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Do not insure your Amazon purchase with an Asurion extended warranty. Yeah, i know, you already knew that. So did I. I thought this was a special circumstance that warranted it. I had previously bought a (much too expensive) docking hub for my laptop setup that started to fail in less than a year, and I was out well over a hundred bucks. So I bought a new hub from a different company for cheaper, and which I extended through Asurion with a three-year extended warranty for eight bucks. Within six weeks (beyond the return policy limit), the sound input on the hub failed. When I plug my speakers into the hub, the sound is supposed to come through the speakers. It no longer does. I contacted the company, Mokin, twice asking for technical support or a replacement, and got no reply. They are a Chinese company, which may or may not have something to do with their lack of responsiveness. So I contacted Asurion. First of all, it's likely you won't be able to handle the issue online by yourself because, as in my case, you may not even see your product listed. Luckily they have a chat app so I was able to successfully process the issue through that. But here's the deal with that: First of all, you don't get a replacement product through Asurion. You get an gift card and you get it for the amount of the product only, not any taxes or shipping you might have paid. So that part of the money is gone. Secondly, unlike Amazon itself, which might send you a replacement product before you have to send the defective product in, Asurion will send the gift card only once they have received your product. So you need to trust this company hardly anyone has ever heard of to follow through on that part of the deal. But lastly, and the best part, is that once you process this transaction, your contract with Asurion is completed. You do not get to apply it to any replacement product you receive. So I spent eight bucks on an extended warranty that terminated within six weeks because I had the temerity to leverage the warranty once. Stay away from Asurion.

There's no other way to put it: early merging culture is fascist, practically by definition, because it encourages people to take what's not even a law, but is merely a more, into their own hands and enforce it against other drivers simply because they don't like them doing what the actual law allows them to do.

It is fine to drive in a lane as long as it is open to drive in.

Seems to me the car driving to the end of the lane is playing by the rules of the road, and the guy who jumps into the lane with the explicit purpose of blocking or stopping the car already has road rage.

Not soon enough for Juan, who was Gone shortly thereafter. https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/juan-gonzalez/ After the season the Rangers traded González to the Detroit Tigers with two other players for six Tigers. Detroit’s new Comerica Park had dimensions not very friendly for batters like González. The Tigers offered González an eight-year contract worth $151.5 million, which would make him the highest-paid player ever. He declined to sign the contract, saying, “That park is too big for my batting style.” He added, “It is better to play at ease and be happy than to have all that money. … Money does not assure you of happiness.” https://vault.si.com/vault/2001/09/03/the-power-of-juan-after-a-miserable-season-in-detroit-juan-gonzalez-has-gone-gaga-over-cleveland-where-he-has-hit-it-big-for-the-division-leading-indians Gonzalez and his agent at the time, Scott Boras, visited the home of Rangers owner Tom Hicks to discuss returning to Texas, but Hicks had just committed $252 million to free-agent shortstop Alex Rodriguez. There was always Detroit. In the end the Indians all but stole Gonzalez, signing him to a one-year, $10 million contract. "This is a business, and I have to think about money," says Gonzalez, "but what was most important was the team. Cleveland wins a lot, and they have good friends of mine. It was a great situation." https://vault.si.com/vault/2000/05/29/courting-disaster-the-detroit-tigers-traded-a-carload-of-young-players-for-two-time-mvp-juan-gonzalez-hoping-to-seduce-him-into-a-long-term-relationship-so-far-it-has-been-a-very-rocky-affair Gonzalez doesn't want the Tigers' money--not now, anyway. He told SI last week that he will not engage in contract discussions until after the season, when he is eligible for free agency. "Right now it's quiet, and I want it to stay that way," Gonzalez says. "I just want to play baseball and put up my numbers. After the season is the time for talking." When asked what he wants most from the team he next signs with, Gonzalez says, "A chance of winning every year." The Tigers can give him enough cash to buy a small-market franchise, but as they struggle through their seventh consecutive losing season, they can't promise a World Series appearance anytime soon. And here I was assured that when a team offers the most money the player will take it.

Correa's going to be a five-win player coming off a seven-win season, and he's due to play in nearly 140 games, with part of the lost time due to COVID protocols, so that might help allay some of the concerns of him being often-injured. He might still not get a deal as rich as he did this past winter, but I think there's at least a decent chance he does.

