T
LOL.
On another note, I still remember reading about a story when President Reagan met Premier Gorbachev in Iceland.
From the airport, there was Gorbachev and about 50 vehicles heading into town. There was Reagan with about 50 vehicles heading into town. And at the end, there was a pickup truck driven by the President of Iceland driving himself into town. LOL
But there were almost 1MM/year in the 1990's.
Crazy Bill Gates and his anti malaria work.
https://www.popsci.com/technology/how-do-cars-get-their-names/
Unless it’s a car made by Christian von Koenigsegg or Mate Rimac, the vast majority of vehicles on the market are named by committee, so there is more research and less pressure on one person to bear the blame. Some automakers take the easy way and give their cars alphanumeric soup monikers.
For instance, Mercedes-Benz names its cars by class from A to S. The brand’s S-class stands for the German word “sonderklasse,” meaning “special class.” In between, there are three-letter names like the GLA, GLB, and so on. Here’s a name that seems like it’s as long as the number Pi: 2025 Mercedes-Benz GLC 350e 4Matic. The car is so fun to drive and it gets such excellent fuel efficiency, though, you can forget about the name and just focus on the ride.
Naming a car usually requires a process
Jessica Fini, the assistant vice president of Communications for American Honda, says the company holds brainstorming meetings with key product planning members and other marketing, communications, and sales executives a few years out from the launch of a new vehicle. In that set of meetings, team members share the overall concept of the vehicle and describe its overarching traits.
Once the list of brainstormed names are compiled, they take a vote and poll again with the top name choices. Then the top three names are handed over to the legal department for background checks, meaning they are tasked with making sure other brands don’t already use them or have them on reserve, and they check to ensure the word doesn’t mean something negative in another language.
“Usually when we submit three names, there are a couple we cannot use so one comes out the winner,” Fini explains. “If all three are rejected, we go back to the longer list and re-submit.”
Fini says Honda’s words generally tie to a meaning. The Prologue, for example, is the automaker’s first mass-market EV (a prologue, or introduction, to a bigger selection). The Passport SUV is an adventure car, and passports are tied to adventures. Honda does have a few acronyms, like the CR-V: Comfortable Runabout Vehicle.
@jon-nyc said in Sex, Drinking and Dementia: 25 Lawmakers Spill on What Congress Is Really Like:
By the way, how did we miss the Granger story with all our talk about politicians straying past their sell-by date?
In December 2024 it was discovered she had been living in a nursing home in Ft Worth, TX for the previous 6 months.
Funny you should mention that. You must have talked to this magazine. LOL. Here is the follow up.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/14/kay-granger-dementia-dc-media-00210317
I guess just another example of the media overlooking Democrat politicians mistakes. Oh wait, she was a Republic. LOL
Given that the U.S. Capitol is one of the few buildings in America where the reporting corps hasn’t been totally devastated, it was a confounding miss. Granger wasn’t a nobody. She’d been in office for over a quarter-century, and had been the top Republican on the Appropriations committee until last April. Her face was familiar both to her colleagues and the reporters who roam outside the House chamber. Curiosity might also have been triggered by the fact that she’d voluntarily stepped aside from a plum position that most members of Congress would have to have pried from their hands.
There were also at least some opportunities for journalists to find out what was happening. Granger may have been absent from votes, but she briefly returned to the Hill for a retirement salute to her last November, well into the period where her son acknowledged “dementia issues” and just a month before the Express story broke.
At the chummy event, speakers included House Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, as well as Democrats Rosa DeLauro and Nita Lowey. Nobody mentioned anything awry when Granger, still an elected official, reappeared not for an important vote but for a laudatory send-off. During the tribute, Granger sat and looked on as her official portrait as a former Appropriations Committee chair was unveiled before a large audience of congressional colleagues and staffers.
Neom, the insane urban development project in Saudi Arabia, appears to be sinking faster than the giant holes they keep digging in the middle of nowhere. Increasing delays and soaring cost overruns have led to project cancellations and a general scaling back of the original vision. Now a Wall Street Journal report has uncovered an internal audit that reveals evidence of deliberate manipulation of finances by management to justify rising cost estimates to investors. The sense of impending disaster is even more shocking when you look at the only crazy structure that is now standing in Neom: an unbelievably giant palace.
New satellite images obtained by Business Insider via US space company Maxar Technologies have revealed the gigantic complex, which appears to feature at least 16 buildings (plus other buildings in the property), four swimming pools, private beaches, extensive gardens, a marina, 10 helipads, and its own golf course. The palace is thought to be owned by Saudi Arabian ruler Mohammed bin Salman, and it’s only one of five palaces that will be built for the royal family in the 10,230-square-mile region known as Neom.
