Marriage, as a romantic notion, is about demonstrating a lifelong commitment to another person.

Marriage, as a legal institution, is about creating an economic incentive for intergenerational land ownership among the government-favored ethnic group.

I might suggest that you, at a bare minimum, like the other person even if you’re not romantically fixated on them. The marriage process comingles assets and incomes in a way that’s very difficult to unwind over time. Idk if I’d consider you “broken” for thinking about it. But you might want to reconsider what you’re getting into, especially if there’s someone other than your prospective partner who does have a romantic interest on one (or, fuck it, both) of you.

For folks who are married, the joke has been made a thousand times “We should have done this when we were poorer”. And I even have a friend who did a court-house wedding, months in advance of the family celebration, just to get the tax rebate sooner.

But, it’s a big decision. You’re sharing credit as a single household. Depending on the state, your partner can have all sorts of medical and legal authority that constrains you. And if you don’t even live with the person you’re married to? The economic benefits slide off quite a bit.

One man’s cost is another man’s profit.

At some point, Walmart execs sitting on a pile of NVIDIA stock won’t see this as a loss for them. It will just become an excuse to trim spending - on healthcare, on wages, on wholesale costs, on maintenance of their fleets and facilities - everywhere that isn’t AI.

You might have him confused with White Josh.

In talks

Going to need to talk faster

a joint European anti-ballistic missile defence system.

Didn’t the Americans already try this and end up burning through billions of dollars of defense while still losing bases all over the continent?

CIA Jim, yes

Jellyfin doesn’t have this problem

Mega-Embassy

Very funny to think the problem people have with the embassy is it’s size and not it’s “China”

A great deal of the industry is powered by debt financing. And the CEO typically holds the job by gatekeeping access to that borrowed money.

Labor solidarity is predicated on being able to participate in the market. It isn’t as if people don’t try to Unionize. But if your office or your business or your entire industry can be casually strangled to death by the financial sector when a plurality demand a raise, there’s quickly nothing left to unionize.

Maybe. Or maybe companies like EA would implode under their own dysfunction and leave a multi-billion dollar hole in the industry for China to fill.

A lot of American companies do seem willing to commit suicide before they pay their workers equitably

Excited for Battlefield 7

When you’re working on a big enough project, you’ll inevitably find yourself acting as a condom between people who don’t understand your niche field and the thing you’re all building together.

That’s not unique to Claude. However, the fact that Claude can drop big salty loads far faster than you can catch them does present additional challenges.

I thin we can all agree there is a happy middle ground

I don’t think there IS a middle ground. These are two very distinct historical styles. And if you tried to find a spot in the middle, everything would clash and it would look horrendous.

Nice and personal… Soulless.

Is a black/white color actually scheme soulless? Or is it merely the absence of clutter, no accumulation of wear-and-tear, and the blue filter used for the lighting?

Put six people in that black/white house for a week and it’ll be a cluttered mess. Throw a yellow-filter on the lighting and it’ll look more warm and inviting.

You know, Israel.

Israel has been more than happy to sell arms and other military services to either side. It’s pure war profiteering.

I’m surprised trump hasn’t tried starting something similar

Rubio has been standing up all sorts of horrifying prison and forced labor pipelines across Latin America and into the Pacific Rim.

Nevermind ICE itself, which has just become a factory for turning disaffected, unemployed Fox News millennials onto roided up paramilitary death squads.

TIL. That’s an incredibly tiny border.

🤷

China is much likely cooking the books

I see this line repeated ad nauseum, with vanishingly little to back it up.

As it is detailed in the research report

That’s a dead link for me.

the total number of immigrants amounted to just 0.1% of China’s population of more than 1.41 billion people.

If every single Italian in the country moved to China tomorrow, they could bump that number up to 0.15%

Brussels has been examining ways to shield European industry from what many manufacturers say is the negative fallout from China’s industrial overcapacity and subsidised exports.

So happy to see the German government finally embracing the way, the truth, and the light of Juche Thought

Italy, the world’s fourth-largest machine tool exporter, also lost ground over the period. Its share of global exports slipped to 7.8% in 2025 from 8.4% in 2016, while Italian exports to China plunged to €110 million from €316 million.

One of the jokes about the Italian economy is that it does a phenomenal job of raising, educating, and training young people. But it does a dogshit job of actually paying them. Consequently, a significant number of professionally trained Italian engineers, IT specialists, and other highly educated workers find themselves moving to China in order to pursue the careers they trained for at the Universities of Bolonga and Milian. Shanghai, in particular, has an enormous European expat community.

So there’s a very good chance the machine tools Italians have lost the edge in the market producing are coming from the very same tool makers that they used to employ.

It definitely shows how bad the state of the national news media is. We’re watching The Trump Show 24/7/365. I doubt one American in twenty could even name a Dem contender for President who hasn’t run already. One reason why Kamala Harris remains a front-runner on paper. Hell, you’ll see people talk about Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Barack Obama running again, purely because these are the only people whose names register.

But come primary season, that will change as contenders put more money and social pressure on boosting their own name recognition. This time next year, you’ll have a dozen different Dem contenders doing their warm-up laps around the field. If AOC isn’t running, I doubt she’ll be seriously missed.