Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy. (Politics General)

@igotnopicks
She’s smart enough to put on a show instead of admitting the truth.

@Violet Rose in The Rain
Elon can’t weasel his way out so easily. The merger agreement has a “specific performance” clause, basically saying they can force him to buy the company at the agreed price. And since TWTR has dropped well below $54.20 a share, the board has a fiduciary duty to get that cheddar.

He’s the dog that caught the $44 billion car.

@Zincy
It’ll be interesting to see what happens in 2024. Clinton held on despite getting his ass handed to him in 1994. Obama got a second term despite the Tea Party wave in 2010. If the GOP wins one or both chambers and overplays their hand, they could easily get Biden over the hump also. Especially if Trump and DeSantis battle each other to the death like that one episode of Star Trek.

Absolutely not.

The reason airports outside the US make a profit? They’re malls. Untaxed malls. Because they’re international, and constantly overflowing with long distance international travelers, mostly business people with generous company travel expense coverage or tourists flush with cash to burn on duty-free booze, phones, restaurants, $3.50 coke cans, etc.

Do you really think an operation like that is going to work in Albuquerque? Or St. Louis? No; the majority of airports in the US are just glorified bus terminals for domestic travel.

@Meanlucario
It’s too bad that’s not smart enough to win again.

@YourPalContrail
Yeah, it could work, though changes would need to be made. They would still have a ton of regulations in place so how successful they would be would also depend on the quality of that regulation.

IIRC, Musk can back out of the deal. But that means paying an flat penalty fee of $1 billion.

Which is still a drop in the bucket compared to the $44 billion he was going to drop, but in this scenario he gets nothing. He just plain loses a whole billion.

Which itself is an even smaller drop in the bucket considering how he’s worth near $300 billion $180 billion after he crashed his own company’s stock with this very deal, but man is he sure not trying to cut his losses right now.

@Dustcan
Mind, it wouldn’t be just Musk losing $1bil (which I can almost guarantee he’d worm himself out of ever having to pay Twitter, even if it costs him $2bil to do so), it’s that’s Twitter’s value would be permanently damaged… and ripe for someone else to buy for half or less what Musk publicly offered to pay.

Basically what I’m saying is Musk is, once again, flagrantly and very publicly committing SEC violations in the open in order to play the markets and, in this case, severely devalue Twitter so that one of his pals, if not an outright proxy, can snatch it up for pennies on the dollar.

@Violet Rose in The Rain
Forget “masks off.” They’re full-blown wearing that s##t on their f###ing heads now.

Sounds like best case scenario for Dems is simply holding their ground right now…

@Zincy
I always wonder why does it seemingly not occur to Americans that sex ed can teach all about contraceptives, safe sex, etc., while still recommending abstinence.

@Seiken
Same here. Drinkable tap water is a requirement for joining the EU and yet we still have a lot of people buying bottled water for no reason. At least clean air is a part of political discourse, though still somewhat niche.

The latest scapegoat that high profile people on the right are trying to say was the cause of the recent mass shootings is…

Weed apparently

They’ll blame literally everything for a mass shooting except guns

@Background Pony #1F81
They know the truth and are desperately trying to hide it.

@Background Pony #1F81
They’d blame Oxygen on Mass Shootings before ever considering guns might be a factor…

@Dustcan
The breakup fee only applies if he can’t close the deal for some reason, like his funding falls through or the FTC says “lol no”. If he just tries to walk, they can sue him to compel the sale. And in a venue like Delaware, they’d probably win.

And because Musk is a, cough, super genius, he even waived his right of due diligence in the contract. So complaining about the bots now is a little disingenuous. Caveat emptor, bitch.

@The Smiling Pony
And the people at Twitter know this, which gives them a very strong incentive to force the sale through, come hell or high water.

“It’s harder to make someone admit they have been scammed than to scam them in the first place.” I think these words can also apply to politics.

So what’s going on in Ukraine?

I hear Russia is still taking losses but they sure as hell ain’t giving up.

How long will the US and EU officially support Ukraine in defending itself?

@CaptainXtra
So far, it’s been a war of attrition at this point, but it seems like Russia’s throwing hundreds of bodies for a few inches of ground.

I think that support’s starting to falter given what’s going on domestically.

It seems that Brexit should’ve been transferred to Russia, we wouldn’t have this war to begin with.

@CaptainXtra
Both sides are taking losses and each side is trying to gain some military advantage which can then be used during peace talks to force other side to make concessions. Russia wants to stop Ukraine from joining NATO/EU/whatever (so it can be invaded again at a later date), to destroy Ukraine’s industrial capacity and to grab some land if possible. Ukraine wants to be free to join whatever organization it wants to and to push back Russia’s territorial gains at least to the pre-2022 state and preferably to the pre-2014 state.

How long will EU and US support Ukraine? Hopefully as long as necessary.

I hope that Ukraine will be able to break the stalemate when all the heavy weapons are delivered and in use.

All I really have to say to this is that you’re unironically using the same tired, over-exaggerative, nuanceless and dubious talking point that’s long become a living meme of a stereotype of IDpol-obsessed neolibs and leftists of the sort, being perpetuated by themselves—and that for that matter, a repost of this:

I think that perfectly sums up the flaws of you repeating that unconstructive mantra, here.

