This is exactly why they hosted it in an OPEC nation; to continue hamstringing the transition from fossils & delaying the impact to their profit margins — the same thing they’ve been doing for the last 50 years.
There was an article on Washington Post last week explaining COP28 and details around it. Also the reason for the location:
Why is an oil kingdom hosting COP28?
The United Nations rotates the location of COPs each year through five regions: Africa, Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Western Europe. This year, it was the Asia-Pacific group’s turn to host, and the United Arab Emirates made an unopposed bid in May 2021.
It’s because UAE volunteered to pay for it all. These things are expensive and no one over age 8 believes a UN event will result in any action, much less international cooperation on climate. Since it’s all just a PR stunt, UAE might as well spend a rounding error of its oil proceeds on having some control over the narrative.
The most interesting thing in that article was that someone anonymously sent in a tip with Randele's obituary which is how they finally closed the case. Who is the rando super sleuth following this cold case for 50 years obsessively scanning obits from all over the country?
My guess would be there are a number of people who are hobbyist cold case investigators and have a list of wanted people they keep an eye out for in obits.
There’s an actual quality true crime podcast called Crime Junkie, and an associated podcast specifically dedicated to cold cases called The Deck. It’s a whole thing for some people, but occasionally a listener hits on something and makes a phone call that gets the ball rolling again.
I listen because I find it interesting, but that’s the extent of it. Some people it’s truly a hobby, or more to chase information down.
It’s crazy to think about all the things we’ve each done and seen in our lives, and maybe at some point we were part of some terrible crime and had no idea. Maybe we saw and still remember something that if known to someone else would completely change their life.
Texan? You mean the school that had their mascot killed? You’re insinuating Texans killed their own school’s mascot on the lawn of an Oklahoma State University fraternity.
This was a prank done by a rival OSU fraternity to an agricultural fraternity. The close proximity to a championship with Texas I’d wager is an unfortunate coincidence.
Russia paid off one side, so only the other side complained.
Israel pays off everyone except progressives (who won’t take it), and moderates/conservatives never give a shit if progressives complain about anything.
Israel can fuck right off, right now, after breakfast, in the afternoon, this evening, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, ten years from now and in the 26th century.
They can fuck off and never, ever, fucking come back.
In fact, Elon Musk is feverishly working on a geostationary orbital platform that beams images of Moses down to Tel Aviv to chide the Israelis and tell them that their new promised land is on Pluto, and that Israel is too infested with impure outsiders for them to safely remain there.
It’s not Israel, it’s an American pro-Israel group which is a meaningful difference legally.
And it’s not racist if they’re targeting her obvious and proud pro-Palestinian political opinions and policy objectives. Republicans are funding a candidate against the only Palestinian congress person too, that isn’t racist. They are against her policies.
Depends on how well formed the uteruses are. If they’re both healthy, it should be fine. You would be amazed at the ways a person’s body changes to accommodate pregnancies. Idk why this would be any more risky than, say, twins or triplets.
At the Science and Industry museum in Chicago they have/had step by step see-through models of a woman’s guts before, during, and after pregnancy.
I took a date there and we had a great time. Arrived at that exhibit and we just stood there for a minute, witnessing how jumbled up the post pregnancy innards were.
Haha yeah, pregnancy can be amazing from an objective “wow, humans can really do that, huh?” perspective and also horrifying from a subjective “I’m sorry, you said my intestines are where??” perspective 🥲
As someone who decided to be pregnant for the first time right now, I definitely have a healthy heaping of both—at the same time even! It’s a wild and sometimes darkly hilarious experience.
I’m thinking delivery has got to be way more complicated? The hormones that trigger childbirth might trigger both? But maybe with a special c section everything will be fine?
Planned induction could also be a way they could go. Induce one, then the other, or else c-section for one or both as mom prefers and doctors feel is safe. Maybe slightly more complicated, but not necessarily more complicated than normal birth. Birth can get pretty wild anyway, or it can go super smooth! Hoping for the best for this family, especially being in Alabama
I really wish there was a way to tell him to go back where he came from that wouldn’t make other immigrants uncomfortable. I’d gladly trade him for a hundred refugees.
U.S. vehicle fuel efficiency standards administered by NHTSA have encouraged automakers to build larger vehicles. The bigger the vehicle, the lower the fuel efficiency target it has to meet.
