.

Practically speaking, almost certainly that path gets worse

That second one is familiar. I’m pretty sure that I got pulled just in case I was drunk, but they had to say “speeding” because I was not driving erratically. Country cops on a nearly empty stretch of road with nothing to do…

Pretty similar to my experience in the US.

Generally, a 15km/h speeding won’t even get you stopped. Once I got pulled over ostensibly for about that much over, but it was 2 in the morning on a weekend on a country road so I’m pretty sure the officer was just using the speed as a fishing expedition, and came up with nothing worth the paperwork over.

Another time got pulled over for ostensibly speeding, and when the officer asked if we knew how fast we were going, I started tapping on the screen to try to pull up what would have been dashcam footage, and the officer fairly quickly decided to leave us with a “you just be careful now”.

Like you said, at no point did I get particularly pissy, on the first I was a teenager who had never been pulled before and was just being super deferential, and even with the dashcam I was genuinely checking if I had such a thing because it was a new car and I wondered if I could access the camera recording (I heard that in a crash it would have recorded something, but evidently without activating or crashing it, it wasn’t there). But never said that I doubted him, just that I was going to see if I could see how fast I was going.

If the whole scenario is low stakes and the officer is not stressed, my experience has been like yours. Only time I personally witnessed a pissed off cop was when I got rear ended by someone going about 90kph when I was in a traffic jam and the officer was very pissed at the person ramming a stopped car.

Of course the challenge is that it might be high stakes without your knowledge.

He specifically listed that activity as one of those rare time consuming parts.

Broadly there is a lot the common person assumes absolutely beyond their capability and never tries. People should at least be encouraged that DIY is worth a shot to see if it can work. Big business loves a populace that views doing anything for themselves as a lost cause, good for people to have a least a little familiarity with things to keep that perspective balanced.

I’d probably start smaller, a handful of leafy plants on a patio or something. Very cheap, easy, and low stakes. You won’t replace your diet with independent farming, but at least the general concept won’t seem impossibly out of reach.

Depends on the goal.

Being totally independent is hard. Having a few strategic plants isn’t that bad.

No, you aren’t going to live off your casual garden, but you can have a bit of lettuce or a few other easy leafy vegetables around. You can’t go all in on lots of salads, but you can at least have a lettuce leaf for a sandwich if you can’t get it from the store.

It’s not a bad situation for things like a sandwich topping or garnish here and there.

A few pots on a patio occasionally watered can be pretty solid. Yes you still need the grocery store, but maybe you can skip lettuce from the grocery store and still have it for light usage.

Lettuce actually grows pretty easily.

Now you aren’t going to trivially have enough to be a staple of your diet or anything, but if lettuce at the store is a problem, you could at least have a few leaves to add some to a few dishes while the issue is worked in the supply chain.

My kid just has a single lettuce plant and pulls a few leaves off to eat with something once in a while. It doesn’t need much active care or anything.

At one point my kid had an indoor hydroponic garden going that offered up a bit more vegetation to eat, but keeping that thing maintained was a hassle.

for shits

Your time has come

Perhaps I should have put it in quotes, “careful what you wish for” intended as the expression and “you” being China.

An imbecile is desirable in some ways to have the USA act against it’s own best interests making competitive interests easier, however when the imbecile goes and bombs Iran, that is a problem. And who knows what bone head move to screw things up for everyone comes next.

In some ways an imbecile is harder to predict and negotiate with.