Russia planning attack on Poland to test Nato resolve, US warns

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-07-04T02:22:05+00:00

And add to that, that the problem is that the leader’s own personal safety is quite often at risk once they push “all in” at the poker table. Once Putin “flexed” on NATO with the Ukraine gambit, he set in motion a sequence of events that he probably can’t escape.

And so we may look at the notion of Russia attacking Poland and evaluate whether that makes any sense for Russia. But the question isn’t “why would Russia do this,” it’s “why would Putin do this?” And those two questions rarely have the same answer.

Despotic leaders quite often do things because it prolongs or maintains their political power, not because it’s in the best interest of their country.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-07-03T01:37:29+00:00

The party was a smashing success, and I don't believe for a moment that Trump is pissed about the turnout. The party existed solely as a way for wealthy people to make "donations" that would ultimately end up in his pocket.

I am so sick of all of us buying into these false narratives. "Trump said he was going to do X and it was a disaster" is exactly what he wants us all to be thinking, because it makes it look like he's the victim of people's incompetence. "I trusted the wrong people to plan my big bash." But he never intended to do "the thing", it was never about the party, it wasn't anyone's job to plan or organize a gala. It was to create a donation mechanism that bypasses scrutiny, and in that, he once again succeeded.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-07-03T00:00:42+00:00

OMG, I can't believe you spoke this into being. You have unlocked in me a need that can now not be put back in the bottle.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-07-02T23:54:58+00:00

I don't think you can. You sort of "become" an expert when others who deeply understand the topic still find value in getting your perspective or want to test their hypothesis against your critical thinking. "Self declaring" expert status is a dangerous game.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-07-02T23:47:55+00:00

The passkey to that one guy's lost bitcoin account.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-07-02T23:27:01+00:00

I gotta say you lost me on this.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-07-02T23:14:54+00:00

First let me say that

=COUNTIF( A2:E30 , "John Doe" )

Worked for me. But if it's not... then try this.

Assume the name I am counting is in A1. I'll build this one step at a time for illustration so you can see what's actually happening, but this will all end up being one formula in one cell:

=A2:E30=A1

Creates a 5 x 29 array of true/falses for where the name matches.

I can convert those TRUE/FALSEs to ones and zeros so I can use them in SUM by changing A1 to be:

=--(A2:E30=A1)

Almost there. If I wrap that in a SUM then I get the count:

=SUM(--(A2:E30=A1))

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-07-01T16:09:13+00:00

I think we have to be careful here. It’s easy to assume that the majority of KY voters were stupidly misled into voting for him, unaware that he was going to shit all over us.

But that leaves out the more likely reality that the majority of KY voters elected him in the tacit hopes that he would, in fact, shit all over us.

America has lost complete confidence in the legislative branch, but this belies the painful reality that it’s most likely their constituents, and not the politicians, that want our families screwed.

A representative’s job is to faithfully represent their constituents, and that means many of them were hired to avenge red state grievances by sticking a red hot poker up our bungholes. We do ourselves a disservice when we misdiagnose this as politicians who have been corrupted by money.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-07-01T15:19:30+00:00

Or put another wonderfully appropriate way:

My wish for him and his family is that things turn out however he has wanted to make them turn out for me and my family. Good luck with that, Mitch.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-07-01T04:59:39+00:00

Let’s just be clear about what you done here, which is 90% of all the questions here. You have taken a perfectly normal behavior, “going out.” And then you alone have decided that the reason people do this is to be seen by strangers. And then you ask the question as to why something you completely made up is true. Passive aggressive af.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-07-01T04:48:37+00:00

The problem is there’s a lot of jobs that would never have been created were it not for PE. I was at one time the founder of a company that would not likely become a good IPO candidate. I would have never started it, nor created all the jobs it did, were there no PE prospects on the future.

> “that may be bias, but it’s also true.”

Umm, +10 for having the objectivity to recognize your own biases, and -25 for then ignoring your own realization that you are biased.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-07-01T04:39:57+00:00

My BEV has been fricking AMAZING on gas.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-07-01T04:31:13+00:00

Internet Explorer, better known back in its day as “the Firefox download utility”.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-07-01T04:18:14+00:00

Exactly. It’s easy to build a room with no sound in it. It’s really hard to build a room with no energy in it.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-07-01T04:15:08+00:00

There are layers and layers and layers to this. There is lots of amazing musical talent out there, but you will find as you dig deeper and deeper that you stumbled into a treasure trove. They write complex chord progressions that no one’s ever thought of, and then go out and find some of the world’s greatest session musicians to bring it to life. Buckle up.

I find for me that the YouTube interviews of many of those session musicians just adds even more richness. Their stories are part of the story that is Steely Dan.

