“From the moment we submitted our bid, LA28 committed to reimagining what’s possible for the Games,” Wasserman said. “These groundbreaking partnerships with Comcast and Honda, along with additional partners to come, will not only generate critical revenue for LA28 but will introduce a new commercial model to benefit the entire Movement. We’re grateful to the IOC for making this transformation possible.”

Imagine if it was possible not to have embedded advertising crammed up your eyeballs at every turn. This is a tradition that doesn’t need to be “reimagined”. I doubt that much if any of that revenue will go towards the chronic funding gap that exists for most US Olympic athletes.

What terrible framing by MendoFever. Dam removal is great news.

Federal law currently requires (nearly) every individual to file a tax return with the IRS, and it requires every business to withhold money from payroll and remit to IRS with appropriate bookkeeping.

Even if California decreed all of that money should be paid to its new agency instead of to the feds, anyone doing so would be individually breaking federal law, and the gestapo would be sent after them. It’s a nice idea but I don’t see how it could work, short of secession (which has its own problems).

Would you like to suggest a mechanism to achieve that? Since every business and taxpayer sends money directly to the federal government, the state isn’t in a position to impede it. Unless you want to start talking about secession, and maybe that would be a good discussion.

That’s really poor of State Farm, though unsurprising. And yet I’m still glad that they haven’t dropped my wildfire-adjacent home. The FAIR plan would be far more expensive, and no other insurer will write a policy that satisfies my mortgage company. FAIR is also underpriced at that, having already gone bankrupt once.

It’s kind of a disgusting capitalism-bootlicking for me to be grateful to State Farm, but they’re my least-bad option at the moment. I expect the private insurers as a group to convince Ricardo Lara that rates need to go way up, or the state will end up being the only insurer in an abandoned market. There’s no other way with the climate change reality and atrocious political conditions for action. The potential mortgage failures if the insurance market fails will threaten a financial crisis on top of whatever other government financial havoc has been wreaked by then.

It’s the most curved but it’s oak and so far it has been strong enough for my hiking use.

Only one of them features a piece of quartz at the top to concentrate the wielder’s magical energy.

I, however, have no such power, so it’s functionally just a stick.

Thanks, that one is my favorite! It does have some curve to it, but only in one dimension so it hides when leaning against a wall like this. But it does feel like the heftiest choice to fight off a coyote that wants my little dog for a snack.