I honestly didn’t know if you were actually permabanned and was never going to come back, yet knowing that six month ban is usually the very last ban a user will receive before being sent to the moon as their next and final punishment, if they break the rules again, this may as well be your last ever chance to post what ever you feel like you need to in this thread without breaking any rules.

Anyways, you’ve arrived back here just a couple days late after a nearly three-week-long tirade by a newer user who, no joke, was the literal embodiment of what many here believe (TSP even pointed this, out, himself) is what conservatives and/or “conservatives” actually believe leftists and everyone left of Bernie Sanders is truly like, these days, and has actually gone on record asserting that “the United States is worse than Nazi Germany”, word for word, and has unapologetically stood by that assertion, ever since.

Never in the more than half-decade long span that I have ever gotten myself involved in any political discussion online have I seen anything like it.

Speaking of arguments that I’ve never seen the likes of espoused unironically, before: last night, I came across one of the most utterly and hilariously bizarre, absurd, and nonsensical articles in quite a while, claiming that wheat—of ALL THINGS—is directly responsible for much of humanity’s “enslavement” and eternal suffering throughout mankind’s entire recorded history, in and of itself.

Here’s the absolutely bonkers article that I’m referring to: “Wheat has corrupted humanity”, by your favorite local British farmer and historian (and possible cocaine addict), John Lewis-Stempel. I swear to god, I could not stop laughing more and more as I read further into the article, and his soultion at the end is just the icing on the cake.

Well I’ll be. The House just passed a resolution to raise the minimum age to buy semiautomatic guns from 18 to 21.

It may not survive a Senate vote because - of course! - the (non-filibuster) filibuster.

But hey. All it took was a half year where we averaged 2 mass shootings a week, and a weekend where a reported 13 mass shootings happened over a single weekend to get some minimal gun regulation passed over party lines.

Progress!

well I don’t know much about KABQ other than that it’s a class C and a much smaller airport which I concede might necessitate a government controlled facility purely for the economic good of the city. I do know a lot more about KSTL. First Lambert is a class B airport similar to KORD, and KLAX which is inherently bigger. St.Louis’s main revenue source is from tourism from people wanting to see the arch, tour The loup in UCity, visit the St.Louis art museum, Forrest Park ect. Also the largest employer in Missouri (and is based in St.Louis) not only is a aerospace company rivaling airbus, but is a massive part of the military industrial complex. All these factors should work in Lamberts favor, and yet every year it operates at a loss. why? Because the city runs it, like you said, as a glorified bus station, and glorified bus stations aren’t good business. Private ownership would relieve the financial burden from St.Louis taxpayers and provide a better operating airport. Back to Heathrow, yes their duty-free retail stores play a instrumental role in their profits, as a consequence baggage check and security is quicker and your time in the airport isn’t spent sitting at the gate. I’ll leave it to the people here to decide which they prefer.

@Violet Rose in The Rain
Astounding. Milo’s history with the right really tells the story of their psycho morality. When he was all about putting down the poor and saying the right isn’t really anti-gay, they loved him to no end, but then when he slipped up on the way conservatives don’t actually care about age of consent, they went full panic mode and dumped him overnight.
I think the reason why they dumped him that way is that Republicans love to bring out AoC to shut down gay teens relationships, but keep things hush-hush (and maybe with a shotgun wedding) for straight teen relationships (this may in part be why they don’t want gay marriage, marriage overrides AoC in the US). It was thus not just the quiet part loud, but treating gay and straight relationships the same, and treating them different is what they really care about.
Marjorie will probably be introducing bills that’ll try to force teen girls into marrying for financial security with this, especially with Roe dead.

@Dustcan
You seem to have not noticed that the House has been passing blue bills that it knows will fail in the Senate for about four years now. The House passing something is never really a cause for celebration.

@CaptainXtra
Looks like Democrats are going to lose the midterms because Joe Manchin wants to keep his own (extremely white and middle class) state happy by not caring about any social issues at all as the country tumbles off a cliff.
At this point we mostly have to hope that something breaks in the neverending propaganda machine Republicans have that blames all actual problems on things the left likes.

My gods, that is a complete and utter misunderstanding of history by that moron.

The domestication of crops increased the variety in our diets almost 300 fold, and the resulting surplus is directly tied to a while host of major benefits.

It allowed for job diversification, for starters. Which meant that fewer members of the family/clan/settlement had to invest time and energy to gathering food, so they could do things like invent tools, study philosophy and religion, create art, and basically set the groundwork for human culture.

It is also directly correlated with a noticeable increase in lifespan and overall health. While pre-agriculture remains may have indicated greater “strength” (hunter gatherers were very strong and resilient) post agriculture remains showed greater health, longer life spans, higher bone density, and overtime increased brain size.

Crops, as well as animal husbandry, were the linchpins upon which society flourished. If we had remained hunter gathers, we’d likely never have amounted to much, and may even have died off.

As note, his assertion that HGs ate 140 different edibles is disingenuous. Sure they had access to a wider variety in terms of raw numbers, but a significantly lower amount, the energy of which was largely burned on gathering more of it. Larger population sizes would require more and more aggressive hunting and gathering to maintain the dietary requirements, resulting in resource depletion and increased resource competition. Having access to 140 different foods, and being able to sustainably rely on said food are two different concepts.