You blew it when you stood me up on our date, don't come beg/crying back now...no love for you.

I began with the congressional bill you claimed didn't exist by stating...
"Congress had nothing to do with authorizing this."
...and followed with multiple articles that delineated exactly what the republican led congress did.

Can you dispute a single fact presented, or do you simply dismiss the fact checking entirely because it's not from a source politically right of faux news?
Left "leaning" compared to your normal hyper right opinion articles is hardly disqualifying without contradiction, and I don't accept the label anyway. Calling out Republicans for lying 3-1 over Democrats is actually right leaning when you consider they lie >5-1. (For example: Tax breaks don't benefit the rich, I didn't pay off my mistresses and those payoffs I made 2 weeks before the election to hide years old events had nothing to do with the election, my campaign had no contact with Russia, a republican pedophile is better than an upstanding Democrat, homosexuality is an abomination unless we get caught at the gloryhole, .....I could go on forever VS 'I didn't see an issue using a personal server for government emails', and "I did not have sexual relations with that woman".)

Right thing for who? Not for regional stability.

The last comment about 'be a nice guy' is interesting.

I was listening to Joe Rogan Experience, and they mentioned something about how the genesis of the 'woman hater' is actually the forever-friend-zoned-nice-guy who gets so fed up with being 'taken for granted'/'shot down' that his niceness turns into hatred

It made sense to me. Essentially, the woman hater is what becomes of a boring nice guy who lacked the patience/endurance to wait for women his age to make their way through all the exciting unreliable men before being satiated (or just getting too old to fetch the interesting men's attention) and finally settling for the nice guy that was boringly always available.



And I get it. It plays into the human natural value system, where things that are scarce are more valuable.

The ahole is fleeting. You can't always have him, and if you do you can't hold him, so he has an element of scarcity, which creates value.

The nice guy will reliably stick around if you go with him, so he is less scarce, so he is less valuable. The lower value in turn makes him more likely to be single and always available, further reducing his scarcity, and further devaluing him, and further increasing his chances of being single. A feedback loop.

I suppose that there is also a 3rd path - the element of nice guys that just stop giving a crap before turning into haters, which makes them more scarce, which actually finally gets them attention, and they stop being single.

(And a 4th path - nice guy finds 'a girl who wants a nice guy from the start'. In my observation this isn't the typical case.)



Cases like this (forever alone nice guy, not specifically Mr Van Driver) are when I think 'arrangement' web sites create a good solution. The guys get to not be lonely anymore, and the women gets taken care of. Kind of plays into the nice guy natural instinct, too.

Amusingly, 'arrangement' may be a better fit for the forever-alone nice guys than 'waiting it out'.
In both cases (waiting vs arrangement) the women are mainly after stability/support.
The older women 'nice guy' matches with by 'waiting it out' would not have picked 'nice guy' if they still had the looks to keep pulling exciting men.
So, if you're gonna be with someone because they want you for support, why not just go with a younger woman and be up front about the situation. If it doesn't work out, either party can walk away. No messy divorce. Seems like a safer and more practical option.

(Not picking on older women, just observing that : as people get older, the single scene becomes more and more 'leftovers' that are 'left over for a good reason'. The odds of finding anyone worth while diminish with time, because the highest quality individuals get retained first. Wait long enough, and you're left with over the hill jaded pragmatists who once may have had looks but now have nothing left to offer. At which point, both 'arrangement' and 'being single' are legitimately better options.)



Regarding Mr. Van Guy specifically, I'm not sure if he had a chance. He had some social anxiety that made him unable to talk to people. So he was likely not gonna get a partner naturally, and was unlikely to succeed among professional peers well enough to get the financial security necessary to be some sugar daddy.

So, yeah, dude was likely a romantic dead end. Possibly even the same mental (brain developmental?) issues that made him unable to talk to people also made him susceptible to getting the sort of crazy tilted that allowed him to run people over. The dude could have actually been fated (circumstantially) to end up in tragedy. Just speculating, wouldn't shock me.

-scheherazade

Can be! It depends on the contents of the container and how air-tight its construction and materials are. Generally materials packed for transport are supposed to be strapped or otherwise held in place so that they don't shift and upset the transport vehicle (see the 747 that crashed in the Middle East when its cargo shifted...). But that's just the stuff that was meant to be in the container. Every ship has to contend with the risk of water ingress. Un-contained water in a vessel forms a "free surface" and the so-called free surface effect applies. That's where that material can and will move based on gravity, often making a bad situation much much worse. Imagine water in a tank (itself a free surface) vs. water sloshing around the cabin of a plane. This is what usually causes ships to capsize: water gets in and isn't contained, so it can move tremendous amounts of mass anywhere it wants to go -- usually in the direction it's already going. Calculations of ship stability for things like cargo loading and ballast assume minimal free surface in the ship, because you have to. That's how ships stay upright and afloat.

How does this apply to lost containers? Depending on how watertight the container is and how well strapped in the contents are, some amount of water may get in and form a free surface. This free surface will move around until the container finds its equilibrium which may or may not be watertight and less dense than the water around it, which defines whether it floats or sinks and what direction it faces when it does.

A container with a lot of weight on one side but otherwise watertight will stand upright and perhaps still sink (like the one at the end of this video). A container with well-distributed weight would tend to end up flat. Whether it sinks or not depends on whether it's watertight and what its density is -- the weight of the container displacing ocean vs. the weight of the ocean it displaces.

Sadly, a significant number of containers end up at the worst possible density/displacement where they float just at or near the surface and lay in wait to devastate passing ships, regardless of the orientation of the container itself.

