Most places in the US will have nothing about severance written down anywhere, but it’s very common to actually pay severance in a mass layoff situation (unless the whole business is going under).

Current IT best practice is that passwords should never expire on a set schedule, but they should expire if there is evidence they’ve been breached.

There’s a technique called “heel-toe” shifting which involves using different parts of the right foot to operate the brake and throttle at the same time, while the left foot works the clutch.

That kid looks ready to raise your health insurance deductible again and deny your claim for insulin.

I think Silver. Nate left FiveThirtyEight and now the site doesn’t even publish any kind of predictive model.

The President can do a lot of macro things that affect oil supply, like exercising some control over leases in public land, choosing to regulate or deregulate fracking, or invading a foreign country to obtain more oil.

In a more micro scale the President has fairly direct control over the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and can decide when to release and when to replenish.

I think I’ve seen at least one that has returned to Pizza Hut after leaving the folks for a while.

Israel has already been fighting a war with Hezbollah that Hezbollah declared. These attacks were fairly specifically targeted at Hezbollah’s military equipment. They have been arguably successful at disrupting Hezbollah’s communications, and likely command and control systems. That by itself is a valid military objective.

To the extent that these attacks directly hurt Hezbollah personnel, and to the extent that they damaged Hezbollah’s morale: those too are valid military objectives.

So “war crime” gets thrown around here quite a bit just because there are high civilian casualties. The facts are twofold: Civilian casualties have always been a part of warfare; and there is no specific number or proportion that makes some act into a war crime. That’s just not how these kinds of laws are written.

I have not yet seen a strong argument for a specific war crime rooted in a specific basis in international law. A lot of people bring up protocols 1 and 2 to the Geneva conventions, but Israel and the US have not ratified those.

There are other conventions that regulate weapons of war, but I’m pretty sure none of them are going to address pager bombs directly. An argument there would have to be at least somewhat creative.

The US has a few thousand miles of land borders, and there are some neat places to visit along them.

I’m not at all sure where this gentleman went or why.

TPS is a lawful status in federal law. But it’s also not a regular immigration status that you’d get with an actual immigrant visa.

The idea is that TPS recipients are going to ship back out just as soon as Haiti (or wherever) gets its act together again. It’s not a very secure status and does not lead to green cards or naturalization.

And historically leads to stuff like putting the one final screw in domestically so you can slap that Made in America tag in it and avoid a heap of tariffs.

attempts on presidents’ lives are not rare in US history

And that’s why the Secret Service is as comprehensive as it is. Ultimately, the democracy responds to problems.

The Geneva conventions do not contain the level of protection for civilians that you think.

In particular, Israel has ratified and is a party to the conventions of 1949. After much debate in 1949, those conventions ultimately allowed things like indiscriminate carpet bombing of cities (which the US practiced extensively in the previous war).

Later protocols from 1977 added more civilian protections more along the lines you propose. These protocols banned carpet bombing and introduced the concept of proportionate response into the conventions.

Israel and the United States have not ratified the 1977 protocols 1 and 2 concerning additional civilian protections. According to the text itself, they are not bound by the provisions if they do not agree.

Well you see, every February is egg laying season, and he needs those warm sandy beaches to incubate his spawn.

Usually, he can just go down to Galveston and get what he needs. But that year was a very, very special case. It’s not easy being cold blooded.

SpaceX is beating the pants off every other domestic launch provider unfortunately. All because Musk took some fantastic risks with his own money, and they paid off handsomely. And the worst part is SpaceX is a private company: no public shareholders to keep Musk in check.

You may have heard about ULA having a wee bit of trouble with some capsule thrusters. They have lost some truly epic amounts of money on that program.

Trump is only entitled to ex-President and candidate protection. It’s a lower tier of protection with fewer resources expended.

This is the only way to legally vote by remote electronics in Texas. Must be registered in Harris County. And must be voting from outer space.

Airplanes are usually limited to land at only around half of the total weight they can take off with.

This isn’t normally a problem for normal trips.

If they went to a higher landing weight, the landing gear struts would have to be designed quite a bit stronger. This would make the landing gear heavier, and that would reduce the useful payload weight in the plane.

ABC is a network that doesn’t have an FCC license. Each individual local station is an FCC licensee. They’re the ones that are responsible for the content they air.

Question, when you move to a new place in Spain, do you need to register residency with the police?

I don’t know if Spain does that or not, but I think Italy does some version.

The United States doesn’t have that, and doesn’t have a national id card. Although most people effectively register themselves to get a driver license, that is only required if you drive. So voter registration nominally provides some way for the government to get the information on residency, which is important for figuring out which local elections you need to vote in.

Now recently, in the last couple of decades, some states started requiring photo id verification to vote. This defeats the purpose of having a separate voter registration system, because you still have to go to the driver registration system to get either a driver license, or a non-driving photo ID. Nevertheless, the separate voter registration system has hung around in every single one of these states, because the real goal is to prevent people from voting.