That’s what my government tells me

Or deep on the hook for the O&G industry.

Israel is basically a military outpost for the US in the middle east.

Sitting politicians have described it as our biggest aircraft carrier.

No no no. China is Fake News. They don’t even make cars. If they made cars, I would have seen Chinese cars driving around in America.

“China Battery!” typically trips everyone’s “Fake News! Evil Company! Communists Killed 100 Billion People!” alarm

The way to safer is to reduce the amount of cars.

Hersey! Blasphemy! Unamerican!

Ah, so they’ve already exploded, thus rendering them safe for use.

Democrats will take office on Jan 2nd and announce the need to compromise with Moderate Republicans about three days later. They’ll pass enormous bailouts for the tech industry, a marginally increased spending package for ICE and the Pentagon, a massive tax cut plan for middle class people with over $40k in auto loans, the Joe Manchin Memorial Coal Energy Independence Act, and then advance the “Act to Declare Donald Trump a Naughty Boy” which… gosh darnit… we just can’t get it out of committee because we don’t have the votes!

Nonetheless, Democrats will declare that they outsmarted Trump, by tricking him into signing the “Make Israel Great Again” Act. And we’ll hit a bipartisan consensus on adding antisemites to the concentration camps. Also, Elon Musk will be given a trillion dollars, in a bag, out the back of the Capital Building. Please don’t ask how or why.

I will be called a Russian bot for predicting this.

That won’t do anything to avoid scammers.

Missing the deadline undermines your position in the firm and marks you out as unreliable for the better projects and promotions.

Obviously a court is not going to support an eviction if that eviction is part of a fraud.

You would be surprised. The folks running these scams know the law (and the bureaucrats who actually manage it) way better than you. And they know the buttons to press that fast-track their complaints against you way better than you know the defenses you can employ.

This isn’t a question of the strict legal verbiage or the spirit of the law. This is a question of experience navigating bureaucracies, and the general bias they show in favor of landlords over tenants. They’ll be able to move faster because they’ve done this (or worked with people who have done this) repeatedly. Unless you’ve got an (often expensive) legal counsel, you’ll be stuck trying to explain yourself to a sheriff or a judge long after your title has been traded to a third party who doesn’t care if you were ever rightfully compensated for your sale or not.

I don’t think Cuba has any kind of leverage that would cost the US anything.

Cubans have their own military and mid-range weapons. They aren’t nearly as fortified as the Iranians, and they don’t have a straight line to Russia or China for support, but they can absolutely put missiles all along the Gulf Coast if push comes to shove. They’re - bare minimum - as dangerous as Yemen is to Saudi Arabia.

It would be hell on earth for the island, though. Nobody actually wants a shooting war with the US. God only knows how many civilians would die as a result.

And the real second-order consequence of a US invasion of Cuba would be the flood of refugees. People would flee the island in droves. Jamaica, the Yucatan, the Bahamas, Haiti, hell Florida - they’d be inundated with people fleeing the country. As bad as US relations are with the Caribbean states, this would make things so much worse. You’re talking about and island of 10M people. It would be chaos.

What happens is you’ll get a cashier’s check that bounces. A lot of these “We Buy Your House” scams are effectively just check-bouncing scams, where they try to get the title to your home in their names without offering real payment.

Once the house is in their name, the law is on their side. You securing payment from them is far more difficult than them evicting you.

I don’t understand why you wouldn’t just continue working your normal hours.

Some of it comes down to real social pressure. People work harder when they’ve literally got the boss at their desk saying “We need to hit Deadline X or Consequences Y will happen”. For people past their breaking point, I tend to see them work less. If you’re already on the job hunt (or if you’ve landed a job or queued for retirement or whatever), enthusiasm for doing your current job plummets. If you think you’re about to get fired, same.

But for folks who genuinely believe they’ve got a future at the firm - at least for another year or three - it often boils down to “Do I want to be stressed forever, or just get over this hump and survive until things die down?” Hitting the deadline and getting the project over the line typically comes with a refractory period of sorts. A slowdown in work hours and a more relaxed pace. Missing the deadline means even more work and even more stress and even more of my boss at my desk (or my boss’s boss or my boss’s boss’s boss) staring at my computer and asking why the thing isn’t done yet.

Fred Durst about to sell me a $2500 commemorative edition America Bible lettered in gold ink, wrapped in rich Corinthian leather, and including a copy of the Declaration of Independence signed by our President.

Eh. When your boss has four people in the office to do six people’s jobs, and the VP just said they’re cutting headcount by two.

It’s not just about how useful the dollar is to Iran, it’s about making it less useful to other countries also.

For Iran, specifically, there’s no incentive to accept reparations payments in a currency they can’t easily collect or exchange. Yuan makes sense, because China is one of their biggest trading partners. Bitcoins make sense because they’re easy to launder and can be transferred independent of the NATO-based financial systems.

If Iranian oil is back on the market there will be a lot of interested buyers.

It’s more Qatari and Kuwaiti oil at issue. Iranians are just rent-seeking off the most expedient shipping lane.

The petrodollar wasn’t going to last forever youre right but there are many parties interested in ending it sooner than later.

The petrodollar is arbitrage between Middle Eastern raw materials and the western banking system. It could move to the PetroEuro without a meaningful change in foreign policies. Or the PetroLoonie or PetroPound for that matter. All of these countries are in agreement that the Persian Gulf states need to play a secondary role in the global economy.

What Iranians are hoping to change isn’t the primary currency of the region, but the balance of power between US/EU colonizers and local people.

The very act of securing the Straight and collecting rent on passage is a huge step in that direction, regardless of what currency they collect their fees in. It’s a material change, not just an accounting shift.

Plenty of short sellers (myself included) have been burned, thinking we could predict short term business cycles in advance.

Forcing students to read the Bible will create a loooooot more Atheists.

Forcing students to pretend to be Christian in order to get educational perks and avoid harsh discipline will create a lot more implicit segregation and cliches of Mean Girls who can harass non-confirming students with impunity.

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