redditmademedoit

At this point I can’t imagine why people would want to live on or visit Sicily. The appeal of the food and culture is undeniable, but the island’s place on the frontlines of climate change really overshadows that by a wide margin in my book: summer temperatures that can go near 50 c, water shortages (the mafia taking over water distribution!), horrific wild fires. The list goes on.

yours to hear

Though, from the snippet above it seems he just gave Greenlanders the right to listen to it, not actuallly gave the territory of Greenland all economic rights to his catalogue

Ok, NVM Trump is great, super reliableand Nato is not at all in a state of disrepair. Got it.

But boy what a stupid move it proved to be to join Nato in panic. Historic blunder by Finland and Sweden.

Rescued to a sinking ship with a mad captain, where the mid-level officers are just running around in disbelief, unable to decide between doubling down on loyalty to the captain or taking command for themselves. Who will the captain shoot next? Will he shoot at all against the people he’s sworn to protect you from?

Yes and no, it moves the goal post and makes it harder for some criminals/terrorists to launder money. But organized crime is one of the largest business sectors in the world, so many have large incentives to get around the rules.

It’s helpful to think of crime as a (or many separate) business sector(s) in this context, because at large scale criminals can benefit from much of the economic infrastructure that is required for legitimate international businesses, particularly modern businesses that sell things that don’t cost much/anything to produce (doesn’t have a fixed profit margin), such as subscriptions, streaming or intellectual property (e.g. music or games downloads).

Not long ago the circulation of this dirty money was a staple of many parts of the established financial system (see the Wachovia cartel scandal as an example). Today’s rules and crackdowns after the 2008 financial crisis has changed that somewhat.

You know how you can only withdraw a certain amount of money from an ATM even if you have more in your account and need it in cash?

That’s because of laws against money laundering and terror financing. The gist of it is that criminals and terrorists will finance/get cash out of their activities through using a bunch of middle men/fronts, cash and other ways to obfuscate the origin/destination of the money.

It’s a time honored tradition to treat foreign legions as disposable, even if Russia takes that to another level with the country’s general lack of regard for human life.

Rutte is Trump’s most loyal ally and friend.

It’s probably right that Trump is overstating his win, but frankly any form of yielding to Trump is infuriating. If there is a deal that covers “the entire Arctic region” the details will be important. Countries in that region include Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. One should not assume it’s a win for the Nato countries with more Trump regime forces in the region after the US has threatened invasion or annexation of two of them.

An average day in 2024, 54 people in the EU died in road accidents, per Eurostat.

Edit: Somewhere around 40 people a day die in road accidents in the EU. (Eurostat seems to only have numbers with the actual number of dead for 2023 so far and that year I think it was something like 47 per day on average, but other sources show road deaths decreased somewhat in 2024.

He wants to own Greenland, but moreso he wants to “own the libs”.

But to be clear, that’s still just your “normal” bad day that hits the markets with some regularity (e.g. Jensen Huang has a bad hair day).

Consider that Russia has been failing to take over a neighboring country for several years now, for incomprehensible reasons, displaying immense incompetence on every level along the way. It is inherently very unlikely that Russia simultaneously has masterminded the entire fabric of the US and effectively taken over the country through sheer genius.

No doubt that Trump is playing right into Putin’s hands, but Putin is also an idiot: not omnipotent.

I think it’s more worth considering that the MAGA doomsday cult has a lot of interests that align with Russia, e.g. shifting U.S focus to the Western Hemisphere for resource dominance, as suggested by Aslı Bâli in the latest episode of The Dig (https://thedigradio.com/podcast/maga-empire-w-asli-bali-and-greg-grandin/).