tomatolung, tomatolung@sopuli.xyz

So now Hungary deals with a potentially less mafia like leader, who still isn’t very pro EU nor Ukraine and might still bloc the 90 Billion Euro. However he’ll have his own mess to clean up and possibly stop blocking the EU from more functionally operating as well as hopefully stop being a Putin conduit/advocate.

Trump and the US shit is world affecting, but get your head out of your US ass. The EU is where the free world game is, and China is still the player to watch. Trump just made the US more irrelevant and your ignorance is part of why that is.

And here in lies one of the many problems with American exceptionalism. “It’s always from our perspective.”

As an American abroad, I have to say I really dislike the ignorance from where I was born.

In that, I congratulated you on your very Dutch directness in querying.

$8-12 million per so somewhere between 38 and 57 of them based on raw division. Probably less than 38 though as my guess is the 400€ million is inclusive of training, support, delivery, ammo, integration, etc.

Also doesn’t indicate timeline.

It’ll be interesting to get a side by side comparison vs the Rheinmetall SkyRanger, given both use programmable ammo and also have different range and integration characteristic.

The president did not share any names as to the leaker, the journalists, or the media outlets that he believed had publicized the story. But after his comments, some members of the press pointed toward Fox News and The Washington Post for being among the first to land the scoop.

Yet those media companies were not the only ones to report that one member of the military had been unaccounted for after the initial rescue on Friday: Reuters also reported at the time that just one of the aircrew had been rescued. Hours later, the outlet reported that a search and rescue was underway.

Other journalists jumped to claim the scoop, even after Trump’s threat. Amit Segal—an Israeli journalist with ties to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—said on his Telegram chat later Monday that he was the first to report the story.

“As you may recall, this was first published here,” Segal wrote.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former staunch ally turned Trump critic, said everyone in the Trump administration who claims to be a Christian needs to “beg forgiveness from God” and intervene in the president’s “madness”.

In a lengthy post on X, the former Republican congresswoman wrote: “I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit. I’m not defending Iran but let’s be honest about all of this.”

She went on: “The Strait is closed because the US and Israel started the unprovoked war against Iran based on the same nuclear lies they’ve been telling for decades, that any moment Iran would develop a nuclear weapon.”

You know who has nuclear weapons? Israel. They are more than capable of defending themselves without the US having to fight their wars, kill innocent people and children, and pay for it. Trump threatening to bomb power plants and bridges hurts the Iranian people, the very people Trump claimed he was freeing.”

You it’s a Mad Easter when MGT is the voice of reason you are applauding, even if she is nucking futz.

So that’s rumors of Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, and now Gabbard. I doubt any changes will help Trump improve his ability to control reality… But I also doubt it until I see anyone dismissed.

This is the author’s post at Oxford: https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/news/global-poverty-trends-through-a-new-lens-olivier-sterck-article-for-voxdev

Has global poverty fallen since 1990? Depending on which poverty line you use, the answer ranges from “we’ve made huge progress” to “nothing has changed”. 

Using the World Bank’s extreme poverty line of US$2.15/day (in 2017 PPP), the share of people in poverty fell from 38% of the world’s population in 1990 (about 2 billion people) to 8.5% in 2024 (690 million people) (Figure 1). This is often cited as a historic success.

But raise the line – say to $21.5/day, as suggested by Pritchett and Viarengo (2025), or $30/day, as argued by Roser (2024) – and the picture changes entirely. The poverty rate is then extremely high, above 75%, and has barely budged since 1990. In absolute terms, the poverty headcount has even increased, from over 4 billion poor people in 1990 to over 6 billion poor people in 2024. Based on these numbers, the fight against global poverty appears to have failed.

This divergence is not just a statistical quirk. All mainstream poverty measures share the same fundamental feature: they ignore everyone above the chosen line. With the extreme poverty line of the World Bank ($2.15/day), someone earning $2.16/day is treated as equally non-poor as someone earning $10, $100, or $1,000/day. Billions of low-income people – who most would agree still live in poverty – are therefore excluded from the statistics. And because there is no consensus on where to set the line, it is tempting to pick the one that tells the story you want.

In Sterck (2026), I propose to measure income poverty without a poverty line. The idea is to measure poverty across the entire income distribution, rather than classifying people as poor or non-poor based on an arbitrary threshold.

The measure’s key intuition is simple: if person A earns half as much as person B, then A is twice as poor. Poverty is therefore simply measured as the reciprocal of income, and its unit is simply inverted. If incomes are measured in dollars per day ($/day), poverty is measured in days per dollar (days/$).

Average poverty is simply the average time it takes to earn $1 in a given population.

In 2024, that value was equivalent to:

• 1 day in DR Congo, Madagascar, South Sudan, and Mozambique
• 12 hours in Haiti
• 2 hours in China
• 85 minutes in the US
• 25 minutes in Switzerland.

As Sal would say, shipping is the blood of the world and I think the world is having a heart attack right now with 3200 ships stuck and permission based trickle going through.

3:31 seconds in is when she say it.

Satisfying, but verse others who believe in this it’s still disheartening.

While I understand the hypothesis, I am not sure it is working out that way.