Recently bought a new diesel silverado 3500 for my ranch. It’s enormous, I’m glad I didn’t get the dually option as it’s hard enough to drive in the city. Most of its job however is pulling trailers around.
That said, on highway if I drive the speed limit and take it easy I can get 9L/100km. It’s unreal that such a huge truck will get almost the same economy as our KIA SUV.
You don’t need that truck, same way as nobody else on the planet, no matter what their profession, needs it
Please stop this bullshit. There are most certainly reasons to own a truck that can haul big things. Including in Europe. It’s just that 90% of the trucks you see in a Costco parking lot don’t need to be that way.
What do you expect to use for hauling livestock? These can have a tow weight of 10,000 lbs, which is much more than you can do with a regular hitch. The fact that you’ve never personally seen this does not mean anything.
That can haul a livestock. How about 12? Or would you like them to make more trips (with proportional use of gas and risk of accident)?
As for F150s hauling nothing, that’s kinda my point. There’s a market above it that actually does work (F250 and up), and there’s a market that ought to exist underneath it (what used to be the Ranger, which is now much larger). You’re targeting the wrong group by focusing on trucks that haul 10,000 lbs.
Wait, how often do you need to haul stock with your F250? If every day, then it’s more optimal to by having a dedicated livestock truck, Like Volvo FL.
If you’re only moving livestock occasionally, but driving F250 daily, you’re compensating for your tiny weiner and shitting in the air that everyone breathes
Farmers haul big, heavy things around all the time. If this is news to you, then again, maybe you should step back and stop having strong opinions on things you don’t know anything about.
What do you mean ‘my experience’? These idiotic ‘trucks’ don’t exist outside America.
Ah yes, the daily drive to the shop with my two tractors. So you either drive that without two tractors 99% of the time or you’re driving the wrong vehicle. If you need to haul two tractors you do it properly - you hire a specialist with a specialist equipment. What is pictured in your picture is reckless and idiotic.
Do you have any idea how big American farms are? You can go miles and be on the same farm. That’s why American farmers have their own equipment for that.
Why do you think vans are any better? A lot of them are made on exactly the same platforms as the trucks you’re deriding, and have similar gas mileage. A Ford E350 is basically an F350.
What do you think those “specialty operators” would use?
You’ve successfully moved the goalposts from:
“People need these cars!! They’re not tiny penis enlargers!”
To: “People in US, no, Farmers in US, no, Farmers in US that own incredibly large farms need these cars!! How are they going haul two tractors at once within their own farm!”
I do occasionally see tiny-penis trucks here in Europe. Do you know what I’ve never, ever seen though? A dirty one. One used for work, rather than just showing off.
If you had to haul something heavy on a trailer, what would you use? A fuel-guzzling, heavy, unreliable shiny trinket, or a Toyota Hilux?
99% of workers with stuff to move use a van. Farmers use pickups like L200s. Accountants drive tiny-penis trucks for the tax break
Explain to me again why American contractors are the only contractors on the entire planet that need giant trucks?
What do those farmers use to move livestock around? Because you’re generally looking at a 10,000lbs trailer for that, which is F450 territory.
What you really want to go after is the lower end the truck market. Circa 2002, the Ford Ranger had a curb weight around 3,300 lbs (exact number depending on the trim) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Ranger#/media/File:2001-2003_Ford_Ranger.jpg. The current one is around 4,200 lbs and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Ranger#/media/File:2019_Ford_Ranger_XLT_Super_Cab_FX4_front_6.1.19.jpg. Small trucks have disappeared entirely in the US market, and there’s no good reason for it.
But when you start hitting the Ford Superduty market (F250 on up), you’re looking at people who actually use their trucks for the most part. They are big because they haul a lot of stuff and they have to be.
Still waiting for you to explain why American contractors/farmers are the only people on the planet who require these vehicles when everyone else manages with vastly smaller vehicles
I run 1000 cows on a 60,000 acre ranch in southern Alberta. It’s too rough to run a semi truck and trailer around on but I can haul a tri-axle Wilson gooseneck stock trailer with 20,000 lbs of cattle across it when I need to. There’s no roads through the ranch other than dirt trails so it takes a long time to travel through it and the fewer trips I have to make the better. Generally I’m moving cattle on horseback but occasionally I have to move old/sick/injured cows from a to b. Simply put, your European farms are miniscule and you don’t need the same capabilities that we do. The world is not uniform.
