Ah yes, it’s…

checks notes

the US fault that Russia invaded Ukraine. Right, makes perfect sense, carry on.

The only involvement the US or even most of the NATO countries have had in this complete shitshow has been to sell obsolete military hardware to Ukraine at a steep discount. It was probably cheaper to ship the stuff in bulk to Ukraine than it would cost to properly decommission it so might even have saved some money doing that.

Russia desperately wants to make this a fight with NATO or even better the US so they look like less of a laughing stock for losing this badly.

They tried making subscription turn signals but nobody bought them. /s

I seem to recall a big kerfuffle around a decade and a half back about Russia not actually knowing what became of a whole bunch of nuclear weapons in the aftermath of the USSR collapsing. There were also rumors of Soviet nukes being sold off to various unsavory groups. It really wouldn’t surprise me to find out there was some truth to that.

I have also heard that ICBMs and the like require regular expensive and specialized maintenance in order to remain functional. Knowing what we now know about Russia what do you figure the odds are that some general or other decided those maintenance funds would be better used to line their pockets since the odds of actually using those nukes were so low?

China would just wait until it’s over and then pick through the remains of Russia. Probably try to claim a big chunk of southern Russia using some excuse or another.

They appear to be a propaganda outfit. They’d fit right in with InfoWars.

I’ve learned how powerful the unelected bureaucracy is. You have to win in November … you have to dismantle the leftist state … they are devious, they are ruthless and they are out to get you.

Those are called voters.

It’s Japan, I’m sure somebody is planning to.

Hmm, it’s true that cold fusion would need some kind of physics breakthrough, although I think it might be going too far to call it junk science. To be entirely fair energy positive hot fusion also requires some kind of physics breakthrough though, although potentially a far less extreme one.

The Sun works because of its mass which generates the necessary temperature and pressures to trigger the fusion. Replicating those pressures and temperatures here though is incredibly energy intensive. In theory, on paper the energy released by the fusion reaction should exceed those energy requirements, but when you factor in that doing so requires exceedingly rare and expensive to create fuel most if not all of that energy surplus vanishes. Nobody has been able to prove that they can get more energy out of the reaction than the energy cost of creating the fuel and triggering the reaction, so until that happens hot fusion is far from proved either. There’s a few research projects that look promising, but it’s far from guaranteed that they’ll pan out.

Hydro is good when it’s available but also has some significant problems. The biggest is that it’s an ecological disaster even if the reach of that disaster is far more limited. The areas upstream of the dam flood while the ones downstream are in constant danger of flooding and drought. In the worst case if the dam collapses it can wipe entire towns off the map with little or no warning. It is objectively far more dangerous and damaging to the environment than any nuclear reactor. The only upside it has is that it’s effectively infinitely renewable barring massive shifts in weather patterns or geology.

All of that is of course assuming that hydro is even an option. There’s a very specific set of geological and weather features that must be present, so the locations you can power with hydro power without significant transport problems are limited.

It’s certainly an option, and better than coal, oil, or gas, but still generally worse than nuclear.

Why? It’s an active area of research with several companies and universities trying to solve the problem. There’s also a chance hot fusion succeeds although to my knowledge nobody has actually gotten close to solving that particular problem either. Tokamaks and such are still energy negative when taken as a whole (a couple have claimed energy positive status, but only by excluding the power requirements of certain parts of their operation). I guess maybe I should have just said fusion instead of cold fusion, but either way there are no working energy positive fusion systems currently.

Edit: To be clear, I’m not claiming that anyone has a working cold fusion device, quite the opposite. Nobody has been able to demonstrate a working cold fusion device to date. Anybody claiming they have is either lying or mistaken. But by the same token nobody has been able to show an energy positive hot fusion device either. There’s a couple that have come close but only by doing things like hand waving away the cost to produce the fuel, or part of the energy cost of operating the containment vessel, to say nothing of the significant long term maintenance costs. I’ve not seen evidence of anybody getting even remotely close to a financially viable fusion reactor of any kind.

The real problem is that there are no renewable solutions for base load, nuclear is the best we’ve got. Renewables are good, but they’re spotty, you can’t produce renewable power on demand or scale it on demand, and storing it is also a problem. Because of that you still need something to fill in the gaps for renewables. Now your options there are coal, oil, gas, or nuclear. That’s it, that’s your options. Pick one.

If we can successfully get cold fusion working we’ll finally have a base power generation option that doesn’t have (many) downsides, but until then nuclear power is the least bad option.

So yes, if you tell them “no nuclear”, you’re going to get more coal and gas plants, coal because it’s cheap, and gas because it’s marginally cleaner than coal.

