The reason they're cheaper is because they don't need to charge tax on them.

I understand. Thank you for confirming it.

I've heard people here in Europe sometimes save on cigarettes in a similar way, by buying them across the border, where taxes are lower, or in duty-free shops at airports, but that's possibly outdated or even made-up hearsay I've never checked.

That's interesting there isn't anything on wiki about it. It's not a secret or anything.

There may be something I missed, or it might be such an inconsequential and uncontroversial phenomenon that no one deemed it worth documenting.

Reservation cigarettes negate those prices though.

TIL that, on at least some Indian reservations in the United States, cigarettes are sold, sold at a lower price and sold to the general public. I could not find a reference on Wikipedia; all I found was a seemingly unofficial webpage.

I see. I find it sad and alarming that a disease, however infectious, would reach Antarctica and wreak such havoc, but then again, all ecosystems are ultimately linked and little ever stays local. Thank you for replying and linking a source.

To my knowledge, Zelenskyy only expressed support for Israel after October the 7th, 2023, over a year and a half after Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine — a year and a half during which Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian Authority could have condemned Russia's war against Ukraine. They didn't, presumably, for the same reason Zelenskyy has expressed support for Israel: to avoid antagonizing their allies, morals be damned. Given their dire situation –both Ukraine and the Palestinians rely heavily on their respective allies for military and diplomatic support–, I think we ought to give them a pass. If you disagree, at least apply the same logic to both and condemn them equally.

If building them becomes difficult because of missing materials, the prices would rise, which is not happening at the moment.

Solar panels have indeed become cheaper and cheaper, and you are right to argue that the materials used to build solar panels are priced in. However, solar requires some infrastructure besides the panels themselves, such as inverters and storage, and that infrastructure needs additional materials, some of which are expensive. Copper, for instance, surged in price in 2020, and there is not enough investment to expand mining operations despite the great profits it has been yielding. This is an ongoing saga in the mining industry, with BHP attempting to take over Anglo American in part for its copper portfolio.

I am not arguing against solar; I just think it cannot be scaled to the extent necessary to cover most of our current and projected future electricity consumption. To get rid of fossil fuels and generate ever more electricity for EVs, the AI black hole and goddamn cryptocurrencies, I think we will need nuclear. I wish we would build more public transportation, break from the AI spell and ban cryptocurrencies, but I'm not hopeful. In any case, the pace solar has picked up these past years is very encouraging and we should do what we can to push it further.

That article is a sobering read. I wasn't aware of the extent of the spread and thank you for sharing it.

If pigs get it […]. That's how the "spanish" flu started in the USA.

That is indeed a theory, hypothesized in a paper from 2005 and mentioned on the Wikipedia article about the Spanish flu:

[The hospital] also was home to a piggery and poultry was regularly brought in from surrounding villages to feed the camp. Oxford and his team postulated that a precursor virus, harbored in birds, mutated and then migrated to pigs kept near the front.

Because pigs are more readily infected with avian influenza viruses than are humans, they were suggested as the original recipients of the virus, passing the virus to humans sometime between 1913 and 1918.

[I fact-check as much as my time and preexisting knowledge allow. I post what I found to vouch for your comment and save other people time. I hope I don't come across in the wrong way.]

penguin populations in the arctic

There are no penguins in the Arctic and the article you linked to doesn't mention them. Where has bird flu infected penguins?

I would characterize Tesla stock not as a pump & dump scheme anymore, but as a bet on Musk's position to extract concessions from his political connections. He has got his way already with Trump planning to end EV subsidies that mostly benefited Tesla's competitors (although Trump may have intended to do so anyway) and he might yet push against regulation that would threaten Tesla's market position in the US, like federal charging standards. He may also get Trump to impose harsher tariffs on Chinese electrical vehicles than he otherwise would, although such tariffs enjoy bipartisan support.

As far as I can tell, Biden didn't control Congress. Senator Manchin, for example, effectively watered down the Build Back Better Act that Biden advocated for — and, to my knowledge, Biden never threatened him or any other Democratic members of Congress who resisted his legislative plans with “political consequences”, as Trump is doing to Republican House representatives in this instance.

In establishing himself as the Republican presidential candidate for the 2024 election, Trump seems to me to have set up a sort of cult of personality within the party such that Republicans either fall in line or out of favor.

