I'm some sort of Classical / Moderate Liberal and occasionally "talk against" NATO but there's a wide difference between that and actively pushing to see it disbanded which is tantamount to Pro-Russian propaganda...especially right now.
If you can't handle a rule preventing you from trying to remove a bastion of Western European freedom then I guess you'll move to a new instance.
If you didn't want to be insulted you shouldn't have been insulting...Sir. Interfacing with the public should have been covered somewhere in your ROTC program.
Take your "As a Veteran..." argument and cram it. I've seen more ignorant POGs running that line to get internet credit than I care to remember. Your opinion carries no more weight than anyone else's and that most definitely includes regular civilians.
The McRib is objectively gross...which doesn't stop me from stuffing my American face-hole with the damn things every time they're available because despite being gross they are tasty.
They used to be a full time menu item but I guess the pork got too expensive so McDonald's will buy pork when it's cheap and stockpile it until they have enough to do another limited time promo with them. Been that way since somewhere in the early / mid 2000s if I remember right.
It wasn't until somewhere in the last 15 years that air type type heat pumps, as opposed to ground loop, could cope with the cold temperatures in the northern states without having to fall back to resistive heating for weeks at a time.
When you have to run resistive heaters the electrical usage skyrockets and makes a heat pump system vastly more expensive to operate.
If you live in a cold State, Zone 6 or higher, then you need to be careful when purchasing an ASHP to make sure that it has an HSPF of 10 or greater. If it doesn't then you'll be paying big electrical bills trying to keep your home warm. Those units are also more expensive to purchase than a regular Heat Pump like you would run down under.
Frankly nowhere in Australia experiences cold anything like what I do on a yearly basis. The coldest temperature ever recorded anywhere in your country was a mere -9f. Here in the United States there's quite a few places where that is a common daytime high temperature in the winter, even in the lower 48. There's quite a few places even in Zone 5, see previous map, that will get to -9 and stay there for days at a time.
It's not uncommon for overnight lows in Zone 6+ to hit -20f and temperatures even lower are definitely possible. At my house in Wyoming last winter we touched -40f / -40c for a some hours one night.
Air type heat pumps simply could not handle those kinds of temperatures until relatively recently. That's why so much of the US doesn't have them already. They just didn't work during the winter in northern half of the country.
Average price of gasoline in the US in July of 2019 was about 2.80 per gallon. In July of 2023 it was about 3.60 per gallon. This is about a 27% difference.
Based on official us inflation rates (CPI) in 2020, 2021, 2023, but only through march of 2023 the price would be 3.40 per gallon. That isn't that far off, especially when my calculation is missing inflation data for 4 full months.
tl;dr This is what inflation does to a mf'er. $3.70 to 3.80 is almost certainly the new normal, it won't be going down unless the US economy experiences deflation.
Still within range of a good heat pump but Scandinavian countries don't have a lock on cold. January averages where I live in the US are colder than Reykjavik, Iceland!
I had to look that up because honestly I had forgotten about it. It's not that I "like" to, I just did.
The argument that GM should have been required to make up the difference seems reasonable to me, of course I think the bailout was unreasonable in the first place sooooo...
It doesn't require a full scale Great Depression style meltdown, the 'downturn' of 2008 caused significant difficult for many, it simply requires a sharp enough retraction of Investment Capital. That retraction is already in progress as the retirement rate for Boomers escalates and more of them begin selling their stocks and bonds; either directly or through their retirement instruments like 401ks and Pensions.
I'm not a doomer but I am fairly convinced that 401ks are a timebomb.
The 2008 TARP that bailed out GM and Chrysler may have had widespread support but it wasn't universal. In my opinion it shouldn't have been done either and was probably only necessary because of the original Chrysler bailout back in the day. Without that "The Big Three" would have been subject to market forces and turned into "The Big Two", the healthier market may have kept GM from being in the position to need a bailout.
The other point of note is that GM did repay their loan so at least in that instance it worked out. I have no idea why anyone in the Federal Government thought that Yellow would be able to successfully repay this one.
Gotta be a special kind of incompetent to crumble in a booming economic period.
Yellow has been horribly mismanaged for at least two decades. They should have died long ago and in any environment but one that's literally awash with money looking for investment opportunities they would have. For structural reasons IC is drying up so we're going to see a lot more badly run and unprofitable companies going belly up. This is a trend that's already started and its just going to pick up speed from here.
401ks are a time bomb waiting to go off. If / when there's another severe stock market crash (and make no mistake one is coming) tens of millions of retirees are suddenly going to be penniless.
The US fucked this up during WWII when it froze wages to prevent businesses from swiping the limited number of available employees from each other. So instead of wages employers started offering benefits instead, two of the commonly offered benefits were Pensions and Medical Insurance.
As a nation we really should fix these problems but doing so would be hella expensive and perhaps even impossible as we're hitting the same demographic off-ramp that France and so many other Western Nations are already on.
I'm some sort of Classical / Moderate Liberal and occasionally "talk against" NATO but there's a wide difference between that and actively pushing to see it disbanded which is tantamount to Pro-Russian propaganda...especially right now.
If you can't handle a rule preventing you from trying to remove a bastion of Western European freedom then I guess you'll move to a new instance.