Yeah preverse incentives. When doing the wrong thing makes the most sense for the individual. Happens often in tragedy of the commons situations.
If you hit a pedestrian it is better for you that they die. If you find an endangered animal on your land it is better for you to kill it. If you have a child with someone who makes minimum wage it is better for you to divorce.
Maybe it is too much to expect but for things like this, when public policy experts came up with a standard instead of just inheriting a situation, that they plan for these things in advance. Spend a few moments and look at where the incentives are before just hammering a new policy into place.
You aren’t factoring in civil suits. Someone dead, their family can only get so much. Someone crippled can just keep going after you and might have to as they go into greater and greater levels of debt. What would you do if suddenly your income went down to about 14k USD a year and with each passing day the chances of you returning to work diminished, wouldn’t you be desperate enough to try to win some money from the person who did this to you? Wouldn’t you go along with any shyster lawyer who promised results?
Up until recently, most Americans benefited from a few government-supplied safety nets, most notably the large injection of stimulus money, which left many households sitting on a stockpile of cash that enabled some cardholders to keep their credit card balances in check.
But that cash reserve is largely gone after consumers gradually spent down their excess savings from the Covid-19 pandemic years.
It is absolutely insane to me that anyone thinks the stimulus money left households sitting on a stockpile of cash.
As though millions of people on the edge of poverty sat like dragons upon a mountain of wealth.
Seriously, they don’t even have a grasp on how little that money was even worth. That shit evaporated the instant it arrived just to pay off some of the interest on existing debt.
There are a lot of people conditioned to see the little guy getting money as some kind of affront to freedom. Most of them are the little guy as well, unfortunately.
But but thats different, that guy down the street with two kids who wakes up at 6 and goes to work every day doesn’t deserve that money for reasons I can’t articulate without sounding racist, But I deserve my check.
Listen, I’m a hard working American and I come from hard working Americans. We built this country and we’re just having a hard time for the last couple of months but we work hard. That guy up the street, he’s needed “help” for years. That isn’t help, that’s a handout. He’s not trying. I can’t see any systemic reasons that things might be more difficult for those people, they just aren’t working as hard as us. I mean sure he goes to work but where is he working? Why doesn’t he just get a better job like I did?
/s although I’m sure someone has said those exact words and meant it seriously.
Lol. The PPP loans is where all the money disappeared to. Yes people got some money but it was spent for necessities, and to be honest it wasn’t even that much. Some business got hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars that the government is still trying to recover which they probably never will.
That’s the wild part. We got like two or three checks of $1200, 800, and like $400 or something similar. Less than $2k. That’s not a stockpile. A stockpile would be of we all had an extra $20-40k just sitting and no debt.
It’s the people who got laid off or partially laid off that got a good deal. The 600/week unemployment was a lot if money for people, especially if you still were getting most of a paycheck.
I knew some bank folks. From what I heard, large amounts of the PPP loan money sat in the bank because some banks had trouble giving the money out. That extra money earned the banks a hefty amount of interest, and the C-suites of the bank made-off with a huge chunk of year-end bonus as a result. So while it isn’t directly the PPP loan money, the bankers made a lot of money off of it.
The PPP loans that they were able to give out went to some small businesses and a large percentage of that money were forgiven. But some small businesses also had some trouble getting their loans forgiven due to either bad documentation / application / or the bank that gave them the loan did a poor job of filing the paperwork. So some of those businesses were stuck with a loan that they had to pay back or is waiting for it to be properly processed.
They keep calling them “homeowners”. These are not “homeowners”, these are “landowners” or “landlords”. A homeowner is someone whose property is their primary residence. Homeowners are not having their taxes increased, just landlords.
Not the argument I’m making. Just that questionable moral choices in people’s private lives shouldn’t affect employment if the consumer is inherently unaffected by the behavior in their personal lives. I think the more talented you are and the better you are at your job, the more protection you should have. Like, for example, Elvis was so talented he gets a pass for fucking kids. Meryl Streep can choke kittens to death at this point.
I don’t actually think Jonathan Majors did anything wrong, even and especially if he got physical with some jealous histrionic drunk slut trying to snoop in his phone. All he did was revoke a pussy pass. He should be considered a feminist icon for that, along with Johnny Depp and Sean Connery. He’s too hot and talented to cancel.
but more than anything else, in the same way I want to give the middle finger to moralizing prudes who don’t like to admit that teachers are often total sluts, I want to give the middle finger to white knights who want to cancel celebrities for petty arguments.
