To be pedantic, they have a navy, just no large ships in said navy.

I thought Taiwan was China? Hard to invade yourself, eh, Xi?

The logic is very different when there is verifiably an afterlife and true gods.

The best description I have seen for single store franchisees is, you’ve paid a lot to give yourself a job. They are not lucrative, and in fact, are capital intensive, and often predatory.

There is a very high up front cost, and you generally do not own the real estate. This means you are locked into 30 year leases, often with complicated terms that are solely beneficial to the land owner.

Next, with regards to liquidity, if you don’t own the real estate, you often can’t get multiple business loans with a single franchise, so you must secure the loan with your personal assets, which means you will go personally bankrupt if you hit a rough patch.

Then, after dealing with the complicated business to business transactions and legal work, you still have to deal with the corporate bullshit, taxes, and supervisory duties, particularly if you do not already have a strong business partner to do this for you.

Pretty much, unless you are independently wealthy, own the real estate in a high traffic location, or already have multiple other franchises, it’s a losing venture that will kill your soul and eat every dollar you have.

It’s not like these billionaires are spending this money, so it’s just been invested for 7 years. What’s the old adage, Rule of 72? Given a 10% rate of return, they would be expected to double their money in…

…seven years.

While the tax policies certainly aren’t helping the majority of the population, let’s not pretend compound interest isn’t a thing.

This is nothing new, other than that Chase has brought this capability in-house. Credit card companies have shared purchase information with second parties forever.

Chase Media Solutions follows from the integration of card-linked marketing platform Figg, which JPMorgan Chase & Co. acquired in 2022

From my understanding, the impetus was that F5 submitted a CVE for a vulnerability, for an optional, “beta” feature that can be enabled. Dounin did not think a CVE should be submitted, since he did not considered it to be “production” feature.

That said, the vulnerability is in shipping code, regardless of whether it is optional or not, so per industry coding practices, it should either be patched or removed entirely in order to resolve the issue.

We need to have capitalism. We need to have economic freedom.

Freedom to do what, Nikki?

freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.”

Freedom to exploit anything for profit, got it.

So if it’s not illegal, it’s fair game. And guess what wasn’t illegal until the Thirteenth Amendment? And guess what we had to do in order to pass that amendment?

Fight a civil war, right.

Release date, 06/30/2024. Cease and desist date, 01/01/2024.

From the article, what we all already knew:

About 96% of the atmosphere on the second planet from the Sun is made up of carbon dioxide, a smidge of other gasses including nitrogen, and practically no oxygen.

Scientists: We detected infinitesimally sparse amounts on the sunny side of the planet for the first time!

The author: Literally covered.

For fuck’s sake.

Why would you send authentication to a known good identity while on TOR? This literally defeats the purpose of anonymity.

I can understand Teams in Office, particularly O365 for organizations… what I don’t get is Teams being mandatory in Windows 11…