Panto_Villan

Bailey was poor for more than one season. (He came good though. Maybe Diaby can too?)

Israel need to put their right-wingers back in their box themselves, tbh. They're about to pass some crazy bill that's cutting the welfare state to pay for the war, and extending the length of conscription, while also increasing funding for the ultra-orthodox Jews to not work and make them officially exempt from military service. One of the more moderate members of the war cabinet went to Washington a couple of days ago and was apparently astonished at just how pissed everyone in the White House was with Israel, too. At what point do they collapse the coalition and force new elections? Even if you're a patriotic Israeli you should be able to see that many of the policies being pursued at the moment aren't good for Israel in the long term (or even really in the short term).

Yeah. Total vote count is irrelevant.The margins were knife thin in several important swing states - I think Nevada, Arizona, Georgia maybe? I forget the exact maths but if any two had swung the other way then Trump would have been President, and that wasn’t far off.

The last election was incredibly close, remember. It won’t take Trump gaining many voters in the swing states (or just Biden losing them) for it to go the other way.

Polls suggest two large groups that have swung somewhat towards Trump are black men and Latino men (not women). While I don’t think it makes sense for those groups to switch sides, I don’t think a shift of 20% to the Republicans is necessarily unrealistic. There could be any number of reasons for it, not least the inflation in recent years might have convinced some that the economy would be better under Trump.

There was another story in the news a few days ago about some Indians who signed up for a non-combat support role in the Russian army (for big money compared to the migrant work they were already doing in Russia) and got sent straight to the front lines. It’s possible that’s what happened here.

I don’t believe NATO has complete information on every air-to-air kill Ukraine claims to make. NATO was flying AWACS planes everywhere in the early days of the war and apparently they couldn’t tell whether a massive transport plane was shot down or not; ergo they don’t have perfect information. You seem to be talking about something else entirely so I’m not sure there’s any point continuing this discussion.

The crew of the plane doesn’t really matter - the key thing was that there weren’t any planes of that size (transport / bomber) shot down in the opening days of the war, at least as far as I’m aware, and I just don’t see how the US could tie themselves in knots with their public statements if they actually knew what had happened. Maybe things were just too chaotic back then, I don’t know - but either way, it’s a different discussion from Ukraine being willing to exaggerate their kills (which they obviously are).

It wouldn’t affect my point even if they did, but I’ll believe Ukraine never exaggerates their kills and NATO knows exactly what’s happening at all times when someone brings me evidence of that big plane full of paratroopers that was supposedly shot down near Kyiv at the start of the war. It pretty transparently never happened, and the fact the US military repeated the claims before everyone realised it didn’t happen demonstrates pretty clearly to me that they don’t have perfect information either. There’s other examples too, but that’s the one that most obviously springs to mind.

My argument was actually that they might be exaggerating Russian losses to improve their own morale given they’re steadily losing territory. Noel was the one that brought donors into it. As for NATO knowing exactly where every Russian plane in the air is at all times, and knowing instantly when they’ve been shot down - I don’t believe that for a second. And even if they did, they’re not going to slap Ukraine down in public for exaggerating their kills. Every country at war exaggerates their success to some degree, and Ukraine is no different.

No, it won’t make a big difference. Nobody said it would. However I feel like it should be obvious that “we’ve taken your weapons and wasted them” is a much worse pitch for more weapons than “we’ve put your weapons to good use, can we have some more?”

Nobody wants to give money to a lost cause.

I think there’s also a very real chance Ukraine are inflating the numbers they’ve shot down. They’re in dire need of good news, and this sort of “kill” is very hard to evidence.

I really enjoyed it. It was a long film but never boring, and although I feel like they made the ending a bit more open-ended than necessary (although to be fair the books ending was also slightly more open ended than I remembered). Left it feeling a bit like the middle film of a trilogy, when I was expecting the first two films to be more self-contained as a pair. Anyway, great performances from the cast, great visuals. I don’t know if I’ll be rushing to watch the film again because “entertaining” might be the wrong word for it, but it’s definitely a classic that won’t soon be forgotten.

There’s no excuse for Israel not allowing unlimited amounts of food into Gaza.

“America respected again”

There’s lots of incredibly dumb footballers out there, and if everyone was juiced to the gills I struggle to believe someone wouldn’t have said something incriminating (accidentally or otherwise). Like, wouldn’t some lower league clubs who can’t afford a sophisticated doping operation have a massive incentive to dig up dirt on their richer rivals who can? Etc?

Meh. I'd still take him on a loan and let him try and prove himself here if he was interested in playing more regularly and said he wanted to come back (and be within our wage structure). I never had any hard feelings about the way he left, and that's especially true now it seems like we got the better end of the deal. However I think he's most likely lost his hunger at this point, so I doubt that's something he'd pursue.

I wasn’t being serious - he’d probably score and then get sent off for rubbing his balls on the opposition keepers head or something! As others have said he’d probably be higher in the pecking order than some outfield players purely because of his mentality, but I think something would have to have gone wrong for him to make the initial five.

Yeah I’d have Martinez taking the first penalty for maximum psych-out effect.

I’m sure you know this stuff far better than I, but it’s worth bearing in mind the way the Ukrainians use their fighters (at least as far as I’m aware). They mostly use them well behind their lines to intercept cruise missiles, because as you say unless you fly extremely low then you’re vulnerable to air defence if you approach the contested area. Sure, flying higher would give them more time to react to incoming SAMs but the Russians have a LOT of anti-air so I don’t think the Ukrainians want to get into firing range of them at all. The point I was making regarding range was more about the relative altitude of the aircraft involved. The Russian planes are flying high and the Ukrainian ones have to fly low; if there’s a 30,000 ft altitude difference then that’s ~10km of additional distance the missile has to traverse. That’s about 25-30% of the range of a Sidewinder, right? It means the Ukrainians would need to get even closer to the front lines to try and intercept the bombers launching missiles at Ukraine from near the border. So I think in this specific situation what I’m saying is correct, isn’t it? Even if it’d be inaccurate in most cases.

Yet again this thread shows me something a satirist would be laughed out the room for suggesting.

It's meant to be about 20% of Trump's networth; it's not a huge problem for him. The fines might exceed his available cash, but then that just means he'll either have to sell some property or liquidate some investments. That might cause him some extra losses if he has to do it in a hurry but ultimately he'll still be worth around $2bn, so he certainly won't have to sell most of his assets to raise the money, just some of them. And honestly I'm not sure there's that many things you can afford to do when you're worth $2.5bn that are suddenly out of reach when you're only worth $2bn. Unfortunately, I think he's going to be getting quite a substantial amount of money from Truth Social soon too. The SEC have given them permission to do something or other - a merger that would let them list the company, or something. Expected to net him a few hundred million I believe.

Probably just another stunt by the Democrats to get Ukraine aid passed etc etc

I almost always tip 10% unless there’s a service charge. Although I increasingly find that people just hand me the card machine with the no-tip amount already entered, and in that situation I can’t be bothered to get them to go back and change the amount so I can give a tip (I don’t usually carry much cash).