Was it Chicago or Detroit that sold the rights to their parking meters for 75 years to a group of investors from Abu Dhabi, and after like 4 years they had already made back their money and just started jacking up the price of parking because they could. Also supposedly there is a clause in the agreement that makes it so the city has to pay excessively anytime they want to take away a parking space that the investors own. It's literally insane that a city that size doesn't just tell the investors to fuck off and sic the national guard on them.
#Tradle #918 3/6
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https://oec.world/en/games/tradle
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Went with Honduras at first, because my coffee was from there this morning. Then guessed Nicaragua before looking at a map in my office and realizing that I had to go further south.
Didn't Ukraine deliberately draft a lot of people from their eastern oblasts specifically for the reason that they were more expendable and also not-really ukrainians anyway?
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Guessed that this would be either central asian or caucasus, since the country was mostly extraction, but still with sizeable agriculture and a small amount of industry. The clues are notoriously wonky with some of the bigger central asian countries (particularly Kazakhstan) so it took me an extra try just to point me westward.
They're not saying that white women are worshipped, only that people with power take them more seriously, particularly if they're yelling at other people. When a black person (specifically often black men) are confronting white people for being shitty, cops / enforcers are WAAAAAAAY more likely to escalate the situation and make everything worse.
Giving someone cancer is also typically incredibly slow as a way to kill people. A heart attack inducer would be more useful, since it kills people right away, while a cancer-gun would kill people over several months/years.
Hell hath no fury like a petty reactionary scorned
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Thought this was Belarus at first, then the geoclue pointed to the middle east, so I tried to be smart and guessed Cyprus. The complete lack of oil made me certain it wasn't in the middle east, and then I pulled a map out and remembered that Jordan exists and got sad for a moment.
Our SocDems are among the most vile in the world. Putting a "red" flag on the far right's policies and rhetoric, drowning our unions in bureaucracy, spearheading millitarism in Eastern Europe, and probably many other horrible policies that I can't remember at this point.
Denmark doesn't even have ships with guns that can actually fire, so somehow I doubt that the southern european countries that we have looted for the past 10 years have had a chance to rearm themselves.
Russia is sort of in a war economy, but the bigger reason they're doing well is because the sanctions have forced Russia to abandon the dumbest parts of neoliberalism and instead to rely on import substitution. The sanctions also prevents the ruling class in Russia from taking their money and putting them elsewhere, which means that Europe kind of introduced capital controls on Russia, which is really funny considering Europes fierce opposition to them in any other context.
#Tradle #913 2/6
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https://oec.world/en/games/tradle
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kind of proud for getting this one. Immediately guessed West Africa, and was then confused by the geo-clue, before i remembered that there are small countries in East Africa as well.
Also, the fascist loser who is spokesperson for "foreigners and integration" (read: official racism recommender) is a 28 year old Groyper guy, who somehow managed to get elected before all the really weird online shit began infecting the far right. He used to have an instagram account where he would just post screed after screed next to pictures of women in niqabs and burkas. Also lots of pictures of old danish people looking scared at groups of muslim teenagers with captions about people being too afraid to speak their mind, presumably because the old people are afraid of being called racist (the worst thing you can call someone in Denmark apparently).
Somehow this fucking freak got himself maneuvered into a high position in an admittedly fringe party because he was willing to bend the knee to Morten Messerschmidt, the fancy-lad who considers himself an oldschool gentleman and carries himself like a 19th century failchild of a noble family.
Morocco is literally buying israeli surveilance drones to spy on the population that lives there, and has even erected a massive wall down the middle of Western Sahara, which blocks off the Sahrawi population from accessing the sea. So it's not quite apartheid level, but it's surely looking like israel post nakba but prior to their complete descent into madness.
Fun fact: I have been completely banned from talking about Morrocan politics with my moroccan inlaws because I kept asking about the differences between West Sahara and Palestine. Apparently I was an idiot who did not appreciate that Morrocco had a rightful claim to the land (doubtful) as it used to be ruled by the kingdom of Morocco prior to Spanish and French colonization.
Telegram is litterally the source given in most of Danish State Broadcaster's articles about Ukraine. It even got me into trouble with our IT-department because I clicked one of the links in the article, since apparently Telegram is mega-blacklisted on my work-computer.
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really enjoy playing the good old guessing game of "which shitty Gulf Monarchy is it this time"
True to my word, I have refrained from posting on this site for the duration of my paternity leave, as I refuse to post here unless I can count it as work. Anyway, kid is doing great, but it does take a toll to be alone with him for n entire day while he is learning to walk. The amount of times I have had to catch something falling on his head is incredible, especially considering that I child-proofed our place when our daughter was born.
The government of Denmark salutes the American people and their sacrifice for making our line go up. Ozempic is currently the main reason why Novo Nordisk is one of the most valuable companies in Europe, and that company is almost single-handedly pulling Denmark out of a recession (on paper, most people here aren't doing too hot, but since when has our shitty fucking SocDems ever given a shit about that)
I'm not particularly highly paid compared to most people i work with, but it seems like a simple way to not have your convictions eroded is to begin thinking about issues in a more structural way, rather than just the immediate.
So sure, the driving contradiction in my life is the fact that my rent and car-payments and childcare expenses are taking up a solid 105% of my post-tax pay, but I'm also capable of looking outside and seeing the fact that a 1000 people just fucking died of heatstroke during the Hajj, because temperatures in Saudi Arabia crested 50 degrees celsius. If you are actually interested in socialism, you'd probably pretty easily be able to connect the lack of income growth compared to inflation and climate change, as both issues have the same fundamental cause.