Argentinian government debt is mostly owned by big American investment firms like Black Rock. If their economy crashes, American Oligarchs lose $$$$ so they convinced Trump this is in his best interests.

That doesn’t feel like a lot of money but public library directors aren’t paid very well so that’s likely more than 10 years of salary.

Oh, that halcyon era between The Witcher seasons 1 and 2 when you could just enjoy it fully and have expect the writers knew what they were doing.

Fuck you for making me look this up. Only Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune would fit together. Venus, Mars, and Mercury are too much.

The second line of the article really sums it up from my perspective. “President George W. Bush was obsessed with the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and deliberately misled the American people about who was responsible for the 9/11 attack.”

I was curious how the nebulous connection between Iraq and Afghanistan was perceived by those who weren’t as aware of the older Bush’s history in the area. In the hours following 9/11, a common question among my peers was “How will this be twisted into us going into Iraq?”

With respect:

Why is 9/11 associated with Saddam jokes?

I’m old enough to remember both Iraq wars and 9/11 and the associated politics in detail the two subjects are very intertwined in the collective American memory.

But I want to hear specifically why people in 2025 think this.

A lady standing on my neighbor’s back porch smoking a cigarette cussed me out when I let the dog out. Except my neighbor had moved out last week (I had helped) and I knew it hadn’t sold yet. A girlfriend of one of the guys up the block was having a episode of some kind and had decided to squat in my neighbor’s home. I locked the door, waiting for the next morning.

I decided to call the Emergency Line to see if they would send mental health first but they sent the cops anyway. Our local cops are really delicate with mental patients so they got her back to her boyfriend and left the homeowner to cleanup.

Could it be that these guys are going to “Where are we going, Papa EA?” them in a few years?

(Can’t find a link to the referenced comic on my phone but basically EA is known for buying up smaller studios and then closing them only a few years later after sucking them dry. This led to a comic of them taking little unsuspecting companies into the dark woods to end them.)

I had to go check this was real. Containment breached folks.

It’s authored by the guy who coined the term originally; so however he’s using it, that’s the way it’s used.

I asked my family what the last useful thing Congress accomplished that made life better for Americans.

The only 2 answers were the 2010 Affordable Care Act and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.

Two actions in 40+ years.

French’s just changed their mustard recipe and my whole house rioted because it tastes “wrong now.” I don’t eat mustard but my husband and kids made me go to the discount grocery to stock up on “old French’s” before it goes away.

Oh yeah, the cast grows and grows every episode or so until there’s much more likeable people. Senku is always there but his role gets smaller until he’s tolerable.

It was 24 eps and I liked it better after like 6-8 but it’s an ensemble cast that grows bigger basically every episode so I’ll once you get the swing of it, it carries you along.

No shit, I had the hardest time getting into the anime Dr. Stone for this exact reason. Thankfully, someone held me down for the first 2 seasons and I learned to love it.

I have a growing personal hatred of people in white pearl-coat cars right now. They are the new BMWs for me.

This was true even in the 90s I’m sad to say. It’s one of the reason I didn’t pursue fiction writing as a career 30 years ago. I don’t think AI will replace any working authors because poorly written slop and computer generated text are both a lot older than today’s LLMs craze.

The field of authorship has been in a slow decline for a long, long time. It has a lot to do with the way the book Publishing industry was run in the middle and later half of the 20th century. We stopped valuing authority and authors and it became a less valuable occupation. This happened to teachers and a lot of other thought-based fields too.

The reality is that statistically you are more likely to win $1 million in the lottery than to become an author in the US who can live on their income from writing fiction. It does still happen but the people who’s work leads them to become full time authors are extraordinarily lucky, talented, hard working, AND again, lucky.

So you have to write for the joy of writing and expect to have a day job. And if that writing makes money, that’s great and you should keep doing as much of it as you can. But please accept that it’s not going to be your income driver for the foreseeable future.

Interesting! Thanks. That has some more nuance than I was expecting.

PA state government is rife with corruption of every level and so we as residents tend to leap to conclusions that every state official, especially the elected ones, are always committing some kind of crime and it’s just the unlucky ones who get caught and tried. The State Treasurer in particular has a recent bad history.

Source? He was a State Treasurer involved in a complicated bribery and contracting scandal. It’s not a he-said-she-said sort of case. His accuser was a deputy comptroller for Pittsburgh Public Schools who noted contracts were wildly overvalued for the work and called the State Auditor General who called the FBI to investigate the matter. Who are you suggesting was lying?