Too bad, because whatever the hell the Korean company was making was probably better than the upjumped twinkies that are Tokyo Bananas.

About 25 years.

You know how in sporting events, they shut it down for 30 minutes if there is lightning near the stadium, and every single bolt of lightning resets that clock?

America’s “allies” need to do the same thing, except switch sporting event to “meaningful international commitments,” minutes to “years,” and bolt of lightning to “any GOP Administration.”

This is just how you (slightly) expand the gene pool of Archaic era Ithacan elites. We’re gonna King Ralph everybody except Odysseus!

1. Important context: he’s talking to Laura Loomer, so trying to communicate to a skeptical White House that supporting Ukraine is supporting the values of Trump’s base. Ukrainian propaganda is real and I don’t judge them for deploying it, but we also don’t want to presume that statements like this are not calculated. That said…

2. I mean, he’s not wrong. You can (and I’d argue should) stop well short of confiscation when trying to keep religion from being a toxic voice in a country’s political discourse. However, raising it in this conversation, when Putin seems more interested in co-opting religion rather than suppressing it, and that in a way that MAGAs would frankly find to be a useful model, makes me think of it more as a hail mary (LOL) than anything else.

3. The last line of the article gave me pause, so in investigating this source, it appears to be an arm of the UOC-Moscow Patriarchate, and while I am concerned by any curtailment of the free exercise of religion, the Russian Orthodox church has been largely co-opted by the Putin government, leading the ecumenical patriarch in Istanbul to cut the Ukraininan church free from Moscow, and now the UOC-MP seems to be trying to have its cake and eat it to with regard to respecting Moscow without fully toeing the line on the ROC’s pro-war rhetoric. The argument would come down to whether the Russian Church is de facto an arm of the Russian state. At any rate, the site definitely has an agenda here.

Despite making them my main hobby the last couple of years, not me, at least not with any level of speed or confidence. I don’t hunt and peck, but it’s definitely a weird dance of muscle memory and hand-eye coordination, and I top out at about 60-70 wpm when composing from my mind. It’s quite a bit less if I’m transcribing something, but that’s not the use case it once was.

I’ve had it pounded and pan fried. It was like a somewhat tougher, gamier chicken-fried steak or wienerschnitzel.

It was… okay. Wouldn’t turn it down, but also wouldn’t seek it out.

I mean, that’s a better choice than “fuck my waiter, specifically and today, while not affecting his bosses’ bottom line at all.”

But here’s the thing, it ain’t the owners’ problem either. They’re winning. The whole reason they do this is to externalize labor costs and do ad hoc market segmentation, except it’s based on customers kinda being dicks. When you don’t tip in the US, you have sided with the owners and have said to the server, “you are worth minimum wage.”

Agitate the rest of the day. Tip at mealtime.

Primaries are primaries. People walk back comments made during them all the time, and to a certain extent they’re the time to push your party where you think it needs to be.

I will be interested in what happens for the general. Can’t do much of importance if you pout and let the perfect be the enemy of the good (or the good be the enemy of the kinda okay), and thereby get evil elected.

Statistically speaking, the first part basically already happens. 90-97% of civil cases in the US settle before trial.

In a system that depends on interpreting unique fact patterns and evaluating and weighting “real-world” evidence with varying levels of subjectivity, I’d say that’s already as predictable as it’s supposed to be. What’s left has to do with inherent uncertainty on that 3-10% of close cases and clients with differing risk profiles (and pettiness), more so than it does with scummy lawyers bullshitting their clients, though TBF that definitely happens.

If anything, the issue with adversarial civil litigation generally, and the American system specifically, is that any uncertainty whatsoever breaks so drastically in favor of the party with more resources that reasonable claims settle when they had an excellent (but not guaranteed) chance at trial.

