Not really archaic - if this was valuable stuff washing up on shore, the law would still be relevant.

Members of the British government have been calling for strong efforts to ensure the shipping company and its insurers will pay the costs of the cleanup. Seatrade, which operates the vessel, said its insurers are fully engaged in the process, and in the meantime, volunteers are scouring the beaches, aiding in the cleanup (and possibly taking a few bananas home as a reward).

I do wonder about stores like that. According to a friend of mine who worked on the household staff of a very rich family, they did buy extremely expensive stuff in boutique stores even when much cheaper alternatives were almost as good (or even equally good, I suspect) but how many rich people like that are there? That same friend told me that at least some of those stores are vanity projects for that same sort of rich person - they want to own the sort of store they think is cool or cute, and they don’t actually need it to turn a profit.

In the eyes of anyone who wants to elect pragmatists who don’t tilt at windmills.

I’m not sure why people want him to humiliate Democrats by trying something doomed to failure. Hegseth can’t be impeached successfully unless multiple Republicans support doing so.

So we’re at the “I didn’t do it, but if I did then it isn’t so bad” stage.

My favorite part of this is that the redistricting would have had no problems in court if the Republicans had simply not talked about their race-related motives in public.

With that said, I don’t have high hopes for the Supreme Court here.

My guess is that they’re not particularly outrageous but they are damaging in a nonpartisan way (or else Biden could have released them). Maybe the unreleased information is about Epstein’s work with intelligence agencies, something that neither Democrats nor Republicans would want to release and individuals with access wouldn’t feel a moral obligation to leak.

But that still doesn’t explain why Trump doesn’t just say so without revealing any details - it seems less damaging than total stonewalling.

I’m not sure why this is a better argument against a 50 year mortgage than against 15 or 30 year mortgages. The author does say that 50 years gives more opportunities to refinance, but many people who buy homes don’t intend to live there 50, 30, or even 15 years. For these people, the only thing that matters is the monthly payment and the choice of a lower payment but with more of that payment going towards interest can be a rational one.

he has no control over his party

He can’t actually order them to do anything. One might argue that if he was a better leader, he could have persuaded them to stick with the plan longer, but maybe he had already done that weeks ago and this is the longest that anyone could have persuaded them to hold out. It is the longest shutdown ever, after all…

I’ve never understood how being a wanker to someone whose job it is to sort issues out somehow nets you a better end result.

I saw a guy yell at an airport employee who kept telling him that she couldn’t legally let him on the plane because the cabin door was already shut. He kept at it until a supervisor showed up, contacted the pilot, and let him in. I get where the guy was coming from (because he loudly proclaimed that he was missing a connecting flight through no fault of his own) but it was still weird to see him get something by being angry which he probably couldn’t have gotten by being nice.

The random sample survey of 604 D.C. residents was taken between August 14 and 17 shortly after Trump signed the executive order. It indicates some 65 percent of residents do not believe the presence of FBI agents and uniformed National Guard troops from an increasing number of states makes the city safer.

Eight of 10 residents surveyed oppose Trump’s executive order to federalize law enforcement in the city. Seven in 10 oppose it “strongly.”

Source.

I’m not sure why they thought a DC jury would ever convict, given that even a DC grand jury (which hears only the prosecutor’s side) didn’t indict.

Things intended to be temporary often end up permanent, especially when it is in the interest of the party in power to make them permanent (and gerrymandering is always in the interest of the party in power, because that’s the party that does the gerrymandering).

With that said, the intent to revert this gerrymandering is the intent to rebuild the town, but even if the town will be rebuilt someday, it’s still being destroyed now. California Republicans have a right to representation, and the Democrats are deliberately depriving them of that right because of something that totally different people in Texas are doing.

I’ll extend the war metaphor: sometimes military necessity dictates a course of action that will cause civilian casualties, but even then we should still acknowledge that there are civilian casualties and that that’s bad.

I think you’re probably right, in the sense that not doing this would probably be even worse, but we’re destroying the town to save it, as the saying goes. Win or lose, there won’t be much left of a very important norm.

Because disenfranchising people is the solution to disenfranchising people. But who knows - this may be the least bad option.

The article seems to be saying that the VA is no longer classifying breast cancer in men as a “reproductive organ” cancer, and therefore it’s no longer eligible for automatic coverage in some contexts the way that other cancers of the reproductive system are. I’m not sure why this is an issue, because I’ve never heard of any ideological claims about male breasts which the Trump administration might wish to oppose.

He married her and he wants her to convert, but there’s no reason to think that he married her for the purpose of converting her.

So people want him to (1) believe that the Catholic faith is essential for eternal salvation but also (2) not care whether or not his wife is Catholic? That wouldn’t make any sense. Of course any Catholic who cares about his loved ones is going to hope that they convert to Catholicism.

The PSF is (presumably) already required to comply with Federal anti-discrimination laws. Am I misreading the text or does it not actually create any new obligations for the PSF if they were to accept the grant?

These tax savings come at the cost of having to live off of a small fraction of one’s net worth. That provides a social benefit - a fortune that isn’t being spent is like a loan to society. Consider, for example, a person with two hundred million dollars of assets. He has the option of selling those assets, paying a tax of, say, eighty million dollars, and then buying a hundred and twenty million dollars of stuff right now. He also has the option of spending ten million dollars per year tax free forever. The latter is worth incentivising - maybe it’s not worth incentivising to the extent that it is right now, but an essay about tax policy which makes no mention of that is incomplete.

Plus, if unrealized gains on American assets are taxed, that reduces the value of American assets relative to foreign assets in jurisdictions where unrealized gains are not taxed. That might cause problems which this essay also omits.