To be fair :P, English is not my mother tongue, so I don't necessarily realize how pedantic some expressions I use come across. Fair enough?

To be fair, fearing for one's life is understandable in a society where gun ownership, social injustice and mental illness are not only relatively widespread, but correlated, and the chances of being hurt in even simple altercations correspondingly high. The solution, though, is not allowing police to resort to violence routinely, disproportionately and indiscriminately, but to address the root causes of the danger with socioeconomic justice and safeguards, proper universal healthcare and at least some restrictions in gun ownership. Those who either aren't willing to solve these underlying issues or deny their existence outright often resort to the charge of terrorism as both a convenient deflection and an instrument of suppression and oppression. It is in our interest to push back against such misuse and keep the public discourse centered on the origins of conflict.

If I understand your quotation correctly, unlawful gathering warrants the charge of terrorism only when “intended to […] (a) influence the policies of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion and (b) affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder, assassination or kidnapping”. Then again, (a) and (b) seem redundant and the law and the judiciary might see intimidation or coercion where we do not.

Intelligent analysis I concur with and thank you for. I sometimes wonder what myths our flawed present may pass down to our uncertain future. Who knows? After two millennia, our descendants might think of Trump the way we conceive of Narcissus while they recall the new flood myths we are delivering them.

For anyone else who, like me, didn't know: Trump once referred to Tim Cook as “Tim Apple”, as described in the Wikipedia article on Tim Cook:

In a meeting for the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board with President Donald Trump in March 2019, Trump referred to Cook as "Tim Apple".

Presidents and administrations might not be able to dictate specific prices, but they can and do enact laws and regulations that influence or even define the economy. Trump's proposed tariffs are expected –not just by economists, but by markets, as seen after the election– to raise prices and, if they are enacted and result in the predicted outcome, fingers should be pointed at his Orangeness.

I don't know what substances were involved in writing that post. Mind sharing, @werefreeatlast? :P

So why are you still an ally to Saudi Arabia?

For two reasons: to try to soften the cost of living crisis and for strategic interests.

To be fair, Biden not only pledged to reassess the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia, but also oversaw the beginnings of a reset, however soft. As inflation hit households and surging oil and gas prices threatened to make it sticky, his administration and other governments –notably Germany's three way coalition– faced a choice: whether to expend political capital –much of it, in the case of the German Greens– to appeal to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Azerbaijan and other oil and gas producers to increase supply in an attempt to alleviate inflationary pressure. Ultimately, this bet failed: people –like you– are rightfully angry over their governments' appeasement to authoritarian regimes, which didn't reciprocate and instead curtailed oil and gas supply, and the cost of living crisis arguably lost Democrats the election anyway — and looks set to deliver a similar blow to the three German coalition's members.

The other reason for the Biden administration's continued cooperation with Saudi Arabia is that the kingdom is a regional partner helping the US operate in the region. Although the US have been operating there in a way detrimental to life and livelihood, it needn't be so. Were the US to exert a better influence on the region, as I and likely you too wish, Saudi Arabia would be useful for both military power projection and diplomatic endeavours. For example, if the US had stopped supplying offensive weapons to Israel, an allied Saudi Arabia might have helped secure peace and prevent Israel's enemies from capitalizing on the moment, whether with air defenses or diplomatic efforts.

Easy there — you already filled up your quota with Rupert Murdoch.

Russia benefits from a stronger US dollar insofar as its oil and gas exports are settled in that currency. The more valuable the US dollar is (as measured against the ruble), the more rubles Russia's exports end up yielding — or the better they compete with other producers in international markets.

To the contrary: the value of the US dollar, as measured against other currencies, has surged in the past weeks amidst Donald Trump's announcements of tariffs, because markets expect them to bump prices and higher prices, in turn, would could prompt the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, just as we saw in 2022.

TL;DR: higher tariffs => higher prices => Federal Reaerve raises interest rates => US dollar appreciates

The incoming Trump administration could counter this dynamic by changing the mandate under which the Federal Reserve has been operating for about a century and bringing it under the executive, stripping it of its independence.

That's weird. The Internet Archive hosts a copy of the page that you should be able to view. I would like to find out why you can't access the Mexican government's website, though.