Kind of a goofy story. Almost like saying that I want to visit every McDonald in the world. There are too many. LOL
https://www.cnn.com/travel/every-irish-pub-in-the-world-colm-dalton/index.html
Colm Dalton, from County Kerry, is on a mission to visit every Irish pub in the world and has so far made it to 97 pubs in 47 countries. He documents his travels on his Publican Enemy blog and it’s taken him everywhere from Jakarta to Krakow to the Azores.
Like the below song
Well, you're walkin' through a city street, you could be in Peru
And you hear a distant calling and you know it's meant for you
Then you drop what you were doing and you join the merry mob
And before you know just where you are, you're in an Irish pub
They've got one in Honolulu, they've got one in Moscow too
They got four of them in Sydney and a couple in Kathmandu
So whether you sing or pull a pint you'll always have a job
'Cause wherever you go around the world you'll find an Irish pub
etc
NATO countries are having second thoughts about buying America’s F-35 as the ‘predictability of our allies’ is doubted amid Trump’s seismic shifts
America’s F-35 stealth fighter is seen by some allies as a potential vulnerability rather than a cutting-edge weapon that can boost warfighting capabilities.
In recent days, Canada and Portugal have expressed willingness to explore alternatives to the Lockheed Martin plane as President Donald Trump has sown doubt about the US commitment to the NATO alliance.
On Friday, Canadian Defense Minister Bill Blair said the country is actively looking at other fighter jets amid growing political momentum to scrap a $13 billion deal for 88 F-35s that was signed in 2023.
Canada has committed money for its first 16 planes, which are scheduled for delivery early next year. Blair indicated that after accepting that batch of F-35s, Canada could turn to European aircraft to replace its aging fleet of fighters.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/03/15/frozen-embryo-fairfax-heidemann-lawsuit/
A judge in northern Virginia has dismissed the long-running case of a cancer survivor who sued her ex-husband for access to two frozen embryos created during their marriage, saying that human embryos are not divisible property.
Honeyhline Heidemann was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer in 2017, two years after she and her then-husband, Jason, froze the embryos created during a cycle of IVF. When the Heidemanns divorced in 2018, their settlement listed the embryos as property — and would be kept in storage until either the couple or a court reached a decision on what would happen to them, The Washington Post previously reported.
In 2019, Honeyhline Heidemann requested permission to use the two frozen embryos to have more children, something Jason Heidemann refused, saying it would violate his privacy and personal liberty, the judge wrote. Honeyhline Heidemann later sued her former husband for access to the embryos, saying she would prefer to be awarded both, but would also accept the court dividing the embryos “in kind” so that each ex-spouse received one.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/03/tuberculosis-death-usaid-trump/682062/
Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a near-perfect predator. In 1882, Robert Koch, the physician who discovered the microbe, told a room full of scientists that it caused one in seven of all deaths. In 2023, after a brief hiatus, tuberculosis regained from COVID its status as the world’s deadliest infectious disease—a title it has held for most of what we know of human history.
and
The cure for TB—roughly half a year on antibiotics—has existed since the 1950s, and works for most patients. Yet, in the decades since, more than 100 million people have died of tuberculosis because the drugs are not widely available in many parts of the world. The most proximate cause of contemporary tuberculosis deaths is not M. tuberculosis, but Homo sapiens. Now, as the Trump administration decimates foreign-aid programs, the U.S. is both making survival less likely for people with TB and risking the disease becoming far more treatment-resistant. After decades of improvement, we could return to something more like the world before the cure.
Anyone can get tuberculosis—in fact, a quarter of all humans living now, including an estimated 13 million Americans, have been infected with the bacterium, which spreads through coughs, sneezes, and breaths. Most will only ever have a latent form of the infection, in which infection-fighting white blood cells envelop the bacteria so it cannot wreak havoc on the body. But in 5 to 10 percent of infections, the immune system can’t produce enough white blood cells to surround the invader. M. tuberculosis explodes outward, and active disease begins.
I used to listen to it ALOT. They had the news in "special English". LOL
When I was in some pretty remote or blocked areas, it was the best choice (via shortwave) to regularly listen to news.
Actually, there are a lot if interesting countries news out there on the short wave. I still have my book that gives country/shortwave channel/time of various programs.
More than 1,300 Voice of America employees were placed on leave on Saturday and funding for two U.S. news services that broadcast to authoritarian regimes was terminated, one day after President Donald Trump ordered the gutting of the government-funded media outlet's parent and six other federal agencies.
Michael Abramowitz, Voice of America's director, said that nearly his entire staff of 1,300 journalists, producers and assistants had been put on administrative leave, crippling a media broadcaster that operates in nearly 50 languages.
"I am deeply saddened that for the first time in 83 years, the storied Voice of America is being silenced," Abramowitz said in a post on LinkedIn, saying it has played an important role "in the fight for freedom and democracy around the world."
VOA's parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), also terminated its grants to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which broadcasts to countries in Eastern Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, as well as to Radio Free Asia, which broadcasts to China and North Korea.
