That was his heroic plan the whole time.

It’s honestly a remarkable accomplishment.

It is unreal how many tourists are there, though. I was shocked when I went there and basically couldn’t even see the fountain. We left immediately because we didn’t want to deal with all that. Rome has been my least favourite city to visit, purely because of all the tourists. Even going to Paris, which has CRAZY numbers of tourists, didn’t seem as bad; maybe because it was just designed to handle it.

I don’t think the 2 euro fee will stem the number of tourists, but it will help pay for all the upkeep the city has to do for everything to not go to shit when a million people walk through a small area every day.

I didn’t know that until this thread. That other poster made the distinction, so I looked it up.

The point they were making is that blackmail is only about revealing legal infractions. It’s a legal distinction that most people don’t care about in everyday language.

Under US law, blackmail is legally defined as threatening to reveal a criminal act in exchange for goods/services. Extortion is for threatening to reveal sensitive information.

Under US law, blackmail is legally defined as threatening to reveal a criminal act in exchange for goods/services. Extortion is for threatening to reveal sensitive information.

Or the intentional actions of a person who understands that his insane ramblings can cause stock market drops and that walking back those insane ramblings will cause stock markets to recover, allowing him and his buddies to make more money.

Not surprising. Korea has a HUGE population of smokers. While it has gone down in very recent years, back in 2017 almost half of all male adults were smokers. They still have 30% of the adult male population as smokers, though, which is double the US male smoking population.

It has nothing to do with Elon. He just said what intelligent people who have looked into the physics of the problem have known for a long time.

Hydrogen ONLY makes sense for things like trains. Do you really think it is better to use electricity plus extract then process oil to create hydrogen, burn oil to tanker truck that hydrogen to a gas station, use electricity to store the hydrogen, then waste electricity converting it to its components through a rare earth catalyst plate to charge a battery… versus transmitting electrons over a wire to charge a battery? Hell, even the fact that EVs can charge at home instead of constantly driving extra miles to get to a gas station to refill their hydrogen makes them better for the environment.

Yeah, mining rare earths for batteries is bad. But you are an idiot if you think the same thing isn’t happening in the creation of hydrogen and the rare earths used in hydrogen motors, along with the inefficiencies of transport and storage of hydrogen.

Yeah, we love traveling a lot, too. The numbers of tourists (which includes us, I know) has gone up so much in the last few years. It’s like COVID made everyone say, “fuck saving money, let’s just travel the world and buy luxury goods instead.” We went to Paris for Christmas 3 years ago, and while some of the bigger stores were crowded, it wasn’t that bad in the rest of the city. We just got back from Paris, and holy hell you could barely go anywhere due to the amount of people every place we went. It was 2C every day, and that didn’t deter anyone.

I fully support raising lodging taxes like this to help locals out who have to deal with idiots like me on a daily basis.

They might not know about their equivalent in the US: Mississippi.

I don’t disagree with most of what you said, but you have to agree there is some fear of Russia escalating if NATO does send actual troops. Russia is not doing as well as most people expected, and them getting their ass handed to them by NATO would back an unstable and suddenly politically weak Putin into a corner where his response would be unpredictable.

No, he got banned for blatant trolling. He outright admitted to saying he was making shit up. His first post is that NATO is “fake-ass” and couldn’t do anything, and then said that Russia was justified in feeling threatened by Ukraine joining NATO. When called out on the contradictory statements, he said he was just making shit up and didn’t believe either.

Nearly two thirds of Canadians aren’t paying attention.

Wait, you just said NATO was fake-ass and would do nothing. Why would Ukraine joining NATO be terrible for Russia if NATO is so fake-ass and worthless?

Also, just because I’m an American doesn’t mean I believe in the things my government does. Trying to leave NATO and attacking random countries, like Trump is doing now, is not something I think is right.

A) Ukraine is not part of NATO.

B) NATO countries are providing Ukraine with tons of military hardware, without which it is arguable whether Ukraine would have survived this long.

C) The point is that Putin is using NATO as an excuse to go after Ukraine, since NATO is “threatening Russia” and Ukraine joining NATO would put a threatening force on Russia’s doorstep.

And I wonder who he thinks would lead this new political entity.

I am all in favor of countries banding together to create more powerful bargaining units and helping to stabilize economies in their regions, I just wonder how well it would work when ALL countries involved are unstable economically and politically. It’s one thing for the EU to be created with Latvia, Romania, and Bulgaria when you have France, Germany, and England to stabilize things. It’s another thing for countries that have all had major issues with stability in both recent years and consistently in the past 30 years to try coming together.

Maybe that instability is partly due to US interference that this will help prevent in the future? Maybe it would help reduce the violence from drug cartels, which could stabilize the region as well?

I would like to see the poll results after a hypothetical Frexit. As much as people bitch about how restrictive the EU is on countries and how much the bigger countries support the smaller countries, most of them forget how much of a pain in the ass it was before.

I feel like Brexiters might have a more informed opinion on the benefits of being part of the EU.

Tough to say, but we have a dozen restaurants in the U.S. older than 300 years, so it is plausible since we have only had the civil war on our soil in that time frame. There are multiple pubs in England that date (themselves) to 1200 years ago, too.

Maybe the distinction isn’t just “continuously running” but also under the same name and without major renovations??