This was a couple of years ago but I think the numbers are still the same: sending a shipping container from Hong Kong to Newark cost about $3000 while sending the same container in the opposite direction cost about $500. This is because we badly want the shit China makes while they don’t want anything we make (the same situation that led Great Britain to force China to accept opium at gunpoint almost two hundred years ago). Sending a container to China is so cheap that for a stretch we were actually filling them with our garbage because it was less expensive to dispose of it there.

Anyone who think this represents economic weakness on China’s part is batshit crazy.

They eat road-pizza squirrels as well. Although they’re scared shitless by the still-living ones.

Meanwhile my local crows just sit there looking aggrieved while a single squirrel eats all the peanuts I put out for them. I don’t understand it at all, but squirrels must be seriously badass, at least as far as crows are concerned.

- Gang up on hawks
- Get chased away by solitary bluejays and squirrels

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My favorite quote from this movie was “first rule of leadership, princess: everything is your fault!”

Brian Thompson looked pretty well-marbled for a CEO, to be fair. Cook 'im low, cook 'im slow.

That’s crazy talk. Your teeth aren’t part of your body or anything!

I know Qt is cross-platform, but cars? Wow! I only ever used it for shitty Skype clones for Canadian ISPs.

Y’all need Qt Creator: C++ for under the hood and Javascript for the UI. Virtually nonexistent base of coders who can do both competently and if you’re not careful you end up moving to Finland because of it.

I started out with Visual Basic using the Variant type all the time, and even though I was usually just working on one-person projects it was a fucking disaster. You don’t even have to collaborate to see the virtues of strong typing.

I’m a school bus driver and I had to ban the singing of Christmas songs on my bus before Thanksgiving. Naturally the little bastards ignore this, just like they ignore my injunction against singing Taylor Swift songs. Thank god T-Swiffer has never done a Christmas album.

What is your area? I’ve lived in about 20 US states, in cities and rural areas, and it’s always been 1 cop per vehicle.

You’re thinking of cop shows from the '70s and '80s, not reality.

I don’t want to be the guy defending Hitler or Jeffery Dahmer, but

I’m a school bus driver and I regularly get infuriated by people who drive past me when I have my red flashers on and stop sign out, wishing there was a cop around. Only once so far have I gotten my wish … and unfortunately it was the cop driving past me at 40 mph just as some of my kids were about to cross the road. I looked down and saw him with his phone in his right hand and his left hand on the wheel, not paying the slightest attention to what was in front of him.

I’m lucky he didn’t run over any kids, because I probably would have gotten shot.

I grew up in Ohio in the 1970s (which was admittedly a rough decade as far as cold weather was concerned). Generally, the first snowfall was some time in September and at some point in October the ground would be completely covered in snow and you wouldn’t see grass again until April. The snow wasn’t completely gone until May. So essentially it was six months of Winter, three months of Summer and a month and a half each for Spring and Fall. It is certainly not anything like that any more.

Is it an increase? The article @macattack cited does not give any data on how much the IRS collected from high-income earners before this additional push supposedly funded by the Inflation Reduction Act. The article does mention that Republicans in congress recently rescinded more than $20 billion in additional IRS funding, which does suggest that the net benefit was far less than $1.3 billion and might even have been negative. It seems like the kind of breathless article the impact of which relies on people not well understanding the difference between a billion and a trillion.

Fine, revenues are $4.9 trillion. My point is that $1.9 billion is literally a drop in the bucket - hardly an example of the IRS “going after rich people”.

FWIW the US federal budget for 2024 is going to be about $6.8 trillion dollars. So that $1.3 billion is about 0.019% of the total budget. I’d call that a slap on the wrist for the billionaire class except that you can actually feel a slap on the wrist.