Am ace. Not thrilled about the fucking, but I’d be around for the aftercare catering.

Lol, I saw a clown nose.

I do love me a good heist, but piracy is so pedestrian. Suitable only for novices and the lazy.

I make sure to properly steal hard drives from the developers’ computers on launch day.

Gotcha, that was the context I missed. Thanks!

See, the fun thing about English is: if you have a word we need/want, we’ll just take it.

a 77-year old woman and a child?

I’m not seeing where you’re getting a child from.

This fifth defendant business irks me, too: four men and a woman are already five, any further defendants with different sentences should be at least sixth. But that’s more on the journalist/editor, not you.

Can’t help but wanna see this overlaid on a mall map: these hobbits had to get to JC Penny from the Books-A-Million. A harrowing journey of many months.

I dunno, I like going slow- that is to say near the limit- and will have people ride me the entire time in a passing zone or blaze past me in a double yellow.

Edit: It’s the best because I get to watch these same cars pull into the parking lot 500 yards down the road. Really saved them the extra fraction of a second.

Damn. If only there was a way that cars could pass each other.

Never been a better time to start moonshining.

The aristocrats of the western empires may have still carried weight to their names, but the Great Depression was really putting strain on the legitimacy and popularity of the established order.

As for Japan: they were already scrapping with the Soviets at the time in Khalkhin Gol. If anything the American entry to the war freed the Soviets to just a single front. American efforts in the European theater I largely take to be more “maintaining market access” to the UK and France than any real desire to be there.

France may have sat back, but I kinda doubt it. A weakened Germany after fighting the Soviets would have tempted them to retake lands east of the Rhine that they’d lost following the Napoleonic campaigns. My take is that none of the powers were peacable or invested in the status quo, just less rabid about expansion than the Nazis.

Poland wasn’t the first stop in that line, though, only the one that started the thing. The annexation of the Sudetenland was the first “big thing” after a series of smaller appeasements. The powers of the time recognized that Germany was absolitely unreliable. If the Nazis had framed the Polish campaign as “liberation” following a short-lived Soviet occupation… that might have worked. And may have even resulted in a Nazi/British/French alliance. It’d then come down to how much the Allies’ intelligence agencies knew about Nazi/Soviet collaboration on Poland.

Does the foreign vacuum work better? Is it more compact? Are the technologies it is built on protected by IP law? If it’s a cheap junk crescent wrench that I’ll use once because I need it only once, I’d rather not pay double for quality.

Do they? As much as we like to play it quiet, the US exports a lot of food globally- China gets some $17b worth. Those tend to be perishable, so any hot war would have to be over quickly for China to come outahead, and any protracted war would see them need a new breadbasket eother domestic (reducing the industrial/military work pool), or international (which comes with the same risks they have now over US ties).

I’m afraid you’re gonna have to come up with a specific timeframe here.

WW1? The Germany Empire wasn’t really the spark for this one. The entire royalty of the continent was effectively cousins. There may be some wiggle room, but most of them were literal cousins, with Wilhelm II and Nicholas II being most notable in this context.

Nobody was ‘fond’ of Russia in any way. Most European nations then saw it as they do now- large, unpredictable, and territorially aggressive. France and Britain were a part of the Triple Entente not because they trusted each other, but because it was a reasonably sensible counter to the Triple Alliance.

WW2? Royal intermarriage was mostly a moot point after the first go around even in nations that managed to not get their entire lineages deposed. As for the Soviet Union, still wildly unpopular. If your point is that Nazi Germany might have gotten away with things if they’d stayed tied up with Russia instead of trying to diversify their murder portfolio- I’d disagree. They would have gotten the OK from other Western powers for a time, but would still crumple from internal strife, the war was as much a wallpapering of those issues as it was any grand ambitions of Hitler’s.

Don’t forget Protector of Mexico!

In recent years, Wright has visited the predominantly Muslim nations of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.

Is this sentence trying to paint all Muslim-majority countries as repressive? I imagine she also visits several Christian-majority countries.

Yeah, it is a dumping ground, but the concern here is the unintended release of radioactive materials into the surrounding environments.

Florida being a huge, saltwater-accessible, hurricane prone wetland means that not only will containment be nigh impossible, but that it would readily leach into the watershed and fuck up the everglades and other ecosystems in the area.

And apparently there are innocent people or whatever nearby.

Isn’t it still a pump’n’dump? As the Big Cheese, the man can just keep repeating the cycle as long as it suits him.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/22719177