Or even… hmm… maybe… maybe both of them engaged in unprofessional behavior unbecoming… nah fuck that I don’t care, I just want more superhero movies and porn and don’t care about moral hazard.
Rape? You even following the case? He smacked some dumb slut for snatching his phone, and a bunch of other opportunists came wafting up through the sewer grates so it seems like a pattern of behavior. It isn’t.
A teacher showing her cervix to the world is a perfectly reasonable thing for parents to not want. There’s not a single fucking place on the planet where that’s fine.
It’s not that she’s a sex worker that’s the issue it’s the fact that teens can barely keep their head clear is they have a cute teacher they could picture naked. That effect would be 1000% worse if you can simply give your teacher five bucks to slap her kitty while saying your a great student.
In this case she would be the victim and the shooter. She shot herself in the foot, there are hundreds of ways to spoliate identity effectively on onlyfans and she chose not to. She knew her fan ase and took advantage then claimed to be the victim.
If it weren’t a teacher pandering customized pornography to underage school children would it be ok? I’m gunna guess no, it’s essentially pedophilia at distance.
Also there was a Minneapolis cop who got busted for having an OnlyFans last month and she still might get fired for it. A cop having an OF isn’t one of my many complaints about my local police department.
Just because teachers are controlled by schools in other ways doesn’t mean that they should be controlled in this way also. Simply saying that teachers can’t do X and therefore they ought not be able to do Y is a non-argument.
Public Schools: “The best we can offer is a ‘Great Teacher’ mug, tissues for your classroom, and a hearty thumbs up! Actually, the budget won’t support the mug. Or that tissues. Oh, and in completely unrelated news, the superintendent was just given a 25% raise.”
Lol, around easter our admins gathered together to go door to door and deliver plastic easter eggs, one per teacher, with about 5 loose jelly beans inside. Not even good jelly beans.
Like, they’re paid twice what we are and they spent a whole day on this.
I mean, cool, but he’s 64 and is retiring. He started at the UN in '92. He announced that he would retire in March of this year. Most sources list that now.
So it’s more of a ‘i don’t need to deal with this insane bullshit so I’m taking my very healthy retirement package and heading out’ more than a ‘im taking a moral stand and leaving my dream career over this insane bullshit’
More often, threat of resignation is a political tool to sway others. I mean, if everyone knows that the person threatening to resign is that good and irreplaceable, others would cave in. I don’t know how the UN works behind closed doors, and how capable Mokhiber is, but we’ll see if this works and the UN comes begging for him to return.
Yep. I mean in the end it has no product. It’s just billboard/ad space, in the world of commerce. Sure, it’s a lot of ad space, but ad space in the digital world is also effectively endless, so the percentage still isn’t actually that relevant as it can shift in a moment’s notice.
Say… if a neonazi buys the platform and brings all his friends with him.
But beyond an office he’s not even paying for and so on, Xitter got… nothing. They have no actual product that can be liquidated, no supply chains worth any money, nothing to rent/sell out beyond said adspace. Like many digital companies they rely entirely on hype for all their perceived value.
It’s because no other social media platform currently meets their requirements. Other platforms either functions significantly different from twitter or it lacks the reach that a politician needs in order for it to be worth their time.
Last time I was on mastodon during one of the many twitter migrations there was a long post saying that people should hold of on auto-blocking people that don’t caption the images they post because new user haven’t learned the cultural rules of mastodon. Is that a thing? I don’t know, could be a particular part of mastodon, I don’t know. Point is that serious public figures have been trained to be careful when adopting new social media.
Hi. Nobody here 👋 I enjoy Mastodon and although nowhere near the same engagement as Shitter, I enjoy the content more. Some people like different things
It still has a big enough user base and brand recognition that they could put things back on course if they really went for it. The only permanent damage is the brain drain from firing a lot of people that has experience in running twitter.
Yes, twitter is the brand. The first action of a sane buyer would be to put the bird logo back. 20 billions of its current value comes from the fact that they still own that name.
I don't know about the active userbase so who knows. Personally I don't think the Twitter brand is as strong as it was a year and change ago.
Even without the change to X, is there anyone who feels that Twitter is anything more than a shell of its former self? It's not as simple as just bringing back the bird, in my opinion.
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