I dont have a dog in this fight.

Of course you do. Allowing borders to be redrawn by force isn’t good for stability anywhere.

Agreed. I think a huge part of it is down to how many kids are vaping here too. Saw an interview with the Taoiseach (prime minister) and he said 13% of 12-17 year olds had vaped in the last 30 days. Pretty crazy number.

Well I am delighted. €13.1B + the 1.2 in interest represents what will be a bump of 16% of total tax revenue compared to 2023 (€88B total). There are lots of things that money can be used for.

I heard about a guy once, who was a POW, and his friend wanted him to keep a watch for his son so he shoved it way up there.

The reference for the younger among us.

Are you using a VPN maybe?

Wow. That’s fascinating, thanks for the details. Interesting that you’re mostly seeing pro-Trump stuff as from the article the dems are outspending the Trump campaign.

Total ad spend so far by both parties comes to $16.61 per person in the state. DAMN.

Apparently they were googling “time in moscow” when following up on an invoice per Ryan McBeth so they are guilty as fuck.

We don’t really have that whole active shooter thing here tbh.

He doesn’t strike me as violent, just a self important cunt.

In the early days of ransomware I helped a small business of a friend that was attacked. They got in and waited months, creating garbage backups until they were confident then sprang the trap.

Tbh I was impressed with how thorough they’d been.

I know, right?!?

I have actually heard about that. Google “gutter oil” if you want some nightmares. They are working on food safety hard though.

Yeah Western China is basically empty. It’s very mountainous and the land is not fertile.

I mean, it’s still a largely rural country

Not so. Wikipedia has a decent article but here’s the crux of it:

By the end of 2023, China had an urbanization rate of 66.2% and is expected to reach 75-80% by 2035

The cities are massive and really densely populated. Shenzhen and Guangzhou are about 90 minutes apart by car if memory serves and account for about 35M people. Hong Kong is an hour south of Shenzhen by train and that’s another ~8M.

I’ve spent a decent bit of time there on a few work trips. Never saw differentiation of eggs in supermarkets (or restaurants). Eggs be eggs.

A huge number of folks are just coming into non-poverty since the turn of the century so it would seem entirely plausible to me that chicken comfort wouldn’t be a thing there just like it wasn’t in the west until comparatively recently and still isn’t for a huge part of the population.

Apart from that it’s really very different culturally. They just view things through an entirely different (and interesting) lens.

Fingers crossed!

LOOOL. Something similarly stupid happened to a friend of mine. His phone got stolen in a nightclub but it was a rather unusual phone. He saw it for sale a few days later on our equivalent of craigslist and offered to buy it. Thing is the guy was a professional fighter and he turned up with a good friend who was a bouncer and also fought out of the same club.

Anyway…The person selling it was the bouncer from the club it had been stolen from. Someone would go around robbing phones from the club then sell them to the bouncer at a hefty discount and he would then sell them on. He apologised profusely and tried to explain his way out of it yada yada.

Friend got his phone back anyway.

Isn’t interference with mail a fairly hefty offense over there?