This is my radio
I was surprise to see the below picture. On a historic basis, the % of military vs. the overall population is not a big difference (except of course during major wars)
But let's be realistic. The cost of eggs has nothing to do with President Trump (or President Biden). Fun to try and blame one of the other, but I think we are all smart enough to know otherwise.
What about TDS (Trump Deification Syndrome)? Will the state cover that also? 555
I dont know much about the insurance industry, but from everything I have read, the companies need the higher. There have been so many more very very expensive natural disasters (fires, floods, hurricanes, tornados, etc.) that they cannot pay for.
As the article says - the insurance company loses $0.26 on every one dollar they get.
Sorry for the thread hijack, but another area where the funding cuts are somewhat personal. A (distant) friend works in the Soybean Innovation Lab at the University of IL. They have lost their funding and are in the process of closing.
Illinois is the leading producer of soybeans in the United States, and the industry is crucial to Illinois’ economy. According to the Illinois Department of Agriculture, Illinois is the nation’s second-leading exporter of soybeans and ranks third in the export of agricultural goods as a whole, earning over $8 billion worth.
https://shunbeer.com/article/is-it-cheaper-to-buy-beer-in-cans-or-bottles
When it comes to the cost of beer, there are several factors to consider, including the container in which it is packaged. While bottles and cans serve the same purpose, they differ in terms of manufacturing and packaging costs, which can ultimately impact the price that consumers pay. In this regard, bottles are generally more expensive to manufacture and package than cans, and this additional cost can be passed on to the consumer, making bottled beer relatively more expensive than canned beer.
There are several reasons why bottles are more expensive to manufacture and package. Firstly, the cost of the raw materials used in glass production is relatively high, and the process of transforming these materials into glass bottles requires a lot of heat and energy. The heavy weight of glass bottles also contributes to higher transportation costs, as more fuel is needed to move them from one place to another. Additionally, glass bottles are fragile and can break easily, which can lead to increased costs due to breakage during production, storage, and transportation.
On the other hand, cans, typically made of aluminum, offer cost advantages in several areas. The manufacturing process for aluminum cans is generally more efficient and less costly compared to glass bottle production. This is partly due to the lower cost of the raw materials used in aluminum production, as well as the energy efficiency of the manufacturing process. Aluminum cans are also lighter and more compact than glass bottles, which translates to reduced storage and shipping costs for breweries and distributors. The lightweight nature of aluminum cans also makes them easier to stack and transport, further reducing overall costs.
The economic considerations don't end with manufacturing and packaging. The choice between bottles and cans can also impact other aspects of the beer distribution process and influence the final cost to the consumer. For example, bottles are associated with a more traditional and premium image, which can affect consumer perception and influence their buying decisions. Bottled beer is often perceived as a mark of quality and authenticity, and consumers may be willing to pay a higher price for this perceived premium product. On the other hand, cans are gaining popularity due to their practicality, environmental benefits, and ability to maintain beer freshness. As a result, breweries that offer canned beer can tap into new markets, expand their customer base, and potentially increase their sales and revenue.
While bottles may be more expensive to manufacture and package, it's worth noting that other factors can also influence the cost of beer. For example, specialty aged or casked beers are often sold in brown bottles to protect the flavors from light exposure, and these bottled beers can be significantly more expensive than canned beers. Additionally, the brand, size, pricing, volume, transportation costs, and popularity of a particular beer can also impact the price, regardless of whether it is packaged in a bottle or a can. Ultimately, the decision between bottles and cans depends on various factors, including personal preference, the specific context of consumption, and the priorities of both the brewery and the consumer.
and this table
Characteristics Values
Price Cans are cheaper to buy, but bottles are reusable, which can make them more cost-effective in the long run.
Taste Bottles are better for preserving the taste of beer, especially if it has a higher ABV or uses Belgian yeast. However, cans are better at protecting the taste of beer from oxidation and light exposure.
Portability Cans are more lightweight, stackable, and easier to transport. They are also allowed at many public events and recreation areas for safety reasons.
Environmental Impact Glass bottles have a larger carbon footprint than cans due to the heat required to produce them and the energy used during transportation. Aluminum cans are more easily recycled and have a lower carbon footprint.
Consumer Perception Bottles are traditionally associated with craft beer and are often seen as a mark of quality and authenticity. However, consumer perception is evolving, and canned beer is gaining in popularity.
I think that multiple people here have mentioned that the maximum taxes for Social Security should be increased, or eliminated.
As to reducing headcount, probably not a bad idea. I agree with @mik 's comment from another thread that it would be much better if it were "targeted" rather than what seems like random.
There was a saying something like:
"The only people who think war is a glorious adventure are those who have never been in one."
(BTW, interesting video history)
@Jolly If people think I am bad about continuing long ago forum threads, wait for 25-30 years when I come back to this one, when Apple makes the announcement that they are opening up a USD$20B manufacturing plant in sub Sahara Africa! 
