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Ghost of LL

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by Ghost of LL

  1. I don't give a fuck what the Republicans will or will not ignore. The man was here legally. He was in the country every bit as legally as I am here or you are here. The laws of the United States of America say he was here legally. If we want to ignore the laws of the United States of America and say that he can be sent to a Salvadoran concentration camp for . . . reasons, then nobody else who is here legally is safe. Not you. Not me. I don't give a fuck what the Republicans say. That's the facts, Jack. And we need to quit worrying about what Republicans will say or what their brainwashed Nazi supporters will say. The question is on the table: will we be a nation of laws? Or will we be an autocracy in which everyone must live in fear of a knock on the door in the middle of the night by men coming to take you to the camps? Is this the United States of America? Or is this the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany? The question is on the table. And I don't give a fuck what Republicans have to say about it.
  2. You know--as a GenXer born less than 30 years after the end of World War II, it's just wild that I'm going to live long enough to have to decide whether to flee to Germany to escape a Nazi regime and the threat of imprisonment in a concentration camp.
  3. Thank you for your service.
  4. I'm just here to point out that Professor Vladeck's wife is really fucking cute and would totally fucking get it. Of course, she's apparently into really smart guys, which kinda impairs my chances. But still, . . . .
  5. Yes and no. It won't have the convenience of the IC Card. You can acquire a physical IC Card at the train station and at a lot of convenience stores. And I think that is preferable to a 3-day pass both (1) because the IC Card can be used for other things as outlined above and (2) I wouldn't exactly guarantee that the 3-day pass would be good on all lines. As YChang alludes, the Tokyo Metro system isn't a single system. It's a series of different railroad companies. If you're familiar with the history of the London Underground, it's akin to what that was like before TfL consolidated everything. So for one thing, it makes the Metro map really confusing (though actually it's not that hard once you are on the ground and get used to it). But for another thing, they all have different fare regimes. An IC Card will work for any of the operators. But I'm not sure about a day pass.
  6. Shit--I'm sorry I didn't see this earlier. We did the eVisa, and it makes immigration check an absolute breeze on arrival. I would strongly recommend it. Just from the looks of the line, I suspect it probably saved us an hour on arrival. On the Metro tickets, on your iPhone, go to "Wallet" and hit the + on the top right corner. Then go to "Transit Card" and scroll down to Japan. You should get any one of Pasmo or Suica or Icoca. It doesn't really matter. Suica is put out by one of the Tokyo metro companies; Pasmo by one in Osaka. But they're both good on any Metro system nationwide. You fill them up with some $$ on the front end. Then you just tap your phone at the entry and exit of the Metro. That's it--super easy. One other nice thing is that these IC cards (e.g., Suica and Pasmo) aren't just used at the Metro. Every vending machine takes them. So does 7-11. I think taxis do, too. So you just use your IC card on your iPhone kind like you would a pre-paid Apple Pay account for a lot of stuff.
  7. That was exactly my review. It's an awful movie. And I really enjoyed it. La-la-la-lava; Chi-chi-chi-chicken; Steve's Lava Chicken, Yeah it's tasty as hell.
  8. There's also a potential finding of a violation of the 5th and 14th Amendments, which could be used in a subsequent Section 1983 lawsuit against Noem and Trump personally.
  9. Honestly--I don't know. It's driving me fucking insane.
  10. Guess what, my meth-addled, cum-guzzling-for-remuneration Iranian friend @Macklemore--they're coming for you. Seriously, dude--they're coming for you.
  11. One day, the Longhorns will lose a series in SEC play.
  12. The hardest hit was Asheville, which is the only blue county in the region.
  13. https://www.tiktok.com/@gonest_lily
  14. It’s not just that. They’re threatening to crater the entire American retail sector. Were are doing some home renovations right. Ow, and we’re going to need some new living room furniture. So one that was pertinent to me was a gal at a furniture factory. She says “you like something from the Restoration Hardware catalogue? Send us the SKU. We make all that shit here in this factory and we will send you that sofa door-to-door for 10% the price you would pay at Restoration Hardware in Austin.” Even after you pay the 125% tariff, it’s 80% off retail. If people do that in any kind of numbers, yikes.
  15. China is going hard on TikTok exposing how cheaply it makes luxury goods and openly inviting Americans to come in a 9-day visa-free tour to buy shit straight from the factory. That’s some next level “peasants with pitchforks” shit right there, eh, JD?
  16. Because it's something that intuitively makes sense. If you put capital back in the hands of the investing classes, it will be invested in such a way as to generate economic activity and all that comes with it (e.g., jobs). And let's just be real honest about this--it's a theory that did work at earlier points in our history. Kennedy's tax cuts in the early 1960s are widely credits with spurring economic growth. Reagan's are more controversial, but they also are credited with causing an economic expansion. The difference is that by the 2000s, there are two many other investment options and strategies such that the capital didn't necessarily go to economic expansion in the United States. And unlike in the 1960s and 1980s, taxes on the top brackets were already so low that reducing them further didn't really have much impact.
  17. I don't think that's true at all. Clinton raised taxes, and he was reelected comfortably in 1996. The key is that Clinton only raised taxes on the highest brackets. So the vast majority of Americans saw no tax increase at all. Combined with a growing economy, the increased revenue from those taxes allowed the federal government to run a budget surplus during the late 1990s. And we can talk about the Election of 2000. Let it suffice it to say that Gore won the popular vote. It was hardly an electoral repudiation of Clinton's fiscal policy. The reality is that if you confine tax increases to the top brackets, you can definitely ride a budget-saving fiscal policy to electoral victory. The real problem for Democrats in the 21st Century has been that every time they take over the White House, they do so in the middle of an economic catastrophe that greatly restricts what fiscal policies they can enact. It's really hard to raise taxes on anyone when you're just trying to recover from Republican-caused economic meltdowns.
  18. Nothing encourages people to relax quite like yelling at them "BE COOL!"
  19. Do you sell every day at market close? Or are you just letting it ride?
  20. The volumes today are just garbage. Looks like everyone is just sitting there waiting.
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