Remember how thrilled Juan Gonzalez was to see the new ballpark after he was traded here? He was so thrilled that he refused to sign with the Tigers for the richest long-term deal ever up to that point, turning down the most money which people insist players always take.

This is why you know nothing about what "the left" is thinking.

Why isn’t this on the Conservative Self-Owns account?

As long as it’s uncoordinated and beholden to private enterprise actually doing the legwork, probably not.

Follow-up tweet:

I can’t imagine Putin playing the supplicant role, so I think your hope is well-founded.

I think one difference is that the US and Europe would probably be willing to help Russia get on its feet democratically, given their strategic location in Europe—something US/Europe wouldn’t spend as much time on for Libya.

I'm not speeding. And I would appreciate it if you wouldn't lay on the horn the next time I pass you. 😉

I doubt we can convince Correa that we will not still be rebuilding next year. The Tigers said they would compete this year and look what's happened, and everyone on the Tigers looks miserable playing out the string. Correa is surely noticing that. I don't think the Tigers could overpay Correa enough to get him to come here, I don't think Baby Doc would offer to overpay him enough to get here, and I can't imagine any way Correa would be forced to take a Tigers offer in the aftermath of no other team bidding on what is still the best shortstop in the game.

That may be the only thing we can hope for, for next year at least. Baby Doc committed nearly a quarter billion dollars to free agents this past winter and all he's gotten for it so far is a team careening towards 100 losses. I could see him shying away from big ticket free agents for a little while.

Carlos Correa is on record as not wanting to sign with a rebuilding team, so that eliminates the Tigers this winter.

Once again, I think it might depend on how consistent and persistent they make the messaging. They’re obviously off to a rocky start. But then, Republicans also got off to a rocky start on the whole 2020 election debacle, believing it was their golden opportunity to finally throw Trump under the bus, and they’ve been largely whipped into line. So I’m not spiking the football on this quite yet.

The idea was always the investigation itself. The imprimatur of legitimacy is all they really wanted in order to keep the flame alive so they could trade off it.

Voters have short memories, especially voters who want to believe. They need to keep being reminded of this, because those voters will forget.

Voters forget if they’re not constantly reminded.

Hope not, but I also think it might depend on how consistent and persistent they make the messaging. If Republicans can completely replace the image of 10-year-old girls needing to go out of state for abortion with the vision of Democrats snapping the necks of live babies in order to abort them, while promoting a reasonable abortion cutoff that is more lenient than even some European socialist paradises, they could potentially change the entire discussion from “Democrats=Pro-choice/Republicans=forced births” to “Republicans=reasonable abortion policy/Democrats=abort already-birthed babies”. It might be a tall order to expect Republicans to all successfully message in the exact same disciplined way, but Democrats should probably already be figuring out to defend against this possibility and keep reminding people what Republicans’ actual abortion policy is, i.e., “abortion is murder, period.” Democrats simply cannot afford to look the other way and let Republicans take control of abortion messaging.

So, I’ll tell you why I am resurrecting this today … After watching the Tigers get shut out at Comerica last night and still managing a good night’s sleep at the Greenfield, I was on my way back to Broad Shoulders this morning. On 94, just west of AA, I’m driving among a fast-moving bunch of cars when I see a “left lane closed ahead one mile” sign, and most people start moving over right away. You know I’m a late merger, so as soon as the guy ahead of me moved over, there was a lot of daylight for maybe half a mile up to where we couldn’t see any more road because it was the top of a low grade hill. Know what I mean? Point is, we drivers could not see the closure yet—presumably it was beyond the low grade hill we were approaching. But since there was daylight in my lane, I planned on driving ahead to where the closure is and merging in there. Just as I was starting out, a guy a few cars ahead of me started edging back into my lane. I thought maybe he was going to late merge with me, so I hung back to let him get ahead of me and lead me there. But instead, he started driving half in his lane and half in mine. I understood what he was trying to do here. There was still plenty enough daylight to his left so I could still pass him, and as I did, he laid on his horn, and when I could see him in the rear view, he was gesticulating and yelling in my direction. Corporal Lapdog was definitely unhappy with me. Here’s the best part: once we got to the top of the low grade hill and could see the rest of the road, turns out there was no lane closure after all. Maybe it was an old one where they hadn’t taken down the “lane close ahead” sign. Or maybe they were going to close it soon. All I know is, the left lane wasn’t closed for us. So all these people early-merged and slowed everything down for what they thought was a closed lane a mile away that no one could see, but that wasn’t even there. Early merging culture sucks.