The New Coffee Room

@Mik said in ZOMG! Trump is Killing the U.S. Defense Industry:

The government needs to be less a driver of American commerce.

Without the US government, I think many defense companies in the US would go out of business

https://insight.factset.com/how-much-do-government-contracts-contribute-to-defense-suppliers-revenue-share

Yup, when people complain that we are "giving" Ukraine billions of dollars, it is not so simple.

It is not as if there are pallets of money being flown to Ukraine.

It is money going to a bullet maker in Pennsylvania and then teh bullets go to Ukraine.

etc.

Waaah.

https://nodebb.the-new-coffee-room.club/topic/34818/pritzker-starts-setting-up-for-2028/27

@Copper You are a smart man!!!!

Despite Habba calling it the Oval Office, the set was decorated to look like a generic room in the White House — and not the famed round office where major presidential events are held.

@Horace 555

Maybe not Gov. Pritzker, but another Illinois (dont pronounce the s, right @George-K ) person is looking for the President.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/12/rahm-emmanuel-president-2028-column-00224241

The biggest Rahm-may-run tell, though, is that he’s already road-testing the first outlines of a stump speech, or at least an issue he can make his own.

I caught it last month when he came to Washington to appear before a conference held by Democracy Forward, a liberal group helping to lead litigation efforts against the Trump administration.

“I am done with the discussion of locker rooms, I am done with the discussion of bathrooms and we better start having a conversation about the classroom,” Emanuel said, drawing applause as he alluded to a new study showing more than two-thirds of eighth graders can’t read at grade level.

He kept coming back to the study and eventually and explicitly tied the policy to the politics, in Rahm’ian fashion.

“We can lead a discussion and force a topic onto the agenda of this country that’s worthy of having a debate about,” Emanuel said about the dismal student data. Unlike, say, the fate of a heretofore obscure federal agency, whose demise dominated elite coverage in the first weeks of Trump’s presidency. “The New York Times put crumbs all the way to the front door of the USAID headquarters and we just walked along back there,” he lamented of his party.

and

David Axelrod, a longtime friend of Rahm, has also warmed to the idea. “Who has more relevant experience?” Axelrod asked, adding that Emanuel has two other alluring assets for his party right now. “He understands how to win and speaks bluntly in an idiom that most folks understand.”

https://www.doj.state.or.us/media-home/news-media-releases/appeals-court-lifts-hold-on-measure-114-ruling-that-oregon-gun-law-is-constitutional/

Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield issued a statement today, after an appeals court lifted the hold on Measure 114, a step forward in allowing the state to put critical gun safety protections into action.

and

Measure 114 includes three common sense gun safety laws: First, it requires a permit to acquire guns. Permits are available to those who pass a criminal background check, complete a gun safety course, and who are not a danger to themselves or others. Second, it closes the “Charleston Loophole” that currently allows firearm transfers to proceed if a background check takes more than three days. Finally, it restricts magazines that can carry more than ten rounds of ammunition.

Even with today’s decision, the law will not go into effect immediately. Procedural rules give the challengers 35 days to seek further appellate review of the decision.

Eventually, the US Supreme Court will have to make a decision.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/cockpit-voice-recorder-survived-fiery-philly-crash-but-stopped-taping-years-ago/

Cockpit voice recorders are amazingly hardened bits of tech. They are often kept in the back of the plane, so as to better survive a crash, but their audio comes from a microphone usually found on the instrument panel above and between the two pilot stations. The utility of this recording does not come just from what the pilots might say; the sound of a stall warning indicator or landing gear retraction or engine noise could each allow investigators to infer things about the flight's last moments.

The NTSB eventually found the cockpit voice recorder of the Learjet 55, which was inside the impact crater and buried "under 8 ft of soil and debris." The unit was pretty beat up—or, as the government puts it, displayed "significant impact-related damage as well as liquid ingress." So NTSB sent the device to its Vehicle Recorders Laboratory in Washington, DC, hoping to salvage some of the audio.