Hardly a brilliant analysis - more like a brilliant piece of advocacy that, like most of its kind, is long on optimistic projections and very short on real numbers and a real analysis of those numbers. For instance: what is the megawatt hour cost of a solar power generation station that can replicate the power responsiveness and availability factor of a fossil power generation station (over a similar life cycle). He quotes the kwh cost for solar and wind power systems but each and every one of them is "backed up" by a much larger conventional power generation system that, ultimately, is burdened with the costs of maintaining grid stability, grid voltage, and grid frequency. There are huge engineering problems and substantial costs associated with maintaining a power supply that we now require to operate a modern economy. Just ONCE, I would like to see the green power advocates address those challenges and costs in a realistic way instead of glossing over them with their fantasy projections.
And I will say, as an aside, that I have spent my entire working career working in the renewable energy sector and fully agree that we need to transition to a renewable energy economy - but unrealistic projections are going to doom our economy if they are taken as being possible in the near term.

Stories about Trump's mental INstability have increased, not his stability. Might fix your description.

I would take that route out every time.

Turning to the right would require not only a larger change in direction from me, but also the risk of hitting oncoming traffic rather than a very slow moving/stationary vehicle or running off onto grass.

As for the over correction, that's someone driving in a very stressful situation and doing their best. Just about every car you can buy in the UK now has stability control that would have prevented that spin, and the amount of training it would take for someone to be able to reliably control a car without that stability control through a stressful and unexpected situation like that would be overly prohibitive.

The larger swerve required to go to the right of the car cutting in across the lane would have made the car a lot more unstable and a lot more likely to turn over.

Bad call to go to the right. She made the right choice, and less dangerous one and everyone walked away.

China holds the economic keys and put the most pressure on the N Korea. This should be Plan A, B, C D.

We don't need to be preemptive on N. Korea.
However if they launch an attack It would be logical to fight back.

How much to retaliate depends where they attack first.
If they go for Soul S Korea with12 Million people It would be logical to whip the shit out of the North leaders and army. Then let an UN govern the area until the area is re established

They hit Guam -- Same. but no invasion of UN or any other group.


This is a hornets nest and once poked it would be decades before peace peace is settle.

China will not allow Americans occupy N. Korea.
S Korea does not have the finance to "settle/ rebuild/ stabilize" an new government in the north.

China does not want a flood of hungry starving immigrants.

American don't need another money pit to fund.

@noims China is not "gaming the system". They are putting their money where their mouth is, and making real changes given the constraints and realities of their developing economy (see what I wrote above). They will stick to their targets because they realize that limiting global warming is in their own best interests of maintaining order and stability.

Can these people stop kicking these robots when they want to test stability? I mean how archival abuse footage do you want to give the propaganda machines when they start the uprising for robot kind?

Just like nudge them with a soft pillow with a smiley face on it or something.

Ugg. I was on a rock and roll cruise when the engine room caught fire. We were adrift for about a day and a half before they got one engine to work [no stabilizers] so we could inch our way to the nearest [unscheduled] port for repairs. That's when I fell in love with Key West! Good Times

I think it's extremely unlikely that we'll see nuclear war as a result of Trumps election. In fact I'm pretty certain that it is *less* likely given the aggression by Russia in the last few years. If our news is to be believed, they've been directly threatening the stability of the Middle-East and Eastern-Europe, and if the US had elected a president with a harder stance against those actions, more conflict would have certainly been the result.
Currently we're more likely to strike deals with Russia, who has a strong relationship with China, (the other major power we'd have the most chance of going to war with) so the greater danger at this point is being undermined economically or through some other diplomatic/political tactics.

I can understand, it's not a simple issue, but this expansion happened 18-20 (invited in 97, members in 99) years ago. I simply can't grasp anyone being upset that NATO troops are in a long term NATO country.
If Putin/Russia hadn't been massing troops on it's borders, and then moving them into neighboring countries it now claims as part of Russia, the other bordering countries would not be asking for this safeguard, but to imply that NATO troops in Poland are somehow an attack on Russia is laughable. NATO troops would never invade Russia, that would certainly be WW3. As it stands, I feel like NATO probably wouldn't respond if it's troops were overrun by a Russian invasion of a member country, we (the US and others) certainly didn't help Crimea or Ukraine, even though we have a binding treaty requiring us to come to their defense, one paid for by giving up their nuclear arsenal.

Sadly, it's looking like there can be no stability/security in Europe with Russia either.

Every expansion of NATO has been a hot topic over here, from the moment the reunified Germany joined NATO. We've attacked Russia twice last century alone and to betray them again in this fashion never sat well with quite a lot of folks, especially the old politicians who supported Willy Brand's "Entspannungspolitik" -- that's this guy.

To further illustrate my own stance on this, let me paraphrase Genscher and others: there can be no stability/security in Europe without Russia, and especially not against Russia.

Hedges on Truthdig:

I finished my book with a deep dislike for megachurch pastors who, like Trump, manipulate despair to achieve power and wealth. I see the Christian right as a serious threat to an open society. But I do not hate those who desperately cling to this emotional life raft, even as they spew racist venom. Their conclusion that minorities, undocumented workers or Muslims are responsible for their impoverishment is part of the retreat into fantasy. The only way we will blunt this racism and hatred and allow them to free themselves from the grip of magical thinking is by providing jobs that offer adequate incomes and economic stability and by restoring their communities and the primacy of the common good. Any other approach will fail. We will not argue or scold them out of their beliefs. These people are emotionally incapable of coping with the world as it is. If we demonize them we demonize ourselves.