Yeah, it's not technically difficulty; you just do what Trump did and slap your branding on Mastodon or something like that.

I think the reason it's news is that Liz Truss has a 14% positive and 64% negative rating, so the idea investors backing *her* slapping her branding on something to sell it is something of a head scratcher.

It's not surprising that Republican support hasn't changed much, because of poll methodology. If they want to sample so many "Republicans", they don't check voter registrations, they just call people up and ask their party affiliation. But feelings of party affiliation change depending on your feeling about the party, or in the case of the Republicans, the party leader. So many "never Trumpers" who were previously lifelong self-identified "Republicans" are identifying as independent now.

It doesn't take a genius. It was inflation -- or rather high prices because by the time the election came around inflation was low again, but grocery bills were shockingly high. The pitch the Trump campaign made outside it's core of nativist and racist supporters was that Trump was going to bring prices down on day 1 of his administration.

It's not the federal government paying here. It's the federal government terminating permits investors need to build the project.

Well, what's the alternative? Are the people who voted for him supposed to blame themselves?

First prove you're able to responsibly handle 19 billion, then entrusting you with 11 million is a no-brainer.

That's 11 million out of a budget of 19 billion California community college budget. That's 0.058%. In business, if you have less than 0.1% losses by fraud that's considered outstanding financial control.

Of course, that's not all the potential fraud in the system, I'm just saying finding 11 billion dollars of novel fraud is not prima facie evidence that the system is poorly run from a financial standpoint given the enormous size of the system.

If you just focus on financial aid, the state disburses $2.8 billion to community college students. 11 million amounts to a fraud rate of 0.39% in that program. This is still fairly low, although it's in the "room for improvement" range. That's a normal place for a program to be when a new paradigm for fraud emerges: when that happens it's time to put in more controls.

And you think nobody thinks that's bad? Haven't you heard of replacement theory? Remember in 2016 where we were solemnly warned that if Hillary Clinton were elected, there'd be a taco truck on every corner?

If you're self employed you're supposed to send quarterly estimated tax. If this doesn't cover your tax liability you can be fined and required to pay interest.

This is the way the system is supposed to work is that *everyone* pays more than their tax will be and has to file to get the overpayment back at the end of the year. If you're rich enough there are accounting tricks you can use to hold onto your money, but that doesn't apply to 99% of taxpayers.

wouldn't you be putting the brakes on spending? Particularly on contracts for services.

Hertz is a company notorious for adding surprise charges to rental fees, charging bogus damage claims, and even having customers arrested for auto theft because Hertz failed to log the car returned in their systems. Plus they just have shitty customer service. Data breeches are hardly surprising considering how poorly the companies are run and in particular their systems.

Dollar and Thrifty are the same company and have the same problems. I never rent from Dollar, Thrifty or Hertz, it's not worth the hassle and risk. If there were no other cars available I'd do rideshare until a better company had something available.

Why would you expect the death rate in the US to be representative of the global rate? We're not typical in any way.

This is especially germane if you are racing to create the end of the economy as we know it. By the time you get a new plant built to run your data center, someone else will have won the race.

They did the same in the original Japanese language version of Godzilla. We get a very brief peek at the monster's head on the other side of a hill about a third of the way into the film, and we finally see the whole monster at roughly the half-way point. You get the audience sold on the idea that the man in the rubber suit is going to be a terrifying monster before you show him, otherwise it would have been funny rather than scary.

Because of technology, Godzilla Minus One was able to build suspense differently. But again smart storytelling by the editor is what makes this a great movie, in this case making the opposite choices from Star Wars by slowing scenes down and giving the audience time to take things in. There isn't just one way to do it, and in this case the screenwriter/director gave the editor stuff to work with that afforded him those options.

The trick to making a stupid film go down well is to have a great editor. Star Wars was famously an unreleasable pile of shit until Marcia Lucas fixed it.

Any great fantasy story is a partnership between the storyteller and the audience. Marcia Lucas understood that and cut the film so that the audience wouldn't (or couldn't) spend a lot of time pondering the silly and pretentious story George had concocted. In a way, you could say she cut it so the audience remembered a much better film than the one they saw. Given a free hand, Lucas is going to rub the audience's nose in his conceits because like a lot of directors, he's a control freak -- it's what ended is marriage to Marcia Lucas. There was clearly artistic jealousy in George's attempt to bury the original, superior theatrical cut.