Failure to find joy or embrace the little moments of delight may result in termination

They own a big chunk (possibly a majority) of Spotify and extract hefty licensing fees from it. (Spotify moving into podcasting was apparently intended to find a market in which they could keep the profits.) The majors get far better licensing terms than indie labels or small artists would get, because they have the whip hand: Spotify has no choice but to pay up as not to become a platform without Taylor Swift/Ed Sheeran/Baby Shark/etc., which would effectively wipe them out.

Make no mistake, the three major labels (Warner, Sony and Universal) are reaping the vast majority of profits from Spotify.

MM/DD/YYYY would annoy me wherever it’s from, because it’s wilfully perverse.

In Europe, having former imperial dependencies seems to be the minimum requirement for getting to use your own language at the UN.

If they sell off the Observer, they’ll lose a lot of their TERF columnists like Sonia Sodha, which would make it less problematic to link/subscribe to them.

Barrier troops have been a thing in this war as well. Typically Kadyrov’s “Instagram corps” with their shiny new kit have been the final barrier, safely at the rear.

But still no Taurus missiles

“yank” sounds seriously old-fashioned, like something from the Crocodile Dundee era.

It makes some sense. Australia is not that unlike the US: there’s a lot of geographical spread, people more or less speak the same language, much of it is car-centric so you won’t have to get used to walking/cycling everywhere as you might in Europe, plus there’s a more or less functioning state healthcare system and much fewer guns in the hands of the general public. On the downside, the wildlife wants to kill you, and the locals will call you a “bloody seppo bastard” (rhyming slang for American, from “septic tank”/“yank”), though sometimes affectionately.

References to Poland in the context of Russian wars do sound like ominous foreshadowing. At least there’s nothing called “Suwalki Gap”, “Berlin Ring Road” or “Finnish Sniper”

The worthwhile Assassin’s Creed games can be bought for a few bucks for the PS3/Xbox 360. Everything after Ezio is just an inessential sequel.

Operation Wabbit Season

That was probably the amphetamines talking

Maybe, if you’re good enough, you’ll be promoted to a job that pays you. (And if you’re not, then you just haven’t proven yourself.) And so, work becomes like athletics or musicianship: something most participants lose money on, but a famous few get rich from, drawing the others in.

Getting rolling stock certified to the tunnel’s stringent requirements will be a challenge. There is no second-hand market (SNCF, who own a majority of Eurostar, have a policy of destroying old trains rather than letting them fall into the hands of competitors), manufacturers of units already certified for the tunnel have long waiting lists, and getting new units certified would take many years.

You’re not paying for the original banana (well, you are, but you’ll have to replace it with a banana of your own sourcing every few days), and presumably the duct tape is ordinary as well, and there’s no special secret trick to correctly arranging it, so anyone reading this could perfectly recreate the artwork at home. You’re paying for the receipt certifying you to be the one person who paid for the concept. In other words, it’s like a NFT, only more ecologically sound.

Campism. All evil comes from the Washington liberal-capitalist consensus, therefore anyone who stands against Washington and its allies is on the side of the Revolution, even if they’re the Taliban or someone.

I thought they had field crematoria for that

Not even that; 0.1% per trade would bring in a huge windfall. Even something negligible like 0.01% would bring in nontrivial amounts of revenue.

The problem is that being above paying tax has become part of the identity of being rich, and the very idea of even a negligible amount of one’s wealth being taken away to be given to your inferiors is unacceptable, and the rich will defend every fluctuating cent of their wealth as a non-negotiable matter of honour, even if it means burning down the world.

When they next need tanks for a historical film about WW2, they’ll need to cobble them together from plywood and an old Lada sedan. Same goes for historical films about the Ukraine war.