They do happen.

Some friends of mine recently lost their house to fire. the fire department is pretty sure it started with a Li battery pack that overcharged.

Remember last year we were reading how NYC wanted to restrict e-bikes because the batteries lead to apartment fires.

I am saying all Li battery devices are dangerous they are not, but there is a lot of cheap imported crap out there that has very little regulation on charging if any and usually nothing to protect from excessive current draw for any reason.

Li chemistry batteries certainly do pose a greater fire risk when haphazardly shoved into circuits and physical housing with no real engineering as compared to older chemistries like PbS04. There is enough anecdotal evidence to make that clear.

Yeah but lets also recognize that Android SUCKS, it SUCKS hard.

You need a lot better hardware to deliver the same experience, on Android, especially in terms of memory.

I guess the sugar water thing is a reference to Scully having been CEO at Pepsi and than latter apple during its struggling period. Trying to make some claim about phones being marketed increasingly as consumable products rather than hardgoods and...

The whole thing is really forced and seems like a writer who had a few to many convinced themselves they had a good idea for an article, wrote half of it, probably realized it was crap the next day, but figured they could clean it up drive a few clicks with it anyway.

Liquidation of the Navy would be stupid, that is about the most useful of the armed forces.

We should probably get rid of the Army, we don't realistically face a land war, and we don't need an airforce. Naval aviation is probably quite adequate for defense.

If we dumped NATO membership and stopped playing team America world police, reducing our role to keeping international waters safe for shipping and commerce. We could ensure own security by getting out neuclear weapons treaties and making certain we have enough missiles with MIRV tech ready to go on the launch pads and an aggressive re-assertion of the first-strike-policy, nobody would ever threaten the territorial US and we could save a ton money.

Yeah but let's be perfectly honest here, while there were bad actors like IBM before, there was some restraint provided by investors, or at least the desire to no scare them away or face shareholder driven ousting of the board etc.

Passive investing - has been the major contributor to the "whatever brings asset growth or enables dividends to the shareholders this quarter" vision of fiduciary responsibility and corporate governance should look like mentality.

When the people who buying stocks directly controlled/picked what companies they bought there was an incentive to be good state/national/world citizen. Now that it is all 401k money and buy/hold/sell decisions are made by algorithm or a handful of fund managers evaluated solely on the returns the generate, that is not the case. Management at most firms does not give a hoot about anyone's opinion other than institutional investors.

I think the 401k and the abstraction of money management into target date funds and broad asset classes has deeply hurt if not outright severed the relationship between American capitalism and American Democracy.

The result is most of nation has at least some of their money invested in companies who engage in practices they would find despicable - that is warped. Worse they have no easy way to shift those assets elsewhere.

An unsupportable claim if ever I have seen one.

The problem the GPP ignores is that when it comes to forest ecology and wildlife, well a lot of the things people want to do lower greenhouse emissions are pretty bad for what forests most need to be successful and healthy, that is large unbroken acreages.

Every 100 ft wide miles long path you bulldoze thru a forest for powerlines to your new solar or wind facility does a hell of lot more harm than a little CO2 increase. People need to recognize just how incompatible it all is.

Reality is the only answer to more power where we actually need it, that is "environmentally friendly" is neuclear, and that we also know is economically ruinous. It is simply to costly to maintain, secure, and handle the end of life phase. In the event of an accident the harm is so concentrated and so long term is cannot be resolved with local resources. It is a solution that only works in a few parts of the world really.

Two things will actually save us:
1) Peak population
2) efficent, relatively clean oil/gas extraction and use.

It does not seem like Shatner is exactly butt hurt about it either, he is just stating the facts about what he got paid, for what and what he did not get paid for.

The fact is he took the job for agreed upon compensation, and he did so at a time when residuals were not the norm. The industry changed after. Reality is had Star Trek been made a few years later he'd probably a much wealthier man. That is true of a lot of financial success and failure, its an accident of timing.

If you had a good job and cash on hand in 2k8/9 you could have bought real-estate cheap and be selling now making fantastic gains. On the other hand if you happened to have bought in say 2003 and found you really needed to move in 2008 that probably hurt a lot...

Similar thing, there are handful of new-er restaurants in town that appear outwardly to be quite a success. They have exactly the same format/formula and are in the same physical buildings as the ones that failed during pandemic.

While I generally believe in the self-made man, that cream rises to the top etc, I can also recognize that how meteoric that rise is, can depend a lot of being in the right place at the right moment.

Masking as a policy was stupid because everyone in healthcare reasonably should have known that telling a public with no training to mask was going to lead to mostly terribly in effective masking, because ALL of them had to be trained to use masks properly and they knew most of the public was not so trained.

Masks may not have been stupid but requiring the public to do it certainly was!

Ditto for the vaccines, all they did was make people feel like they were suddenly invincible again. People got the jab and went back to their old habits of zero precaution, like not washing hands frequently and sharing drinking containers etc. Why because officials and media absolutely did lead them to believe it was near perfect protection.

All that ignores the moral travesty to trampling everyone's 1A, and 4A rights. Which should also be viewed as unacceptable. This time it was a health crisis but we now have a public conditioned to accept crisis as a justification for just about anything. The current administration is using a legitimate security crisis to justify a lot of very possibly extra constitutional enforcement actions. Speaking as someone who absolutely favors the general effort toward mass deportation and illegal aliens (of all stripes) I still do worry about the way ICE is grabbing people off the street. Its is PAINFULLY evident to me that justifications used for COVID lock downs, mask mandates, etc are different veneer on pretty much the same arguments that were used to support grabbing any light brown person walking thru a Home Depot parking lot, and other 'papers please' policies. Hey some of you guys might be illegals so in the name of safety we care going to search everyone at your peacefully assembly, its fundamentally not different then hey all of you in this Church are subject to arrest and forbiden to gather because someone might carry COIVD>

My general response to every who support the lockdowns and mask policies and now tries to lecture me about civil rights is this. Well you did not stand up for mine because you were scared of a cold, so I am not standing up for yours now FUCK OFF>

two things they do have that substantial housing investment. That is super important.