Although Trump is trying desperately to find a way to subvert the elections, given the decentralized State based nature of it, it’s going to take more than an external war with Iran to justify an internal canceling of the elections. The SAVE Act is an attempt at nationalizing the Elections, but while it’s moving it lacks the capacity to jump the biggest hurdle in the Senate. Any Executive attempt at nationalizing the elections has very little judicial basis, which would make it hard to hold up in court. It’s dynamic and complex, but it’s not as simple as his declaration of marshal law.

That is not to say your sentiment isn’t correct. If he can find a way, or his backers can find a way, they will try and do it.

On the second point, Trump didn’t get a 9/11 style bump. Indeed it seems to have gone almost the opposite way based on polling. Given inflation and other economic impacts, it might cause more defections before it helps him.

What it has done is push Epstein out of the US new. This too might have been part of the calculus. It is still rippling through the UK and other political systems, but the US has put it aside for now.

You are correct, but that won’t stop them from trying to blame them.

Also the Dems are so ineffectual lately, they might just make it easy for him.

Overall, Europe’s gas ​stockpiles across major markets are currently around 30% full compared to nearly 54% full for the early March ​period.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/europes-skimpy-gas-storage-under-scrutiny-qatar-halts-lng-flows-2026-03-03/

So that adds to the hit.

The Norwegian have their issues, but when they get things right they really nail it.

https://www.niwater.com/media/geso5q4o/2024-ni-water-drinking-water-quality-annual-report.pdf Is the report vs those standard.

This is a comparable report from NYC. https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/water/drinking-water/drinking-water-supply-quality-report/2025-drinking-water-supply-quality-report.pdf

’Tis a great question and one very worth digging into. First off, I suggest getting The Big Thirst from the library. It’s a great book describing the challenge of water for several cities across the world and the processes used to make your water safe.

Second, I’d also suggest checking out some YouTube videos like this Animagraffs video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsVfshmK0Ak. As The Big Thirst and others describe, there are a plethora of engineering techniques now to purify water on a citywide scale, and it is very much up to local utilities to decide how they do it.

Third, someone has already pointed out that there are water quality standards in N. Ireland. As others have noted, it needs to be “safe,” not “sterile.” Indeed, you actually do want some minerals in your water—otherwise it can be detrimental to your health. Drinking straight distilled water continuously, for example, is problematic because “pure” water will actually leach the minerals it encounters.

Fourth, the purity of water is ultimately about how much money is invested in purifying it. Chip companies and scientific endeavors need higher levels of water purity for some of their processes. This can be achieved through the engineering processes mentioned above, producing incredibly pure water—which is actually dangerous to drink.

Lastly, the purification of water from your swamp is a function of how much money the city is willing to spend, but it is feasible to take nearly any water and make it safe to drink with enough investment in infrastructure. As part of this, the pipes that deliver water to your house are crucial: they must remain full and pressurized (pushing clean water out, not allowing contamination in). I mention this because it’s important to understand that the infrastructure around water delivery is nearly as important as the treatment itself. (Similarly true for wastewater.)

While I applaud her bring it out on the house floor and making it public, I wonder at the general impact apart from making Trump face his responsibly directly and publicly.

For those of you who can stand it, I’d suggest reading what the conservative side is portraying it as. I say this as around 40% of the voting public seems to swallow this without question. They portray Minnesota as:

The theft of billions of dollars in welfare payments in Minnesota by primarily Somali criminals became an overnight political liability for Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and other state officials who, at best, ignored the problem. Trump has designated Vice President JD Vance to lead the fraud investigation; you can be sure that Democrat-run states like California and New York will be in the crosshairs.

So no mention of the killing, among the many other things that the guardian article did discuss.

It makes me wonder what the swing voters read and believe.

From: https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic which is what the guardian is writing about:

That destroyed a particular kind of moat: habitual intermediation.

DoorDash (DASH US) was the poster child.

Coding agents had collapsed the barrier to entry for launching a delivery app. A competent developer could deploy a functional competitor in weeks, and dozens did, enticing drivers away from DoorDash and Uber Eats by passing 90-95% of the delivery fee through to the driver. Multi-app dashboards let gig workers track incoming jobs from twenty or thirty platforms at once, eliminating the lock-in that the incumbents depended on. The market fragmented overnight and margins compressed to nearly nothing.

Agents accelerated both sides of the destruction. They enabled the competitors and then they used them. The DoorDash moat was literally “you’re hungry, you’re lazy, this is the app on your home screen.” An agent doesn’t have a home screen. It checks DoorDash, Uber Eats, the restaurant’s own site, and twenty new vibe-coded alternatives so it can pick the lowest fee and fastest delivery every time.

Anyone who has used these agent can see this with a bit of futurism… With the caveat that it’s never as simple as a single prompt should be. They are incredibly savant like at time, and then they make the dumbest contextual mistake that you have to chase down for hours. Which is to say the markets are idiots as usual. (Along side CEOs.) These agents aren’t up to the hype, their investment, nor their ability to code without security flaws. Just let it keep singing: “If I only had a brain” and hanging scarecrows up in the windows.

I really appreciate the TLDR, as I like to know the point before I start reading the support of it. However “legible” is a horrible word for this as precise as it might be.

Once a threat becomes legible — primarily, by an elected authoritarian beginning to act in authoritarian ways once in office — people start prioritizing democracy in a way they didn’t beforehand.

Which I would rephrase as saying: ’When politicians act like dictators, document it, yell it out, and call them out."

And even that’s to long and not direct enough.