impulse

Those of us in cattle class don't like middle seats, and are willing to queue up early to avoid getting stuck in one. Especially on a long flight. Or worse, get booked in a middle seat on the 2nd segment, too. Since Covid, the flights to China are cheap, but very rarely non-stop to smaller (<15 million) cities.

You must not fly to China. If I show up 3 hours early, there's already a 30 minute queue. If I show up 4 hours early, I may be first in the queue when they open the check-in gate (3 hours before departure). But I'll need to get in that queue at least half an hour before they open the desks to get up front in the line. And that's if I can figure out which desk to queue up at. And they don't change it... To answer the OP, I don't move hotels to be closer to the airport, and that area isn't of enough interest to me that I'd stay near the airport. I shoot for arriving 3 hours early and allow double the expected time for traffic. Usually that means leaving the hotel 5 hours before wheels up. Swampy is a great airport to spend some extra time. Edit: In fairness, I fly cattle class. I just can't bring myself to pony up the $100 an hour for a slightly better seat and meal, and shorter queues.

If Trump would have been convicted, how about the 126 congressmen and 18 states that agreed that the election was tainted when they filed amicus briefs in support of the Texas vs Pennsylvania suit? Would they have been convicted, too?

Once again, attacking the bearer because you can't disprove the message.

Part of Stanford University. Which is neither here nor there, unless you can point to anything he has said in error, or as deliberate misinformation. I occasionally disagree with his analysis, but I haven't yet found any of his statistics to be in error. He is extremely well researched, probably backed up by a ton of Stanford interns and flunkies.

While that is true, a lot of us think that was an election year ploy that would have been reversed the day after the election had it gone the other way. They just saw how bad that issue was polling.

Yeah, but we're not supposed to talk about that...

And don't forget, "there's no evidence that Biden was crooked" Other than hundreds of pages in several official reports, bank documents, photos, and sworn testimony by dozens of witnesses.

Short answer, yes. He really got that much wrong.

Please tell me someone in charge has a lightbulb going off in their head, thinking about all those idle and paid for accommodations in Rwanda...

We'll just have to see, won't we? Here's my forecast... By Summer 2025, the dying will cease in Ukraine and Gaza. I wish I could be as optimistic that Iran won't have used all of their BidenBucks to go nuclear.

Nobody's disputing that. I'm responding to the claim that Trump will be worse for the debt than Harris would have. Record Date Debt Outstanding Amount Annual Average 9/30/2024 $ 35,464,673,929,172 $ 2,297,339,884,449 $ 2,129,820,683,639 9/30/2023 $ 33,167,334,044,723 $ 2,238,422,431,416 4 Years of Harris/Biden 9/30/2022 $ 30,928,911,613,307 $ 2,499,993,043,258 9/30/2021 $ 28,428,918,570,049 $ 1,483,527,375,434 9/30/2020 $ 26,945,391,194,615 $ 4,225,989,441,181 Black Swan Event 9/30/2019 $ 22,719,401,753,434 $ 1,203,343,570,254 $ 1,142,196,021,737 9/30/2018 $ 21,516,058,183,180 $ 1,271,158,167,127 First 3 years of Trump 9/30/2017 $ 20,244,900,016,054 $ 671,455,302,117 9/30/2016 $ 19,573,444,713,937 $ 1,422,827,047,452 Which conveniently forgets the past 8 years, when Harris/Biden added to the debt at almost twice the rate of the Trump years, excluding the pandemic year (2020), when businesses were going belly up and people lost their jobs. Historical Debt Outstanding | U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/ Past performance may not guaranty future results, but it's a more reliable indicator than some election year forecast from a partisan source.

But thank God that idiot's term will end in a few days.

That one is really making the rounds in the wingnut conspiracy websites. Or should I say the spoiler alert websites?

When I first moved to China in 1999/2000, my apartment building housed a bunch of Korean Samsung employees. 3 or 4 days a week, the van would come by and pick them up (with their sticks) to spend the day golfing. The "supervision" isn't as close as they'd like you to believe.

We sure don't matter to the Dem elite, who decide to keep RFK Jr off the primary ballot, tried to keep Trump off all ballots, then decided to swap out the candidate with 14 million primary votes in favor of a candidate with zero primary votes. Democracy isn't the problem. Democrats are.

You're, once again, deflecting from my issue. I'll never claim my taxes made a dent in the budget, even when I was in the top 10%, then the top 5% of earners. But those taxes made a huge difference in the choices and compromises I had to make on a daily basis. Neither do I. But we have to draw a line under it somewhere. Not an entire lifetime. And I do object to subsidizing generations of welfare families. Partly, that's selfish. But it's also cruel to them. The biggest incentive I had to go out and get an engineering degree was cleaning toilets and all the other crap jobs I did in my youth.

Of course you don't recall any of that. The MSM (and moderators) were squelching anything that stood in the way of getting the "safe and effective" into everyone.

They're confusing "died with Covid" and "died of Covid" I'd like to think it's an honest error. But the financial incentives were huge.

Good point. Recall that the vaccine had to be temperature controlled (kept cold) to avoid disintegration of the mRNA at room temperature. How many times have they moved that goalpost? Remember when the science said "it won't move beyond the injection site"? Then it was, "well, it moves beyond the injection site, but not into the organs" (or some other such nonsense). And every month or so, they had to move that goalpost again. And again. And again.

What happened to "hottest year in history"? It's comforting to know that when it gets really cold, they can crank up those solar panels and those wind turbines.

According to who? The MSM that's lost all credibility, or the paid shills publishing phony "forecasts" in the runup to the election? Meanwhile, in real numbers that have already happened, the Harris/Biden administration piled on debt twice as fast as the Bad Orange Man administration, excluding the pandemic spending. That's the problem for Dems when both candidates had a history. You can compare what they actually accomplished, not their promises.

My God. Those heartless monsters... Requiring people to actually get out of bed and work as a condition of getting free money... My money. I'm sure it won't be popular with some demographics, but they already vote Blue and always will, as long as they get promised free stuff.

I enjoy listening to Thomas Sowell about how the welfare state as it's currently structured absolutely devastates families, mostly Black families. Though, I don't know if "enjoy" is an accurate word for being so disheartened by how bad it's been screwed up. Basically, my takeaway from his books and lectures is that the plight of Black families was improving rapidly in the USA from WW2, until the '60s and then the Great Society took pity on them and turned them into wards of the Gub'ment.

As cheap as it is to organize and staff a protest with thousands of paid shills, I don't think any of us know. What I do know is that if I start to think I understand Thai politics and the interactions between the major factions, I'm just fooling myself. The protests and lead up to the Yingluck coup were actually quite pleasant. There was a huge camp set up outside the office at Asoke, and it was fascinating to wander around at lunch and after hours, for days on end. It looked like more of them were having fun than were genuinely angry. Edit: But I would add, even before that, I was reminded of how bad it could have gotten by the bullet holes in some stainless steel handrails where the protests had happened a few years earlier.