The other thing is they don't have much for raining days with that. Suppose the total a car. Easy to do these days, with the repair costs on modern cars. The delta between what insurance pays and what a new car (even a used one) likely costs could easily be 10k.

Add a few medical events and desire for life improving equipment / treatments not covered, a major home repairs like needing a new fridge, dishwasher, HVAC or water tank that isn't a homeowners claim or does not hit the deductible and you could draw that 200k down pretty quickly.

I am not saying they will have problems, but it would not take to long a bad luck streak to go from comfortable to just scraping by with only 200k in savings.

your biggest expense healthcare there was 'for a family of four' if you are retiring, you should not generally have more then a single dependent, your spouse.

o right away we can at least half that cost. We should be able to further reduce it by including medicare, you probably sitll want supplemental medical insurance, and likely a dental plan.

Housing, again lots of people retiring that still have mortgage payment, that is probably a mistake unless it is for strategic reasons like you have a really good fixed rate and are not paying it off because you are getting better returns on the cash but easily can... At any rate the cost should not be 1500 a month that should be several hundred in maintenance and upkeep costs perhaps but not 1k. I know there are counter arguments and small number of counter examples in terms of history, but generally speaking non-strategic renting (IE you have a temporary position / contract somewhere you don't plan to stay after) is generally a bad bet. Better to buy something, anything, however you have to finance it in most cases as far as real-estate goes, at least long term.

Next consider you have some social security income that will offset what has to come out of your portfolio.

I think most couples could/can retire comfortably on 1.2million, even today. That is still a big pile of money that for a lot of folks is hard to amass maybe even out of reach but it isn't 2million either.

People have to be realistic though, if you are going to reach retirement age, still have dependents, and insist on renting home/apartment/condo/etc close in town - well you are not going to be able to retire, unless you are already independently wealthy.. Its just not going to happen. Our whole economic system just isnt structured for that. If the kids are expected to still be on your dime, and you don't have a housing 'investment' in addition to a financial portfolio yeah better get real and come up with a different plan now, because you're not going make it.

Yeah those views that were literally the driving force for many of this nations early settlers in the first place and so critical to our nations founders they cited them specifically in the Declaration of independence and created constitutional protections for them.

Yet somehow Frankfort school neomarxist asshats like you have convinced half the population that your fully imaginary implicit 'substantive due process rights to marry your dog' TRUMP our explicitly written 1A rights.

It is extremely telling that about the only German law that has survived from the Adolf Hitler regime is about compulsory state education, and how angry the left gets when there is any push-back or scaling back of Federalized education programs here.

You know the best way to identify an actual Nazi in the US, hint they call themselves Democrats and scream Nazi at everyone else.

The struggles your kids have are obvious. You are trying to fix stupid with education. That does not work. No amount of studding will help with the fact they are obviously borderline retards.

You can get between 3 - 4 GPA in most American high schools by keeping a chair warm and scrawling thru your homework in a single study hall period and the bus ride in the morning.

If your kids were working that hard the problem was THEM not the school.

for one thing because it isnt 1996 anymore. "Regular people" largely have lived experience now with digital media, and streamed or download based distribution.

I am not defending Amazon, "buy" ought to mean some transfer of ownership of something, even if it is a 'license' but then the buyer becomes on the owner of the contract and there should be no-legal-way for seller to unilaterally alter the terms after the sale. Any license that allows such a thing really should not be considered legally valid. Even then you will obviously have to have some provisions for what if the server becomes obsolete and is shut down even while the parent company remains a going concern. Can Amazon just kill Prime and create NewPrime another streaming video service and make everyone buy their stuff again, NewPrime should have to be "materially different" at least, then everyone gets to go to court to find out what that means exactly.

You have zero evidence for any of that and the assertion is a retarded as you are.

Trump obviously does not believe there are any unexplainable connections between him and Epstein, or that he ever did anything with Epstein that would ultimately be judged unacceptable by the public.

He cautioned a lot of names would turn up, but also ran on releasing those files. Trump also being Trump expected to win! He knew he'd be in a position to release the files and given his other follow thru probably expected to do. Trump is innocent and he knows he innocent and everyone else will too if the stuff actually comes out.

The real issue with releasing the files is obvious to anyone with two functioning brain cells. After the election Trump found out someone close to him or some critical House, Senate, Court members are really implicated and it really could be anyone including family members. It also might be something like one layer removed, could be some close associate of Bondi or something like that as well. With razor thin majorities nobody knows politically how that plays out or how to deal with it. Naturally nobody told him before hand because they either did not really think he could win, or were just afraid to tell the man bad news (a legitimate problem with Trump style management).

One thing we do have evidence of is that the DOJ is sitting on a lot of information the administration and nominally people like Bondi, Bongino, Patel, have near total procedural control over. The could probably have some LLM redact all the names and address of victims and release it quickly. Would AI get it wrong and enable doxing those people, certainly. However nobody cares about that kind of boobery anymore in government, the public is totally desensitized to it, it would certainly be less of scandal and less of political problem then what they are doing now is for them. So I'd say confidently even as a ardent Trump supporter, he is protecting someone(s) politically important to the GOP or a familiarly member.