But the refugee situation is the tricky part. We can leave and take all our toys with us...hell, we can wipe the hard-drives and implode the (ginormous and brand new) embassy with demolition explosives, and slow-walk away from the blast. We were never going to find a home for 15 million refugees...which is why the…

Yeah, more than 3 changes to the standard recipe, and you’re basically making something completely different anyway. I’d also propose an upcharge whenever your drink concoction customizations exceed the size of the drink you’ve ordered. A grande hot chocolate in a venti cup with extra extra whipped cream and drizzle…

Yeah.  Turns out, the markup on sugar and ice is even more lucrative than the markup on coffee.  Who’da thunk?

Have you tried an Americano? People in a hurry (unwilling to wait for a pour-over or a french press) could always get an Americano for the same price as drip if they were unhappy with the drip o’ the day being served. And if you do have time, upgrade the pour-over to a french press instead, it’s well worth it, you get…

First off, I hope McDonald’s or the local franchisees are taking good care of this guy. Say what you will, but this kind of brand loyalty is rare and precious.

This.  Smoke the glass....or the shaker.

Seeing alot of these show up on social media and in text, I have to conclude many of them are caused by using bad voice recognition or lazy pronunciation...and then simply not looking at the output before hitting “send/post/publish”. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one left who proofreads his text messages before…

Meaning Afghanistan is the geo-political buffer between Iran and Pakistan, and physically one of the countries that blocks easy access to a port. Iran has been very influential if you consider the Shi’a/Sunni divide.

The Biden administration can’t to that exactly, but they could call a pow-wow of insurance executives and urge them to raise premiums or copays on people who don’t have proof of vaccination, and they could do something to the same effect with federal funds for medical programs (like the VA or tri-care recipients). As…

It’s worse than a COVID ward: no nurse in the civilized world is going to be trapped in a room breathing the same air with 30 patients for the whole day, every day.  Alot of older/poorer Florida schools don’t have a central HVAC system, they’re just recirculating room air from a glorified window unit, just like…

It’s not just Florida’s problem, unfortunately, and never has been.  Unless we can set up a blockade at the border and shutdown flights, as goes Florida, so goes the rest of the U.S.  The people popping back in forth to their timeshare, Disney, to see gran and gramps, taking cruises, etc. keep adding fuel to the fire…

So whoever put that in a report can get pinched on filing a false police report, and whoever presented it to the grand jury will get charged with perjury...right? I mean that’s how it works for all us lowly work-a-day law-abiding plebs, so shouldn’t law enforcement get held to the same standard?

Sadly, most of the people who read the report (who are we kidding? most of the people who would read an executive summary of the report, or just the headline of the article reporting on the report) won’t understand enough about how computers work to recognize what’s a threat and how probable it is. Most of this…

Afghanistan was, and is, and probably will always be, landlocked, poor, and with little infrastructure or industry. The wealth and arms and ideologies powering the Taliban are not native to Afghanistan and never were. The Afghan people are sims in a real-world sandbox for clerics, warlords, and royals to manipulate…

The Taliban never went away. The US thought they were fighting them in the mountain caves and rural villages, meanwhile the Taliban leadership has been banking and lobbying and networking in Islamabad and Cairo and Doha, sent their next generation of leaders to the best universities in the west, and has used the…

Yeah. We (with our NATO allies and corporate contractors) trained the entire Afghan law enforcement apparatus, and their military (supposedly like 350,000 warm bodies).  Their current government is via a process we helped them create and implement, and are funding indirectly and directly, through a combination of aid,…

At the time I thought Contagion was well-researched...this last year, I realized that research involved either a virgin priestess huffing subterranean vapors, or time travelers.

I tend to binge laundry (i.e. wait until it piles up enough and then do several loads in a row) and have found that if I clean the dryer lint filter in the middle of the cycle also, fluffy things like towels and sweatshirts at least, dry noticeably faster.

Think of REEF as the franchisee in this case. The kitchen equipment, ingredients, procedures would all be the same as a traditional Wendy’s, minus any of the dine-in facilities. In theory they should be able to run leaner and more efficient, so should be able to pass that savings on to the consumer...whether they do…

In theory, strategic ghost kitchens should help that problem, by being able to better optimize routing. Right now your driver either waits in the drive-thru queue with everybody else, or parks, walks in, and waits in that queue, or the restaurant is slammed with walk-ins, and so your order is farther down the line.…