SwingingTheLamp

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. There's no statistical difference in the chances of victory between men and women when running for political office. Lots of Republican politicians are women. I don't see it as a big deal.

Also, lots of open racists voted for Obama. If you look at the polling and the interviews, it was much more about running conservative Democrats trying to get the votes of people who wanted to shake things up. That's what Obama promised, that's why Sanders would've won, by some measures, and it seems AOC is out there generating the same buzz.

I think the implication is that you're going to die in El Salvador, so better to die at home and maybe take a few ICE thugs with you.

Interestingly, those main squares were all built before zoning. If they were destroyed in a disaster, they could not be rebuilt.

FWIW, I used to take my car to an auto shop located in the middle of a residential neighborhood, next door to an ice cream and bait shop. It did not affect the neighbors in any way that I could see, and didn't affect the property values.

The first time I had ever heard of the word "tankie" was on Lemmy. It's just not a thing that about anybody I know offline is, or has heard of. So I don't understand the obsession with them. Even if they're doing every evil thing claimed, it's a) the metaphorical tempest in a teapot, and b) not even working, based on the number of people here who seem to make hating on tankies part of their identity.

Enough of this bogus argument. It's incredibly dumb. Why? Because rail doesn't have to serve every podunk, desert town in west Texas (even though a railroad is why they exist in the first place!) to be useful. The Amtrak Acela route runs from one tiny hamlet called Washington, D.C., to a ghost town called Boston, stopping in between at some backwater nobody's ever heard of called New York. Why isn't that a high-speed rail line?

Or, as Ray pointed out in one of his City Nerd videos, the Great Lakes region is about the same size as Spain, and has more people living in it. Spain has a built-out HSR network. Why don't we? There's plenty of demand. Amtrak added the Borealis train last year because the Empire Builder was overbooked, and it immediately exceeded ridership projections.

Funny story, a few years ago, I did an 85-mile ride organized by a local club. I rode my commuter, a.k.a. my only bike. It was a city bike (IGH, dynamo hub, etc.) with a list price of about $1,200. To me, it was a pretty expensive ride, but wow, did I catch a lot of attention for doing a long ride on such an inexpensive bicycle. Maybe it was also the regular clothes? The other riders had $3-4,000 bikes, padded shorts, Lycra jerseys, the whole kit.

It wasn't even that taxing of a ride, on a rail-to-trail with basically no grade, done in about 7 hours!

Okay, he's broken the seal, maybe this is the first step to overcoming that idiotic "decorum" mental block?

I just watched the whole series recently. Yes, I agree, that big twist was so blindingly obvious from the series title. If it helps, the producers and writers knew that, too, and the reveal comes relatively early in the series, so no, that's not the big conceit of the whole show.

The court thing is not universally true. I worked in a family law firm for several years, and the practice in the courts here is to start from a baseline of equal custody and placement, and I've heard the same about other states. The men who lost out were the ones who wouldn't fight, because they were convinced that the courts were biased. But hell, in one case, we got full custody and placement for a guy whose son wasn't even biologically his! (His wife cheated, and he didn't find out until well after they'd emotionally bonded.)

To highlight why it's wrong, I just use the example of asking if the store has widgets in stock, and the clerk says, "We have any." (Compare to, "We don't have any.")

I'd say that 20-50 years is generous. Maybe if they'd won every election, but that's now how US politics goes. When one side stages a coup, and history shows they're going to win an election again within the next cycle or two, not throwing the leaders of the coup in Gitmo by January 21, 2021, at the latest, sure seems like enabling fascism.