After "extensive repair and cleaning," technicians were able to listen to the tape... and they found to their chagrin that it contained nothing related to the accident. In a preliminary report on the plane crash, released last week, NTSB investigators said that "the CVR did not record the accident flight and during the audition it was determined that the CVR had likely not been recording audio for several years." Even the most hardened, comically over-specced devices can fail—and sometimes it's not even the fire, the impact, or the "liquid ingress" that brings them down.

Still, NTSB is not out of options. The Learjet contained another important piece of tech: an Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System (EGPWS) computer. The device may contain crash data in nonvolatile memory, and it has been shipped off to its manufacturer to see what, if anything, can be recovered.

Dont think we have a "China Tariff Deserves Its Own Thread" so I will post this here.

Walmart puts pressure on suppliers to absorb the cost of US tariffs. Chinese government is mad.
"If Walmart insists" ... "then what awaits Walmart is not just talk," says China government

https://news.cctv.com/2025/03/12/ARTIhEixOXf3hiVR127ojvxh250312.shtml

Quite interesting. Quite an engineering project.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/fehmarnbelt-tunnel-germany-denmark-europe/index.html

On the shores of the Baltic Sea, in the south of Denmark, a vast engineering marvel is taking shape — piece by giant concrete piece — that, when finished, will drastically redraw the road and rail maps of Europe.

The Fehmarnbelt tunnel may not have grabbed the popular imagination in the same way as the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France did more than 30 years ago, but this structure is just as impressive, if not more so.

Linking Denmark and Germany, the Fehmarnbelt will carry two-lane road highways under the water in both directions, plus two electrified rail lines — a multiple tube thoroughfare that will plunge beneath the waves of one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

At 18 kilometers (11.2 miles), it’s nowhere near as long as the 50-kilometer (31-mile) Channel Tunnel, but in many other ways it’s bigger. The project will, in fact, be the world’s longest road and rail tunnel, and the world’s longest immersed tunnel.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/high-school-runner-baton-charge-virginia/story?id=119733312

A high school track athlete faces a misdemeanor charge of assault and battery after a now-viral video showed her hitting a competitor's head with her baton during a relay event.

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canadians-stung-by-trumps-tariffs-rhetoric-balk-us-travel-2025-03-12/

Travelers are responding with their wallets. New bookings to the United States from Canada have declined about 20% since February 1 compared with the year-ago period, according to Forward Keys, a flight ticketing data firm.

United Airlines (UAL.O) CEO Scott Kirby said on Tuesday the company has adjusted its capacity due to a big drop in incoming traffic from Canada.

"We've lost a lot of interest in going to the States in general," said Allyson C., 34, from Vancouver, who canceled her family's summer vacation to Washington, D.C., citing the on-again, off-again tariffs and the U.S. exchange rate.

This worries the U.S. travel industry. Inbound travel to the United States is still just 90% of pre-pandemic levels, Geoff Freeman, CEO of the U.S. Travel Association, said in an interview.

No other country's residents go to the United States more than Canada, which notched 20.4 million visits in 2024. Canadian travelers also spend three times more on vacations than domestic U.S. travelers, said Freeman.

I will trade myself for her. LOL

Has to include a cottage in Dingle or Galway however.

@jon-nyc Yes he is, but he probably has reason to be worried.

President Trump says someone is bad - automatic 20-30% vote for the opponent, regardless of what the truth is.

Interesting. Never heard of that before. But I am not sure that the middle class is collapsing. I have not really seen signs of that.

I have hear that the "wealth gap" is getting larger and larger however.

https://apnews.com/article/greenland-election-demokraatit-trump-arctic-13c295cbc716db2c8011be5819e11fef

A party that favors a gradual path to Greenland’s independence from Denmark won a surprise victory in parliamentary elections, held in the shadow of U.S. President Donald Trump’s stated goal of taking control of the island.

The center-right Demokraatit Party has pushed back against Trump’s rhetoric, saying it is for Greenlanders to decide the future of the strategically important territory, which holds large reserves of the rare earth minerals needed to make everything from mobile phones to renewable energy technology. The Arctic island is also home to a U.S. air base and straddles strategic air and sea routes in the North Atlantic.

Sorry, but I could not understand whatever it is she it trying to study. LOL

@jon-nyc LOL

But true.

Department stores all over are face the same problems.

Sad if this old company does not make it.