According to my British friends Yorkshire Gold is legit. I don’t know if it’s as strong though. Not much of a tea drinker myself, just reporting what I’ve been told.

I named my truck, but “Old Clunky” doesn’t exactly jump out as the kind of name you’d want to advertise.

The cat’s for scale.

My wife’s old iMac over here. It’s lightning fast too.

Or, you know, they want to make sure that the hostages aren’t executed before they agree to a cease fire.

This is like asking for medical advice on a naturopathic forum; sure you might get some vaguely correct answers, but mostly it’s just going to be a lot of feel-good nonsense from partisan idiots who want to see the world in black and white.

Typical oversimplified tripe. Soviet bodies played a huge role, but US and British mechanized force projection, naval power and industrial capacity were at least as important.

It’s also just bullshit that the Axis had already lost. That’s the worst kind of historical revisionism. It might be obvious to us looking back, but it wasn’t even remotely obvious to anyone alive then.

Close. What they were worried about was a hot war with the Soviets. There was also a great deal of uncertainty about Japanese willingness to continue to fight. It’s simply not the case that they had clear unambiguous intelligence on Japanese leadership’s intentions, which makes sense since there were several schools of thought among the Japanese.

Any respected historian on the subject will tell you that it’s way more complicated and nuanced than your average social media user is aware of. If, like Truman, you honestly believed that using atomic bombs on Japan would ultimately result in less loss of life, on a purely mathematical basis it was the only moral decision.

I mean, that’s part of the given justification for the veto, but it doesn’t take a PhD in international relations to figure out that the real reason is obviously that both the US and Israel --and a number of other relevant players-- are currently knee-deep in operations and negotiations and that a cease fire, by changing the dynamic on the ground, would seriously screw those efforts.

My guess is that Israel has a plan that it wants to execute before implementing any cease-fire, and that the US is on-board with it for now.

Unlike most social media users, I don’t feel like I know enough to take a position on whether this veto is morally justifiable or not. On its face it seems kind of lame, but I can easily think of reasons why it might actually be entirely justified. We will see.

Well that’s awkward.

Iran is Persian, not Arab. They are also currently engaged in a power struggle by proxy with the KSA, ostensibly to determine which of them will become the region’s dominant power. There is no world in which KSA sides with Iran, and as they go (MBS really) so go most of the other big players in the Arab world.

That’s totally fair. My union threatened to strike and ran pickets in 2019 and basically got what we asked for, little though it was.

We authorized a strike in 2022 and the signatory contractors basically gave us most of what we wanted because they didn’t want to lose out on the “CHIPS” act money.

Now here we are with billions on the table, and I think it’s time to strike again.

There are also regional dynamics at play, but fortunately my union is on top of all that and we are planning accordingly.

I got a star-shaped paperweight with my name on it together with 100 dollars worth of gift cards.

This for two years in a row, because everyone really needs two star-shaped paperweights with their name on them.

The truth of the above statement is borne out by its sheer pedestrian banality in the sense that it’s not something anyone would ever bother to lie about.

The sad part about it is that I am a dues-paying union member. One can only imagine how much worse it is for the non-union blokes.

At least the union gives me a way to fight back and to have a little dignity and self-respect.

Wikipedia is kind of wrong in the sense that there’s always been Palestinian Jews.

The issue is that due to Zionism, a ton of European Jews moved into the region starting at the turn of the last century and accelerating following the Holocaust.

Said Jews then set about building a thriving western-style industrialized democracy that was opposed at every turn by an Arab and Islamic population that opposed its very existence on what can only be thought of as religious grounds.

All of which can only be taken as an indication of how deeply corrupting and counter-progressive are virtually all forms of institutionalized organized religion.

Fuck all of them. Organized religion sucks ass and should rightly be seen as a vestige of the past.

My local went on strike once in 2019, it lasted one day and everyone who picketed got $200.

Last year we threatened to strike, had an authorization vote, but our signatory contractors association wanted nothing to do with it and we basically got everything we asked for with no work stoppage.

The deal in my part of the country is that what with the CHIPS Act, there’s literally billions of dollars on the table and our signatory contractors can’t afford to get bogged down in labor disputes.

The upshot is that it leaves the unions sitting pretty since they can’t access these incredibly lucrative contracts without using highly-trained union labor.

There’s more to do with EMRs and the like, but I won’t bore you with the details.

Interesting.

It sounds like you have a completely different system from that which exists in the Anglophone countries.

Here in the US and Canada we would never dream of having our union reps on the payroll of ownership.

That makes zero sense since it would mean that they would be relying on our signatory contractors for their paycheck when what we want is precisely the opposite; an independent union that can bargain on behalf of the membership

Having our unions funded and paid for by the membership is precisely the point since it means that it’s our union, not the company’s.

Yes. Union staff needs to make a living too. It’s also how we pay members when we strike.
My union is also in Canada. How do you do it in your country?

100 percent true. Going to the union is the last thing I want any of my people to do. It just complicates things.

Fortunately, I and my fellow supervisors are all union members too and we all know and are on good terms with the union officers down at the hall, so even if someone does go straight to them, it’s usually worked out with a phone call. The key is to be fair and not be a dick.

Gross.