TLDR (if to be believed) UHC kept denying claims for his mom's chronic pain, which he watched her suffer with for years. Ideologically it's incoherent, because (if the writing is to be believed) it's clearly a deeply personal matter he's trying to rationalize.
The assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in 2010 showed a pretty high level of coordination and sophistication, from what I remember of Dubai's investigation.
An unusual feature of modernity is people who regularly make life or death decisions for others rarely actually face threat of violence for making those decisions.
Heath Insurance companies are the Designated Bad Guy in the US's socialized healthcare system (since they're the only entity placing downward pressure on the infinite amounts of money that could be spent given the lack of price signals everywhere else in the system) so the CEO is simply playing his part, but I think the return of the "pitchfork waving mob" solution is an interesting development we haven't seen for awhile.
A few years ago some republican state legislators fled Oregon to prevent a quorum for some vote, and the governor was either threatening to send or sent State police to round them up.
Ultimately that scenario also used threat of State violence and "arrest" to force an unfavorable legislative outcome.
Though admittedly in the West we aren't so brazen as to use the military for such ends. Instead we'll just threaten to release the footage from the coke orgies that Madison Crawford talked about shortly before the Republican party "coincidentally" pulled all funding and support from his re-election campaign.
Basically you cook like you're a restaurant: cook big pots of (eg.) chili or split pea soup or some other hearty thing you can just throw in a crock pot and go. Cook a whole brisket or big pork shoulder. Bag it up in smaller portions and either put it in the freezer or fridge depending on how much you're going to eat in the next few days.
When you start out doing this you eat a lot of the same meal for the entire week, but as you start building a "collection" of food in the freezer you can start to mix and match. It helps if you have something like a chest freezer to use for this.
I also started getting into pressure canning earlier this year, especially raw meats. So I'll buy a giant thing of pork or beef, cube it, pressure can it all, and then I have it for whenever I want to (eg.) add it into some mac and cheese. Also can be done instead of freezing your giant pots of chili/soup since it's not that much more effort.
One thing to note with cooking with pumpkins for people in the US: if you are cooking with the big Halloween pumpkins (which don't taste like much but are edible) they release a lot of water when they cook. I usually have to drain the liquid released from the pumpkin after it cooks before I do anything else with it.
If you're doing a soup then obviously that doesn't matter.
Make sure you continue filing your Federal income tax forms on time, Reid.
If he's a target then...you're killing him. So you're killing the guy you don't like. Isn't that good?
It's like the castle level in Hitman 2 where you kill the two annoying black sisters. I love that level because the objective is to kill the annoying people.
Or the Elusive Target in Hitman 1 where you kill Harry and Marv from Home Alone. They're bad guys; you're killing them. This is supposed to be a good thing.
I think you hit the nail on the head: when we were children playing these systems the controllers were fine, because they were primarily designed for children. And by the time we got old enough that they might've felt a bit small we'd gotten used to them.
So from that standpoint I'd say the engineers understood ergonomics very well.
Maybe if that happens we can get native GUI applications again instead of everything being some damned web app running in Electron.
The Christian school I attended forbade Harry Potter due to it glorifying witchcraft, and I had friends whose parents forbade them from watching Simpsons, Family Guy, etc... due to its vulgarity.
Whether this was a majority view or not I can't say, but the Church wasn't exactly making it hard to sell that narrative. They had a similar problem with humorless scolds as the left has today. And what they offered as an alternative to mainstream culture (eg. the Left Behind series which was a big thing around that time) was often heavy-handed and just not very good.
Elon can't do everything. Needs to be a big cultural shift that says rich people can do cool "passion project" type stuff with their money again instead of endlessly building wells in Africa that get stripped for parts by the locals.
Paul Allen funded some passion project stuff up here (Cinerama was probably the most visible one but there were others) that his advisers almost certainly told him was a bad investment. Lo and behold, when he died the estate divested from them.
I'd be tempted to get one for a buck. That campaign's going to be memory-holed, and 30 years from now there's probably not going to be much physical evidence that it ever existed.
One of the causes that the left started to take up in the late 00s that sadly was jettisoned was the idea of letting kids play and do errands unsupervised. I forget what they called it, but there was a whole movement that was a reaction to the "helicopter parenting" that had taken hold. But that idea of giving kids space to explore and create would have been much more appealing to men than what they're doing now.
Now the right seems to have taken up that mantle, probably because the parties at this point have effectively split along gender lines. I'm not sure the left is capable of reversing that, but if they are it'd probably require a James Carville type to be given unilateral authority to throw all the fags and hags out of positions of authority in the party.
I assume the connotations were similar to those of the "Bratz" dolls from the 00s: something like "chic with attitude".
It was a running gag in American media at the time that the candidates from both parties were the same. And if Al Gore had actually managed to win and had been in office on 9/11, I have no doubt everything would have happened exactly as it did under Bush.
The modern Democratic party is a party by and for the HR department, and their candidate was the personification of that sort of scold. They suck all the fun out of everything.
Also if you're 18-24 you were either in high school or college during WuFlu, and the Dems were largely who were responsible for sucking the joy out of the most formative experiences of your young adult life. If they did that to me I'd be pissed at them too.
I swear some people are so used to losing they don't know what to do when they win.
Or they don't remember that 24 years ago the thing everyone cheered for at Rep campaign rallies was privatizing social security. Mass deportations would have been a fever dream.
Honestly if you could point to one person other than Trump who deserves credit for the win it's Elon.
Both the "Haitian migrants eating pets" and "Venezuelan gangs taking over apartment complexes" stories both came from twitter and both would be completely buried under the old Regime. And the former completely took over the news cycle from the "Kamala is Brat" narrative they were trying to push at the time. And it put the Dems on the defensive in a way they really don't like to be.
Literally this time: won the popular vote.
Same, and one of those clients was saying how voting was one of their favorite things to do.
Vibe is different than in 2016, because they didn't do the "he has a 5% chance of winning" thing like 2016. I wasn't a supporter then, but I liked what he represented; and I laughed and cheered when he won.
Watching all the worst people weep and gnash their teeth remains satisfying.
Reps seem to have a lot more lawyers and others on the ground to challenge shenanigans in swing states. Hearing a lot more stories about "they tried to kick poll watchers out, but then the lawyers swept in and now they're back".
I didn't say it was "inspiring". I look at it with some amusement as a window into a foreign culture.
- The Accent
- The Yiddish song
- The non-committal language and somewhat apathetic reasons to vote for Trump ("it shows your support and helps our future")
- Selling the idea based on the fact that voting doesn't cost much ("spend a couple minutes of your time")
I used to work for a guy who was early and fairly high up (but not founder level) at a DotCom 1.0 company everyone has heard of. I'd conservatively guess his net worth was high 8 or low 9 figures, and he was easily the most driven person I've ever met. Was one of those people who you wondered when he slept (and frankly, how he ever managed to get or stay married). Raced yachts for a hobby, that sort of thing.
I think about that, and then I wonder how driven someone who's worth multiple thousands of times what that guy was worth must be.