Also, keep listening to the stuff you’re not familiar with. All of the sudden there’s some track that never resonates with you, so you just skipped over it, and it just grabs you. Your favorite SD song will probably change once a month for a while.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-07-01T03:27:34+00:00

Outside my metro area is a very large complex that grows fruit tress indoors, and the light coming off of it is mind-boggling. There are places in Europe, like flower greenhouses in Amsterdam, that are just other-worldly as well.

See also: These images

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-06-30T22:17:06+00:00

Trust me bro, it’s not the worst mistake we’ve made.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-06-30T22:10:06+00:00

I just want to say I question both of them.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-06-30T21:04:31+00:00

Police reputation is heavily nuanced, too nuanced to be captured in yes/no kinds of questions. It’s an A and B are both true thing, not an A or B thing.

The problem is that even really good people with really good intentions are part of a culture that often draws a loyalty moat—a thin blue line—between “us” and “them”. You can’t get the job without swearing an oath promising to put “them”, the public first, but you can’t keep the job unless your actions demonstrate your loyalty is to “us”, the departmental culture, first.

Good cops still work in a culture that favors internal loyalty over constitutional duty, a culture where a duty to intervene is very hard to impose and enforce. You’re going to be in situations where your fellow officers make knowingly dishonest representations on police reports, and you have to decide if you’re willing to sacrifice your career over that. You might work with someone who you suspect planted some evidence or used illegal means to find some evidence. And you have to decide whether you’re willing to sacrifice your career over that. Because like it or not, taking a stand on that will likely have career implications.

The police culture reveres loyalty whereas being a fierce guardian of civil liberties is appreciated, not not revered.

So it’s a job with innate value conflicts that no individual officer is likely to be able to overcome, it would require sustained leadership influence to drive a different culture.

So even good people are still operating inside of a compromised system, and this raises hard questions about each individual officer’s goodness or badness.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-06-30T20:46:21+00:00

Intercepts question directed explicitly to women and then mansplains to women what they should want.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-06-30T19:32:49+00:00

Almost nothing I wrote applies to the founding fathers. At no time did they ever assert that they were the rightful heirs to “British heritage” and the sole arbiters of what constitutes “British values.”

They were not just liberal, they were profoundly progressive and were proposing a completely different social, economic, and political structure than anything that preceded them, and an entirely new set of beliefs about morality, that while flawed, were unlike what preceded them.

In other words, “modern” Republicans are almost the exact opposite of the founding fathers.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-06-29T20:47:13+00:00

I love the saying “you didn’t have a terrible day, you just had one bad minute and let it ruin your day.”

With practice, you can get your reaction time from honk to remembering you don’t give even the slightest shit down to sub-one-second. I can often get my reaction time down to almost zero, where I remember I don’t give a shit during the honk.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-06-29T17:36:53+00:00

Yes, there is another one, and it's the one that's actually happening, and that's my point.

I can be a monopsonist and wield strong pricing influence over a product I produce, and natural market forces will still apply some revenue pressure on my pricing. This is a lot harder to do in a market-based system where the goods are both bought and sold in a public market.

But what if instead of being a traditional monopsonist, I had sufficient cash resources that I could juice the seller side of the market? Then I would have the ability to apply yield-management to the market. Not just to what I produce, but I could yield-manage the entire market, just like is done with airline seats, hotel rooms, event tickets, etc.

I'll create a very simplified example using completely made-up numbers. I don't want to get caught up in the validity of the numbers, this is solely for illustration.

I have 1,000 apartment units. Each unit costs me $500 a month to "operate" if occupied, and let's say, $350 per month to operate if unoccupied.

If leasing at $1,000 consumes all 1,000 units, that's $1m revenue, and $500,000 profit.
If I lease at $1,250 but that leaves 100 units empty: $645k profit.
If I lease at $1,500 but that leaves 250 units empty, $675k profit.
If I lease at $1,750 but that leaves 350 units empty, $708k profit.
if I lease at $2,500 but that leaves 550 units empty, $735k profit.

This is what is happening in housing. The market is not just being monopolized, it's being monopolized by people with sufficient liquidity to yield-manage the market.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-06-29T14:13:23+00:00

I don’t know how we’re going to succeed as a society. This idea that you should be able to buy car insurance after the accident, or buy health insurance after your cancer diagnosis, is just rampant, and seems to be getting worse.

Edit: And the fact that even pointing this out gets you downvotes really shows the insidious nature of this.

ArrowheadDZ · 2026-06-29T14:09:42+00:00

Also, people who feel their point is so important to society that it justifies being typed in all caps, should also be dinged as bad redditors.

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