RunawayFixer

It's what Amazon, Walmart, etc want it to mean. They want the profits, but none of the responsibility that comes with selling goods. So they did some legal linguistic gymnastics and thus according to them, stuff that is bought in the Amazon store, with a % markup by Amazon, with payment to Amazon, and with shipping by Amazon, is somehow not Amazon's responsibility.

The USA government had gone after the large platforms for selling defective/dangerous goods, but that was in 2024 under Biden, so I expect that investigation to be dead by now. The EU is still going ahead though: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/eu-make-temu-shein-amazon-liable-unsafe-goods-ft-reports-2025-02-01/

Normally running a large deficit acts as a stimulus for the economy, but Trump's reverse Midas touch is just too strong.

I'd say stupid. I live in a country where most houses are brick walls + concrete floors, and smoke detectors are still common + since a few years also mandated by the government.

The government mandate came after it was found that of the dozens of people that died every year from house fires, 95% suffocated in their sleep.

Some numbers for my region: ~7m population, 70% of houses had smoke detection before the mandate, on average 63 died per year from house fires.

Some incorrect approximative math: Lets assume that the amount of dead could have been halved if those 30% houses had 2 smoke detectors per person (lets say 2 cheap ones for 2x20 euros per 10 years): 7m x 0.3 x 2 x 20€ /10 /63 x2 = a cost of 267€ per year per life saved. Imo that's a no brainer, it'd be stupid to not invest in smoke detection.

Not the same in all western countries. Afaik it was tradition in most countries for the wife to take the husband's surname, except in Italy and Spain. Regular people also often didn't have surnames, instead they were "son of ..." or named after their or their parents' occupation. Edit with more musings: surnames could also be their place of birth, their farm, ... Names which would then get made hereditary in the early 19th century, but many people still kept using the old changing forms for generations longer. During his life, my great grandfather wasn't known by his official surname in his village, only the state called him that.

In the last few decades, most western countries (afaik again) are allowing the woman to chose if see wants to change her surname or not. Or to use both surnames. They also allow the man to change his name to that of his wife. Equality.

And that recent development is also why it's not a problem for same sex marriage. Back when the wife had to take the husband's name, same sex marriage wasn't allowed so there was no naming problem. Countries that allow official same sex marriages are typically also countries that will already have equality for surnames.

So your idea of justice is to heavily sentence people for actions that are not related to the crime that they are being sentenced for. That's not justice, that's called vengeance.

And yes, someone defrauding the government should be sentenced less severely than someone who does a violent robbery. Violent robberies can get people killed and even if noone dies or gets wounded, the victims will still be traumatized. None of that can happen with white collar crime against a big organisation. That this difference isn't obvious to you, should imo be a wake up call for yourself that you need to calm down and take some time to rethink some of the things that you belief.

And Trump does the following: "President Donald Trump signed off on several eyebrow-raising pardons this week, including a man whose daughter donated millions to his PAC and a convicted fraudster he had already freed from prison for a different fraud scheme during his first term"

Trump hands out pardons after blatant corruption & at the start of people's sentences. Biden did not do that. That you want to portray Biden to be as bad as Trump, shows that apparently your fairness compass is very broken.

And that person who got pardoned after already serving 10 years of his prison sentence ... 10 years is already a freaking long time for non violent crime, which also didn't ruin anyone else's lives. Sentences have to follow a gradiant along the severity of the crime, if not you end up with a broken system (like the USA one). Prison should be temporary, a chance for correction and rehabilitation, where the person one day gets released with another chance at living a quiet honest life. That you want that man to die in prison ... Says a lot about you again.

I looked it up and there was a good rationale based on fairness behind Biden's pardons. Most of Biden's pardons also weren't really pardons, but commutations of sentences: "Context: The thousands pardoned on Friday were "serving disproportionately long sentences compared to the sentences they would receive today," Biden's statement said." https://www.axios.com/2025/01/17/biden-presidential-pardons-clemency-record Which seems fair and also needed to me. Imagine having 10 years left to serve of your 20 years sentence, while new convicts only receive max 5 years for the same crime.

What Biden did with pardons was completely different from what Trump is doing with them.

The surface of the salt grains reacts with what is in the air (moisture, smells), slowly changing the surface over time, and since it's that surface that touches our taste buts most, the taste of the salt will be different.

Salts are also often not pure sodium, but have added elements that give it a distinct taste and aroma. That original taste/aroma will be lost over time, because aroma = smell = particles flying away in the air. Long exposure to a strong smell will also cause the salt to acquire that different smell as part of it's new aroma.

Starting from larger grains and grinding them shortly before usage, would thus give salt that smells and tastes more like it's fresh from the salt factory. But I do wonder how many people would be able to tell the difference in a blind test.

If they were giant smokestacks further back, then they would be in the haze of the smog, like everything else in the background. There's a similar vertical object visible in the top right corner, far back and obscured by the haze, but I think it's a chimney just like those in the front.

I just assume that every historical movie contains inaccuracies. Narrative reasons, budget constraints, dramatization, ... I don't always agree with the creative choices, but I understand why they do it and I'm not going to let it ruin my viewing experience. I can always jump into a wikipedia rabbit hole after the movie.

I can only think of one movie where they went too far for my tastes: the Hollywood movie where it's USA soldiers who capture an intact enigma machine from a u boat.

That said, the danish military was involved in the mine clearing, only not in the way how it was depicted in the movie. https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/cisr-journal/vol22/iss1/4/ The actual pdf contains a better description of who did what than the abstract.

This was done by all the allies, not just Norway and Denmark. In 1945 none of the allies had motivation to stop Norway, since they themselves had decided to do it this way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_World_War_II

Even mine sweeping at sea was done by German sailor POWs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Mine_Sweeping_Administration

As legal justification as to why they could do this, the allied command claimed that these prisoners of war weren't POWs anymore after Germany surrendered, instead they were "Disarmed Enemy Forces" and thus according to them the Geneva convention no longer applied: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disarmed_Enemy_Forces

There's also a Danish film about these POWs: Land of Mine. Good movie imo. And after seeing it a few years ago, I looked up the historical background, which is how I knew that your comment was incorrect.

I suspect that it's a reaction to the various successful media projects by Michelle Obama. In Trump's mind, the Obamas are making him look bad by being smart/successful/..., so this is Trump's attempt at showing that his first lady too can create a successful media project. Because the Trumps are tasteless and have surrounded themselves with sycophants, there wasn't anyone around to tell them how crap the movie was, so it got released as it is.

The big tell that this was Trump's attempt at trying to one up the Obamas, is that once it became obvious that the Melania movie was bombing, Trump posted a super racist video about the Obamas. He tried to one up the Obamas creatively, failed, and then resorted to insults.

Meanwhile Melania is 28 million dollar richer, so as usual she probably doesn't care that much about how bad this makes her look.