I’m pretty sure based on the structure of the deal between the Onion and the Connecticut families this basically guarantees that the families (and any other creditors I guess) take home less money. Given the amount of money that they’re owed from the Connecticut judgement those families are basically 95% of the beneficiaries of this sale, and the original deal with the Onion had them giving up a huge chunk of what they could be entitled to in order to make sure that the Texas families (who were victimized in the same way but weren’t part of the same suit and got a much lower reward from a Texas court) got $100,000 more than they would have under the next-best offer. So in order for this to end up being a gain the next-best bid would need to either be so high that giving up $1.5 billion wouldn’t be enough to exceed what the Texas families would get, or else it gives the other bidder the ability to cut their bid to basically nothing and in turn reduce the amount that the Connecticut families forgo and the amount the Texas families take home by however much they want.

This is all amateur analysis, but short of rejecting the Connecticut/Onion bid outright for some reason I don’t think there’s any way that this doesn’t put the families in a worse spot. Instead whoever is behind the FUAS bid (widely believed to be Jones’s allies) may get to decide how much to screw the families over.

Edit to fix some numbers. What’s $1,498.5 billion between friends?

“In what other profession do you need panic buttons?”

I’m just gonna look awkwardly at bank tellers, convenience store clerks, and so many other front-line customer service jobs that either have or would greatly benefit from a panic button to deal with dangerous customer interactions or outright robbery.

Anyone remember when Chrome had that issue with validating nested URL-encoded characters? Anyone for John%%80%80 Doe?

I mean, it sounds like they did ask how much it would cost, he just bulldozed through the question instead of seriously engaging with it and legacy media is too chickenshit to report it as “Trump apathetic about costs of deportation plan” or “Mass Deportation to Cost Billions Despite Trump’s Claims” because putting the things he says in context makes him sound like the madman he is and apparently truth is no longer sufficient defense from defamation.

Wait hang on you only read 2? I’m disappointed, I put a solid fifteen minutes into googling to find those 11 separate links.

I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but this makes a lot of sense. Especially in a 2-party system the election is inevitably going to be a vibe check on the status quo as much as it is a specific election focusing on specific candidates and policies. I’d like to look more closely at the margins to get a feel for whether the Republicans could have run a ham sandwich and still been successful as opposed to the specific appeal of Trumpism.

Not that that changes how rough the next 4 years are going to get for a lot of people.

What constitutes a terrorist organization is up to the electric officials and police organizations to define.

That’s kind of the point, mate. In the current political climate I half expect them to start describing any organization giving humanitarian aid to Palestinians as terrorists.

But to ask the real questions: is providing material support to terrorists not already a crime in Sweden? Does having a Swedish criminal record not complicate eg visa renewals and make it harder for someone to stay in or return to the country? Assuming that’s the case, why is this something that needs to be specially handled now? Is this actually a problem, or just a way to stoke racism and fear for political benefit?

Right.

Russia’s immense respect for Ukrainian culture has defined this war

So the difference is not whether they’re trying to be imperialists, but in their relative ability to do so. I’m sure there’s some fascinating and useful graduate level historical analysis to be done in understanding why Russification was relatively unsuccessful, but that doesn’t change the fact that Russia has time and again attempted to impose Russian culture, Russian language, and Russian law on parts of the Russian empire that were very happily doing their own thing.

lolwut

I didn’t say anything about voting, I’m just trying to be realistic about who else is looking forward to the collapse of the current system. If you want to roll the dice on that then you should at least be honest about who else is sitting at the table.

So the neocons of the 2000s are the C’tan, providing neoliberals with unending life by running against fascists and also necrosteel bodies but at the cost of their souls. One day we will overthrow the gods and place their shards into our doomsday weapons.

Hey now, let’s be fair. It’s not just ashes, it’s also going to be blood. And between 2 and 3 of the 4 cats are literal Nazis.

Yeah, though in his (incredibly lukewarm) defense he seemed more interested in the batshit crazy aliens-control-the-government theories than the more pedestrian conservative stuff, although the line between the two has greatly narrowed over the years.

How are you holding them accountable when one of them is still going to be in power? You’re just sacrificing one of the few concrete mechanisms you have to actually make things better. Yeah, a Harris victory doesn’t mean immediate victory in the fight against this atrocity, but a Trump election does mean defeat.

Actually it’s vitally important if you’re going to have an outdoor catgirl. Otherwise they’ll decimate the local birdgirl population.

A police report would mark a diversion from the usual pattern of these things where Trump surrogates talk a big game about the massive conspiriacies against them (and therefore against You, the hypothetical American voter) to the media, but if they ever end up in front of a court or a police report or something where lying may have actual consequences they back off hard. How many times did we hear about all the mountains of evidence they had of voter fraud in 2020, and how many of the resulting court cases include those same lawyers specifically saying “we do not allege voter fraud” when the judge asks about it.

In other news, Germany should be allowed to keep half of Poland and the Sudetenland.

We don’t do right of conquest anymore because we recognized how it obviously incentivizes more wars of aggression and the associated humanitarian disasters.

Just keep smashing yourself into the bricks to “deny the wall legitimacy” or whatever. I’m sure it will work this time.

I feel like in a lot of cases the context is also sometimes important to differentiate between a real-life idiot and someone who is “Just Asking Questions.”

The trite disclaimer is one thing, but explaining how you came to the specific question you’re asking helps me trust that it’s worth giving you an actual explanation rather than the dismissal that some folks want so they can post it on wherever the new home is for “so much for the tolerant left” bullshit.