From an administration with low favorability ratings, two people with high unfavorability ratings. Foolproof plan. No notes!

I’m pretty sure you’d still have to make quarterly estimated payments in that case to avoid potential fines.

That clause doesn’t limit the scope to only members of Congress or laws they write. Supreme Court interpretation, 14th amendment, etc. have expanded that to government writ large.

Free speech protections generally extend to government employees, except in the scope of speech related to their official duties, to my understanding. It would be difficult to seriously argue a pride flag in someone’s office in the past meets that criteria of official duties. My faith in the courts to consistently hold that precedent is not high these days, however.

Americans are not practiced in large enough numbers in protest, demonstration, civil disobedience, and solidarity for a large scale general or rent strike to be successful. There needs to be a ramp up period with increasingly more frequent and expansive demonstrations for that to become practical.

It is because Apple has been dominant in the premium smartphone market for years, including in China. Huawei have started to make a big dent in that tier in China after eating Apple’s lunch in the lower price categories.

This is a feature that Huawei brought to market before Apple, which was kind of a first. Until recently, they were just following Apple’s innovations. It’s early and I wouldn’t want one now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if smartphones-that-fold-out-into-tablets was the standard by the end of the decade.

Just housing them is really damn effective in my experience. They recently opened a pallet shelter “village” in my area. Since, I basically never see encampments, and the number of visibly unhoused folks has dropped a lot (since they just look like everybody else due to regular access to hygiene facilities). According to the cops, they’ve had zero calls out to the village.

We should still do all the other things, but just put up a ton of free basic housing and you can make enormous visual progress.

I was at a friends and family barbecue recently, and it just so happened none of the parents there brought tablets for their kids. It was just kids running around the backyard being kids. The parents generally let them do whatever but were attentive enough to prevent them climbing on the shed and stuff.

I can’t remember the last time there wasn’t some kid glued to a screen at that type of party. It was a joy to see.

And he never shut up about how embarrassing Biden apparently was.

If one of my friends showed me a collection of hats with their name on it, I would pull them aside and ask if they have considered getting professional help.

Technically, yes criminal conversion is certainly a thing. If the laptop was expensive and you lived in a really low crime area where the cops were bored that might get pursued. My experience is that cops are practically more likely to say, absent a court order, to sue the person because it’s he-said she-said. It’s just too much effort for a potentially muddy situation.

You’d be surprised how often things that are theft/technically theft are not actually pursued by police in the US. The property crime clearance rate (resulting in at least arrest) is <15%.

Holding onto a rental car, on the other hand, is both expensive and cut-and-dried enough (contract states definitive end date ahead of time) to be a bad idea.

No, at least not in the US. It does not meet the legal definition of theft because (I believe) the property was initially acquired legally.

Otherwise, the police would be doing repo for things like delinquent car loans, which is dystopian corporate hellscape stuff.

In my experience, transplanting within the US has more to do with a significant shift in culture/region. You’re a transplant if you move from Maine to Texas. You just moved if you relocated from Maine to New Hampshire.

I imagine many of those are ordinances intended to regulate fraternities and sororities—or similar college student shared housing situations.

An acquaintance of mine has basically been doing this for years in the form of slop code written by the cheapest outsourcing firms on earth who cannot comprehend rudimentary requirements and have no concept of coding standards. But management insists this is the most cost effective way of doing things, rather than just having a competent group of qualified people do it right from the start.

It seems as depressing as you’d think.

I don’t have a Boston accent (RI) and say Wusstah, as does everyone from the area (including surrounding MA) I’ve known.

It’s more Wusstah than Wooster in my experience.

It starts when the popcorn begins to cool enough that both it’s safe to ram mouthfuls and it’s a race against the clock to finish before it becomes cold.

McDonald’s stopped using beef tallow for fries in 1990. I suppose that might be relatively recent if you are an elf.

I dunno about that. I bought a house well within what I could afford. The bank actually thought we made a mistake and reminded us they would approve a loan double the size of what we asked.

All it takes is two or three really expensive things needing work at the same time to blow your budget out of the water. And often there’s no clear answer on what’s truly urgent.

Water is entropy manifest to constantly remind you that anything you do is temporary and laughably futile on geologic timescales.

Gotta love having an old house. It’s simultaneously reassuring and deeply stressful when a professional looks at something that seems really bad and just says, “Well, I can tell from the layers of paint that’s been there a long time. So if it hasn’t become a problem in all that time, it’s probably fine. But give me a call if your house starts falling apart.”