aramis87

Could he have just informed the company what had happened so they could arrange a replacement pilot for wherever he was scheduled to go next, and then just not-deplaned in Shanghai, staying with the plane until it eventually got back to the States?

What is/are these tv series?

CBP intercepted egg products on 3,254 occasions this January and February, compared to 1,508 occasions in the first two months of 2024.

TIL that people were “smuggling” eggs across the border last year as well. I wonder what the earlier historical numbers have been - there had to be some historical number of border residents doing it in their periodic cross-border visits, and unknowing vacationers who bought a dozen or two to cook while they’re camping and just brought the remainder home.

I’ve been getting begging letters, and I’m sending increasingly irate letters telling them to get me off all their contact lists.

Yeah, they’ve reoriented to be fascist enablers :(

Every St. Patrick’s evening, they paint a giant green shamrock under the traffic light :)

It also sucks for those on the wrong side of the cycle. I reached adulthood right at the start of a bust, worked my ass off but accumulated random debt (car died, cancer, etc). The good times came and I could finally catch up! Worked my ass off finally paid off all my debts, had just started to save up some money - and the economy crashed again. It’s not even that I get good times alternating with bad times; I get bad times alternating with really bad times, simply because of the year I reached adulthood :(

The thing is, do you want to talk to people, or understand the answers? Because learning a few phrases is great but if you can’t understand the answers :shrug:

My standard basic phrases are Please; Thank you; Excuse me; I’m sorry; Where’s the bathroom?; and I’m a vegetarian. It’s not elegant, but it covers my most basic needs.

For places I want to go, I have a list in the local language that I can point to, and I learn the basics of written language so I can navigate (maps, store signs, menus, etc). I also watch TV in whatever the language is before I leave, preferably with English subtitles (sometimes that’s a local program, othertimes it’s a US or UK show dubbed into the local language).

We prefer to think of it as ‘nicely trim’, tyvm!

Here you go! :

https://i.imgur.com/EI7drSl.jpeg

I’ve blocked like five of their accounts. I wish there was a setting that would block PMs/chats. Anyone who wants to talk to me can do it in public.

Internationally, the wars continue. The US military stockpile is structured so that if there’s a full US commitment to a war, the stockpile will last a couple of years while the US transitions to a wartime footing, building and renovating munitions factories to continue the war effort. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the US and the EU started sending their stockpiles to Ukraine, and they ramped up munitions production - but neither power pivoted ro full wartime production. Hell, the European NATO countries were still debating whether to dedicate 2% of their GDP to defence.

With Trump fully in Putin’s pocket, the US is going to drastically scale back the supply of arms to Ukraine, and the EU isn’t in a position to make up the entire shortfall. Even now, they’re talking about giving money and supplying some arms, but I’m not seeing any reports of building new factories or scaling up production at existing ones (it takes a couple years to fully scale up production, so extra arms available now needed to be started 2 years ago, and extra production now won’t make a noticable difference until two years from now). So Ukraine is going to be struggling for arms.

The good news for Ukraine is that Russia has also been struggling with both manpower and munitions. Putin is relying on literal cannon fodder from other countries and his own prisoners to make the war palatable to his people. But I think it’s possible he may decide to push harder, annex a bunch of Ukraine, then declare that the war is over and spend some time consolidating his gains.

In the meantime, I’d expect the US to be increasingly focused on the war in Israel, both as a distraction from Ukraine and because Trump really wants ‘wins’ there - in this case, he likely wants to build some hotels, and he’d really like to be able to proclaim that he “brought peace to the Middle East” [the genocide of the Palestinian people being a mere technicality to Trump].

With the US being increasingly unreliable, Europe will focus more on their own affairs (including Russia and Ukraine). The US will go their own way on things, increasingly alone and alienated. It will never be fully trusted again (nor should it be), so accomplishing foreign policy goals is going to be increasingly hard, and accomplishing domestic goals isn’t going to be much easier.

The US economy will eventually collapse and the weight of the national debt will come crashing down. That’s going to affect other countries as well, though I don’t know enough to be able to predict how badly. The US will end up the big loser and Russia can probably chalk up some wins in Ukraine. The Arabic countries will make noises about Israel, but I don’t think full-scale war will happen there, just long-simmering tensions with both sides encouraging terrorism.

I think China and India are poised to be the big winners: they’re both staying publicly out of things, biding their time, waiting for America to fall and Europe to be more internally-focused. And at some point, human civilization collapses, because we couldn’t agree that maybe we should just buy less stuff and all the infrastructure and farmland is swallowed by rising sea levels, extreme drought, floods, wildfires, hurricanes and whatever else is waiting for us.

I’d call the local Fire Marshal.

Someone said he was in a surfing accident and needed pins/plates put in his back. His profile (https://i.imgur.com/2g1ZGBa.png) shows an X-ray of a back that’s had surgery done on it.

He’s 26 and just come off his parents’ healthcare. [Except his family is wealthy, so I’m not sure if this one is relevant or not.]

The Smithsonian tweeted the photo and credited it as coming from “Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, gift of Joe Schwartz and family, ©Joe Schwartz”. I’m going to take their word for it.

The original is in the Smithsonian, so I doubt it.