Courtesy of Roger Ailes and the invention of political talk radio, The United States was the breeding ground for media manipulation tactics that later arrived in Europe, and those have been most heavily utilized by right-wing actors – think Sky News/The Daily Mail/The Sun in the UK, or instance. When you poll most people about what they want out of government here in the US, they tend to be in alignment with “liberal” values in the US or center-left parties in Europe, but when you ask them if they support implementations of those values by name (i.e., “Social Security” or “Medicaid” or “food stamps” instead of just asking “should the government help needy people stay fed and healthy?” people who consume right-wing media suddenly flip to be against those policies, because they are brainwashed by their media diet to oppose them even though in principle they express support for them.

Bottom line, after almost forty years of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk and thirty years of Fox News deliberately manipulating the American right to become hateful and reactionary in spite of their own natural impulses, the gap between left and right has become incredibly difficult to bridge in any meaningful way. IMO, the only hope for reconciliation is to push those extreme voices out of the mainstream in order to limit their ability to influence the gullible, and there’s just not many viable mechanisms to do that.

That’s true if the right side is a flue, but with neither fire brick nor flue liner in evidence, I suspect it’s purely decorative – I’m interpreting OP’s text description to mean that we’re looking at one of two lined flues, and one of two unexpected void spaces he found when removing the cap. I don’t think the void is actually connected to anything, and instead is just decorative, but if I’m wrong and you’re correct, then yeah – there are more serious issues to deal with here

I think you’re okay here – the code requirement about solid or fully-grouted blocks applies to the masonry supporting the flue liner. What you’re looking at in the photo is a decorative brick wrap around the structural portion of the chimney. My main concern would be to ensure that this area is properly capped and sealed so that critters and rainwater can’t get into the cavity and find their way further into your home.

I highly recommend the Kill James Bond episodes on Charlie’s Angels which break down just how much of each movie is basically just (executive producer) Drew Barrymore perving on her co-stars.

Not OP, but if I had to hazard a guess, it started as a rudimentary issue tracker and grew into a formalized system over time, maybe? I’ve worked with many a project manager who “knew Excel” and liked to use it for things it should never be used for, and sometimes PMs get promoted and take their dumb little systems up the org chart with them.

I remember some of these discussions around the time of the Twitter and Reddit exodii and the mindset of many of these folks was essentially that they’d used this social media protocol to create a nice, quiet safe space for like-minded tech-savvy queer leftists, and felt that the explosion in interest threatened to expose their posts to people outside of the community that they had come to know and trust – which is a point of view I can understand, but as a counterargument, you’re on a public social media platform, and specifically one that is designed to spread content broadly and indiscriminately to servers outside of your control. If you wanted to keep things out of the view of the larger Internet there were other, better solutions for a community platform that you probably should have picked instead.

But it did give us a damn fine concert movie from Muse, and that’s indisputable.

I mean, neither was he, and given that the Saudis bankrolled his purchase and he’s apparently reduced the value of their investment by half, you have to wonder what he’s giving them that has saved him from a one-way trip to a Saudi consulate.

I mean, you don’t really have to wonder that hard. But still, somebody loses you multiple billions in an extended ketamine-fueled rampage, you start to wonder if you should make an example of them…

In this case, it’s internecine conflict between the ordinary-grade-batshit Republicans that make up the majority of the Senate, and the weapons-grade-batshit Freedom Caucus weirdos who’ve been behaving with the sort of decorum and respect for good governance that we’ve all come to know and love from their fellow travelers in the national party, and I for one say we should let them fight.

I make $115k per year, my wife makes another $20k or so, we have one kid, a tiny house in a slightly sketch part of our Midwestern city that I bought a decade ago when it was almost cheap, and both our cars are paid off… and we’re treading water financially. I don’t know how anybody my age is affording big houses and new cars, unless it’s just by snowballing debt at an alarming pace. I’m already underfunding my 401k just to maintain some liquidity.

With old masonry wall construction, you need to be very careful about how you retrofit insulation to the walls. Insulating the interior makes it very likely that you’ll have moisture-related degradation of the stone and grout making up the wall, as you’re cutting off drying potential from the interior side of the wall. If it’s possible, insulating the exterior is your best option, otherwise you’ll need to be very conscious about selecting vapor-open insulation and finishes on the interior side, which will limit your options considerably. This article from Building Science Corporation goes over some of the details, and offers some options for interior-side retrofits that might not cause the wall to fail down the road.

On the other hand, Fraunhofer is obnoxious enough about licensing and enforcement that companies like Google invested similar money and effort into developing open-source codecs just to avoid dealing with them.