It’s Russia, they only know one move “throw more bodies at it”. If it can’t be solved by shoving half trained and half equipped “soldiers” at the problem they’re basically out of ideas.

Unfortunately while they can seize anything in NY, property in other states requires them to go through the federal government. It can be done, but it’s a whole separate legal process.

Let’s keep going, with everyone’s help we can shrink that even smaller. Lets shoot for the negatives.

So I dug into it a little deeper and it looks like the answer is kind of. Government still gets first crack at the value of whatever the property is, but leftover funds may be distributed to other creditors. It also depends on the kind of loan in question as to whether the government will repay them or if they have to sue Trump.

Overall the process works much like bankruptcy does, creditors get ranked based on various criteria (generally the more money you’re owed the higher you’re ranked) and higher priority creditors get first dibs and whatever is left over goes to the next creditor in line. Government pretty much always goes first. Once they’ve gotten their money next would be anyone who has an actual lien on the property. It’s also possible to have given a loan whose terms are tied to the property but doesn’t result in an actual lien being issued for it. Those creditors are just fucked in this case. They’ll have to chase Trump through court to get their money back as it’s essentially a contract dispute at that point.

What’s highly likely to happen is we’ll see a panic recall on any outstanding loans Trump has as nobody wants to be on the bottom of the pile fighting for scraps after the financial corpse of Trumps assets has been picked over.

There’s a reason no banks have been willing to loan to him for 30 years, and when he went looking for a bond the ones who were willing to give him one were demanding double the amount in property as collateral. They wanted to make sure that there would be enough left over for them to get their money back after the government took their cut.

As for what you cited, that’s for civil asset forfeiture which is a little different. In that case the government isn’t treated as a creditor since you don’t owe them anything, they’re just straight stealing your property. In the case of property with a lien on it they repay the lien holder essentially the full value of the lien as there’s no valid claim to those funds by the government.

At the end of the day the government will just keep seizing property until both they and all Trumps creditors are paid off or until there’s no more property to seize whichever comes first. What’s definitely not going to happen is the government goes “This property isn’t worth it because it has too many loans on it, we’ll just let Trump keep it”.

That’s not how it works. The courts get first crack at that property. If something is worth $100 million, and it’s used as collateral on a $50 million loan, the courts can seize it and sell it for $100 million and keep all the money. The one who issued the loan for $50 million can then sue Trump for the $50 million along with any other creditors who Trump owes money to.

So, Trump can’t sell his properties without paying off the loans, but the courts can seize them for their full values.

Trump is, was, and has always been, a conman. It’s his bread and butter. It was critical to the facade of “highly successful businessman” that he put up that he appear ridiculously wealthy. Not just wealthy, but ultra wealthy. While he has always had hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, and owned many properties that when combined would total over a billion dollars in value, he has never at any point in his life had access to the kind of wealth that the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Bill Gates have. Even worse for him, he’s actually an incredibly bad businessman, nearly every venture Trump has directly been involved in (rather than just licensing his name for someone actually competent to use) has failed utterly.

In an effort to shore up his image Trump has for decades inflated the value of all his properties, and then used those inflated values to take out loans and mortgages that he then blows on bad business decisions. There’s a very real chance that he might actually be telling the truth for the first time in his life and he can’t actually scrape together the nearly $500 million even if he sold every piece of property he owns. He may have already over leveraged it all so badly that there’s just not $100 million of value left to squeeze out of it.

Of course it’s also possible he actually could come up with the money but doing so would require him to liquidate every property he owns and would also expose just how badly he has managed the wealth left to him by his father. Something he desperately wants to avoid lest it utterly shatter his “successful businessman” facade forever (not to mention legitimately bankrupt him for once in his life).

Either way it’s about time a lifetime of fraud and lies caught up to him.

I saw a comment somewhere that claimed the RNC only has like $10 million in funds, wouldn’t even put a dent in what he owes.

It’s funny how badly he has screwed himself. He’s spent decades overinflating the value of his properties and then taking loans and mortgages out on them and using that to claim he’s a billionaire. Now the courts used his own claims of how rich he is to issue a fine and he’s struggling to pay it because his actual net worth is a tiny fraction of what he has claimed it is. He’s basically created his own personal sub-prime mortgage bubble and it’s teetering on the edge of collapse now.

You uh … might want to slow it down there buddy. Pretty sure there’s a couple of those things that aren’t supposed to be combined.

Asbestos is safe in the same way old crates of TNT are. That is as long as it remains completely undisturbed and you’re nowhere near it. Also much like old crates of TNT when discovered safely removing it involves a very expensive call to highly specialized removal teams and there’s a high risk of collateral damage in the process.