Public services are also required when providing a service to service level expectations wouldn’t be profitable otherwise. We expect and demand that the post office deliver to every remote outpost in the country for whom there is no alternative, regardless of expense. Those deliveries could be anything, including something like medication. If you privatize it, a private company would immediately and naturally cut loose those unprofitable routes.

So in that way, it is an awful lot like healthcare. If you consider postal service a right, then it’s functionally no different.

Privatization of liquor in Alberta has worked out amazingly well. Booze is cheaper and there’s a liquor store every 100 meters, some open well past midnight. It’s an alcoholic’s dream.

bison fuckers thank you very much

That’s what Mexico is for. And the food is better.

If I was the IOC I’d be worried about empty seats as well. Fascism is poor for tourism.

You’re right. I mean, the nazis had the Olympics in Berlin in '36 too, what’s the worst that can happen?

I love that this guy is in an Ivy League school to meet his ‘co-founder’, when it’s hard to believe that someone that knows nothing and is intellectually incurious could ever found anything of value.

Depends on your definition of ‘war’. They’ve definitely been in rightist America’s ear about abandoning NATO since 2016.

This is why they invaded Afghanistan in the first place. Their next step after what they thought would be a quick toodly-doo over the Afghanis was presumably to take a piece out of Pakistan in order to get a warm water port on the Arabian Sea.

It’s also worth noting that you lumped St Petersburg and Kaliningrad together somewhat, but they are vastly different. While St Petersburg has challenges getting to open ocean, it’s not the full-on exclave that Kaliningrad is, completely surrounded on all sides by the baltic states. I’m sure you know all of this, so this is for folks that don’t. It wasn’t entirely clear from the way you worded it.

I would have never imagine that Russia would have won the Cold War, let alone like this. I guess all of those decades of honing their misinformation and kompromat skills really came in handy.

What amazes me is that Americans still talk about the Cold War like you haven’t lost it. And without a bullet fired.

I just graze liberally at the reassuringly expensive olive bar as payment for apparently working the checkout against my will.