Funnily enough, they’re still the Saint Louis Bread Co. in Saint Louis. Alas, the quality of the food isn’t also a throwback to their better days, but it’s a real trip to be walking down the street and see the old branding on the storefront.

Public universities in the United States haven’t been able to subsist primarily on public funds since at least the Great Recession, and in many cases long before that. To the extent that they are able to, they’ve tried to bridge the gap between state funds and budgetary needs by attracting more and higher paying students, but that has lead in turn to a startlingly-expensive arms race between institutions trying to build the cushiest student amenities and hiring vast administrative bureaucracies professing their expertise at wooing and retaining high value (read: out-of-state and international) students… all of which comes at a cost to the student body, in the form of crushing student debt, which paradoxically depresses enrollment – for many institutions, tuition has soared past the pain point for new high school graduates and their families.

Enter the wealthy donor. Likely they’re a successful alumnus or local businessperson, who has more money than they can reasonably spend on their own. They want a legacy now – to have their name live on for decades or centuries after they’re gone. One easy way to do that is to get their name plastered onto the side of a landmark building at their favorite university, so they approach the administration with an offer of some millions of dollars, on the condition that it be used to build a new facility for their college or program of choice, and that it be named after them. This gets the school out of a bind, since they have massive backlogs of deferred maintenance they can’t afford to tackle, and a fresh new building for one program means they can play musical chairs with the others until they’ve vacated their most decrepit building and can just tear it down rather than deal with its problems.

However, as you’ve guessed, this gives donors incredible power over the universities. I know of one donor who enabled his pet dean to act like a spoiled child and run roughshod over the procurement process, kitting his new building out with useless bells and whistles that took budget away from things that could have actually helped students. In another case, a department chair’s actual job became to dote upon an elderly widow of a real estate baron, in order to keep the donations flowing to the department’s endowment. Not to mention the distorting effects that what donors choose to give money to have on both the programs that get attention, and the priorities of universities. There was a real glut of new business schools for a while, as an example, and all of them were really excited about the novel ways their MBAs could financialize things that didn’t need to be financialized. The late Charlie Munger infamously had UCSB over a barrel with his offer to fix their student housing situation, but only if he was allowed to make the design into a dystopian hell cube.. Not to mention all the donors who will only give money for sports facilities, nevermind what the academic needs are.

In short, the lack of sufficient state funds for the last 15-20 years has drastically worsened higher education in the US for everyone, and opened the door for millionaires and billionaires to exert undue influence on public institutions.

Even less credible than the Chiefs fan I know who has theorized that she’s scheming to break his heart at some point during the playoffs in order to cost the team a Superbowl run.

I don’t think he’s serious, but I’m not 100% sure about it.

Israel has one of the most sophisticated military-industrial complexes in the world, with vast expertise in electronics and remote sensing specifically. If they wanted to build a precision-guided kinetic weapon for targeted assassinations of Hamas fighters in dense urban areas, they could have done it without a second thought. Instead they spend their efforts on building an oppressive surveillance apparatus and robotic machine guns to better punish rock-throwing teenagers, and lob bombs into population centers to deal with Hamas in the area.

re: the tunnels… these things tend to happen when you herd millions of people into a walled ghetto, cut off access to resources, and leave it to be run by what is effectively an overgrown prison gang. The fact that Hamas is willing to use civilians – nearly half of them children – as human shields does not excuse the use of indiscriminate force in calling that bluff. Again and again and again, Israel has made it abundantly clear that there is no war crime it will not excuse in the course of these retributive strikes, because the lives of Palestinians are worth less than nothing to Israeli leadership.

I don’t trust an apartheid settler-colonial state run by a wannabe theocratic dictator any farther than I can throw it. Bottom line, you don’t have to trust Hamas either to see that Israel’s response to Hamas actions are both wildly disproportionate and completely indiscriminate in their targeting. Israeli political figures are on record that they don’t believe there is such a thing as an innocent Palestinian civilian and it shows in their willingness to slaughter bystanders by the dozens to get at a handful of suspected Hamas fighters.

I mean, there’s a lot to be criticized about the US and its actions in the “global war on terror,” but we actually built a missile for this exact circumstance, so that you don’t have to blow up an entire goddamn refugee camp to get one or two guys hiding inside it. Israel has the military capability to do something similar, they just don’t care. Palestinians aren’t people as far as they’re concerned.

What’s got me particularly worried this time around is that the Israeli response is going to make the radicalization problem so much worse than it was before… unless Israel intends to complete the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Netanyahu is undeniably evil, but I don’t think he’s stupid, so he must know this too, which can really only mean one thing – but nobody in power in the West seems to be willing to acknowledge that, let alone step in to stop it.