There are so many. Some highlights though:

• There’s a salary cap of $6.5M, which is actually more “League One” than Championship, but there are loopholes to exploit (Beckham rule and its offspring most prominent among them), and MLS is full of Americans and Western Hemisphere players who are good but would never get UK work permits so their wages are a bit depressed compared to second and third tier British players.
• Maximum senior roster of 30 players, of which 10 are (nominally) supposed to be on the equivalent of 1800 pounds/week. Exceptions here as well, but in broad strokes the bottom of the roster is WAAAY cheaper than even the middle.
• Several of them are supposed to be 24 or younger, further limiting the pool.
• There is an internal market to trade them around, but teams can only have an average of 8 non-domestic players. Rules slightly vary for the US teams versus Canadian.
• The league is legally one business, and holds all contracts. The “owners” are investors in the league who have a contractual agreement to manage a team. It happens much less often than it used to, but you occasionally see things that appear to be league office meddling in player movement.

Yeah, no worries. One of the beauties of soccer is that playing it is not hard, but playing it competently is, and playing it at a high level is insanely difficult.

Don’t get me wrong though, in spite of the perfectly good reasons not to be, I still love American football, and you’re right that the other way around would be a literal bloodbath.

The NFL team would be miserable and probably have soft-tissue injuries, and eventually would not be able to stop the soccer players from navigating around them like cones, assuming they ever could. Assuming the soccer players could learn the byzantine rulebook in a reasonable timeframe, they would be instantly broken into little pieces and do nothing of note. No one would enjoy either contest, and we would learn nothing.

As for why they didn’t catch on, first I’m not so sure they didn’t, as tennis in particular has always had its place in the American culture, though its association with the “country club” class may have limited its ceiling. American soccer has its issues, and it is not pressuring the “traditional” American team sports, but attendances are healthy, sponsorships are good, and quality of play is decent, with a starting 11 being roughly comparable to the bottom half of the English second division. Roster rules would mean an MLS club would quickly get ground into dirt in that English second division, but matchday 1 might be pretty competitive. Taking your question more generously, though, competition from baseball, followed by organizational disarray, followed by competition from college gridiron football, followed by competition from professional gridiron football, accompanied by the “not invented here” syndrome, left it seen as a sport for immigrants and then as a safe yet cheap option for suburban children. Meanwhile ice hockey and basketball were also carving out their markets.

Televised World Cups and Pele started to erode that some, but more organizational disarray left the country without a proper professional league from 1984 until 1995, and when it was restarted it was intentionally done in a manner to control costs and favor management, which it ironically was able to do because it could always argue the players could seek employment in other countries.

NFL athletes would have the conditioning and stamina to at the very least compete in a soccer match

A few might not be utterly exhausted and wishing for death, but running around attempting to play soccer for ninety minutes is not the same as succeeding. Even Wide Receivers and Defensive Backs with some soccer experience aren’t going to hang with any professional team; that’s just not what they train for. Then there’s the skill issue. It would be like asking which Indy car would do better in the America’s Cup. ;-)

It is so fitting that what may quite literally be Trump’s only sincerely held belief about public policy is short-sighted, inefficient, bad for the world, and based on shallow considerations of aesthetics.

In used Bazzite for a bit on a desktop, which mostly worked great, until I tried to set up a small dev environment (for QMK keyboard firmware), and found that I fell into a rare doughnut hole where I’m advanced enough to want dev tools, but too dumb to readily work with the way immutable distros handle that, LOL.

For this machine, it may be an even better choice. I’ll certainly keep it in mind.

Awesome info. Thank you. I think I have some heat pads around for RPi passive sinks, so I might at least stick a couple of them on. Can’t hurt.

Without asking you to chase things down for an internet stranger, is undervolting one of these fairly straightforward?

Thanks. I’d skimmed over mentions of that a couple of times. I’ll keep it in mind if I hit any trouble.

Good to know. I actually didn’t have a bad time when I took a short trip with the upjumped Chrome-tab with a trackball and small mechanical keyboard, since I completely nuked ChromeOS and have Debian running native, but I’ve been told it’s a “sadness machine,” LOL.