Just FYI the US Customary units for A4 are wrong on that image. For my fellow Americans, it’s 8.3" x 11.7".

This is one of those that will inevitably make its way to SCOTUS. Then you just hope that Roberts and one of Barrett or Kavanaugh decides they need a credibility injection that day to deflect from some other horrible decision.

True, but the use case of a trademark is also different. Simply titling your work Popeye and featuring a spinach-less Popeye as a main character should be fine (spinach as a super-serum is a still a few years away from entering the public domain). You wouldn’t want to do something like name your studio after him or try to use him for a brand of cereal or something, but even Disney has had to be careful not to go overboard with Steamboat Willie derivative works despite obviously putting him on the Disney Animation title-card to get some trademark protection. Basically, it will be hard to fully commercialize these characters if you aren’t already the one legally entitled to do so, but creators can use the public domain versions even if the trademarks are still actively in use.

All out Lemmy Civil War engulfs Bahnd and gramie already!

How many bottles of Kragl do you own, President Business?

So I guess the drought finally eased, and the reservoir that supplies the fresh water for the locks is doing better, but yeah, even with a new dam that should finally get started soon, the canal probably has 50 years or less as a viable commercial route, though honestly 150+ years isn’t a bad run as an economic project, and one of Jimmy Carter’s most humane legacies was overseeing its transfer back to the people who were dominated into letting Americans build it in the first place.

Exactly. They can still do all the line item hijinks and market segmentation they want, they will just have to do it up front and not ignore the discretionary price that they are charging.

The rule would not stop businesses from charging fees. But they would be required to list prices clearly from the onset and to display the total cost more prominently on a website than any other price.

Businesses already get a huge break in the US by not having to advertise prices inclusive of taxes and government fees. They can at least tell us how much they’re choosing to charge us.

Ah yes, the old Manafort special, for the enterprising file clerk who is willing to get fired for leaking info but would prefer not to go to jail.

In the Permian Basin? You’re not wrong. This isn’t really a case of blue city in red county. Odessa city population makes up over 2/3 of 74% Trump-voting Ector County’s and is the literal Friday Night Lights town. This should not be dismissed as an important moment. It definitely is.

Here’s a more general article about the Odessa city elections.

The strategy backfired — at least in Odessa. The three City Council incumbents lost, a stunning result that analysts and longtime observers say revealed voters’ desire for local elected leaders to focus on roads and garbage pick up, not national flashpoints.

Basically, in 2020 the county GOP actively endorsed candidates in the nominally nonpartisan election, and this time they went back to their historic tendency and didn’t. Stoker is from a locally well-known family and while openly gay and supportive of the arts and obviously concerned with the residents of the community, is also known to be business-friendly and hardly a progressive firebrand. The incumbents went hard on culture war bullshit and hate, which doesn’t play nearly as well when they don’t have the precious “R” by their names on the ballot, especially when they seem to have ignored the city’s actual needs while obsessing over it.

While ABA is not without its criticisms, especially for cases where the kids are already better able to function day-to-day and ABA is used to strongly encourage masking (back in the day they’d literally just beat kids down with both carrot and stick to get them to pretend to be “normal”), getting severely affected kids to engage and talk is basically what it’s best at, and yeah, you don’t just get “better” from ASD.

Fucking horrific by UHC, as usual, and you know ABA is not the only care getting this kind of “analysis.”

I took one for the team and went to Fox News to read the user comments on the first story I could find about this. It’s pretty telling that even there, the overwhelming sense I got – in between the “Obamacare is why healthcare is so bad!” and the “where’s Hunter’s cocaine, Mister FBI?” and the “our so-called nation is secretly run by acolytes of a shady transnational world government” – is that they don’t understand why this is getting any more attention than any other random street crime in the big bad city.

Even MAGA doesn’t care; wrong kind of billionaire, I guess.

If it’s in the book, then point happily conceded. If not, I reckon it could work either way. Everybody hates depositions.

It may not be a direct reference to the book, but I would just about bet that the author didn’t come up with the bon mot from scratch.

“Depose” in particular is interesting. It could certainly be a broader social comment about a perceived ruling class, but it also has a specific meaning in the context of civil litigation. I would imagine that some glib corporate attorneys have used those exact three words in sequence, in connection with UHC and others: Deny the claim, defend the lawsuit, depose the patients, where “depose” means conduct a lengthy and expensive and stressful set of questions, done outside the courtroom and with very little off limits because it’s expected the judge will rule on admissibility later. All of it wears out the claimant, who clearly needed the coverage and will almost by definition lack the same resources to pursue the lawsuit.

Well, this would track, since Trump himself, despite embodying virtually every other vice and bad character trait imaginable, has through some quirk of his toxic upbringing decided that being a drunk is completely unacceptable.

I’m still reading tea leaves of course, but while he may well have been completely right about literally everything, I sense that what changed was his tolerance for BS, combined how much the administration valued him.

Regardless, it’s still an absolute shame. Of course the personal tragedy for his family, and then professionally, either this poor guy was railroaded and mistreated, or else he missed a chance for a productive final act in his career.

What a sad situation. I googled around and went through some reddit threads and found my way to the final email. It was lengthy and one sided, and got off in the weeds towards the end, but the “ethics” complaints he felt it worthwhile to share were mostly centered around “lying, incompetence, hypocrisy, information hiding, etc.”

They boil down to, “They are taking my meeting space to give to a new professor and they waited until the last minute to tell me and fed me some BS about it,” and “the MechE department won’t be recommending my course for a certain requirement any more, and they didn’t tell me until long after they’d decided.” There were other grievances about the university not making lasting change after George Floyd, not taking his concerns about imminent environmental collapse (or the university’s role in preventing it) seriously, and a last-minute cancellation of a monorail proof of concept he wanted to do between two parking garages.

Honestly, it sounds like he was struggling and felt the weight of the world on his shoulders, and was no longer psychologically equipped to handle intense, but likely common, levels of office politics, academic fiefdoms, and baroque bureaucracy. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear his workplace saw the signs, and simply treated him as difficult but ensconced, an inconvenience to be avoided.

Good point.

Eventually, some clerk or staffer is gonna spend a lot of time in jail but also become a folk hero.

Given Trump’s tendencies, I’m not sure I want us jumping in right away. He’d probably pick the worse side.