The US Midwest, as well as much of Canada, is built like that. Winters are long and cold, so houses are more or less built to keep heat in, but not to keep heat out, or cool down quickly once hot. I say more or less because historically energy has been so cheap that instead of properly insulating like people do in Europe for example, many just turn up the heat in winter. So even when people can afford to buy and run an AC unit and the power grid cooperates, the AC can often only cool one room, and maybe not even quite handle that sufficiently.

In historically temperate areas like the pacific northwest, homes aren’t really built with extreme temperatures in mind, so anything outside of the usual 5-25°C range is very uncomfortable very quickly.

We have investigated ourselves and found no evidence of wrongdoing.

We also have no idea as to why quality engineers are turning up dead.

Thanks for your professional input, I really appreciate it.

Your last paragraph is especially important. I overlooked that part, although it’s obvious in retrospect.

Just wait until the then-president pulls a Trudeau (Senior) by declaring martial law to put an end to the separatists.

In case you didn’t know, there’s a browser plug-in called Sponsorblock which help skip those in-video ad segments. It relies on user input to work, so someone has to watch the video and timestamp the ad segments and maybe a couple other important points in the video, but it works really well most of the time.

The entire EU supply chain is subsidized.

Ah yes, the age old crime of “spamming” news on a … checks the title … news forum.

I had also bought the standard line that it’s about imbalanced or incorrect brain chemistry, but I’m not sure anymore if that theory holds any water.

There are a lot of criticisms leveled against it, but I found the book Lost Connections by Johann Hari to be incredibly thought provoking. This was even before I had gone full tankie and read a bit into the links between mental health and capitalism. The tl;dr thesis of Lost Connections is that anti-depressants are cover up the symptoms for a time, but the root of the issue is a broken social structure, for which capitalism is responsible.

That’s fair. I also didn’t mean to imply that anti-depressants aren’t currently without value. Even just speaking from personal experience, my family would look a lot different without them.

I always wonder if anti-depressants would even be necessary in a people’s state on its way to communism.

My take on it was that they’re hoping for another Yeltsin, someone who will ring the NYSE bell just like Zelenskyy and announce that Russia is for sale.

Wait, so workplace SA is now just casually called “unusual” and “boundary-blurring” relationships?

All of the US officials and thought leaders in the international politics sphere at that time knew what NATO expansion would mean and knew what concerns USSR/Russia had, and at least publicly took them seriously. I’m not coming with the exact names now, but it was types like Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Mearsheimer, etc. There’s even a white paper from one of them, probably during the Clinton administration, discussing how a proposed expansion is playing with fire and should not be considered.

The agreement at the time, which IIRC the West German chancellor confirmed, was that NATO would expand eastward in that the DDR would be taken over by the BRD, but beyond that the alliance would move no closer to Russia.

The US debt is meaningless so long as the USD remains the global reserve currency. With the current trends of dedollarization that may not last for much longer.

It may be a splitting of hairs as well, but I would argue that domestic US financial policy vis a vis US workers has been austere for fifty years. Expenditures on private industry only grow, while any and all services for the services for the people are ruthlessly cut.

I usually look through a few reviews, both on computer journalism sites and forums for real world experiences.

This one seems perfectly sufficient, especially for the price. Won’t break any records, but it’s not supposed to. It’s better suited as a secondary storage drive though, there are better options out there in terms of an SSD to install your OS to, specifically ones with some DRAM cache and a higher TBW.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crucial-p3-ssd-review

https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/crucial-p3

Hey remember how the Rebels were modeled after the Vietnamese resistance and the Empire was modeled after the US empire?

This was all well before the school curriculum got completely changed too. A christofascist and card carrying member of the “victims of communism foundation” got elected and changed the school curriculum, because it was too woke of course.

I’m dealing with some of that kind of “generational trauma” in my own family now and it’s really interesting. I’m far enough removed from it that it’s not a big deal for me, and the people closer to it didn’t turn it into any sort of amped up family mythology, but it’s still quite a trip unpacking it all. I took it all at face value for most of my life, thinking, as you say, it’s my great-grandparents’ life stories, who am I to question them. Until a couple years ago I realized they sound pretty made up, and sure enough, I’m basically descended from Kulaks.

Wholesome US espionage-industrial-complex backdoor!

It was a long time ago and the memory isn’t clear, but I remember a short story in which the protagonist character is either run over by a tank or disappears in some forested area after being shot down by soldiers. It was horribly graphic and entirely inappropriate for eleven year olds.

They were most definitely not.