Exactly. I get the frustrations of the son and grandson of factory workers that finds it hard to imagine anything more than working at Walmart wanting to tear it all down. What I don’t understand is my neighbor in Dana Point.

https://youtu.be/J6bv92W4YnE?feature=shared

Found it, enjoy!

And Mel Gibson. When they were lobbying to get rid of the regulations, the supplement industry did commercials that had Mel’s home getting raided by SWAT-looking guys for having supplements.

Even in Maine and Nebraska, two of their electrical votes are statewide just some are allocated to CDs. A state’s electrical votes are determined by their total number of senators and representatives. The ones that correspond to the two senators are statewide.

Ban or severely restrict abortion.

Ban or severely restrict porn.

Ban or severely restrict contraception.

Ban or severely restrict divorce.

When do we start hearing them question the concept of marital rape? That shit was legal in every U.S. state until the 70s and not made illegal nationwide until '93.

As much as I loathe the guy, I think we all dodged a bullet.

If he died of natural causes last month I don’t think the MAGAts would have rallied behind Desantis, or whomever got the nomination. I’m not saying they wouldn’t have voted for them, just that the excitement wouldn’t be there.

If this has succeeded, the supporters would have transferred and been even more pumped up. And sympathy from those weird fuck undecideds could make the difference, not just in the presidency, but both chambers of Congress, and for their policy goals too.

Riding the wake of an assassination the draconian shit they would push through could have been far worse than anything Trump would have been able to accomplish in a second term.

Take civil rights legislation in the 60s; a lot of what LBJ accomplished was credited to the national feeling after the Kennedy assassination. Would JFK have been able to accomplish all that if he had served eight years with public sentiment toward civil rights being divided?

It sucks that this is boosting his chances in November. But a martyr, a new figurehead, and a more energized base could have been far worse.

There were normal diplomatic disagreements that all allies have. And consider the source of that statement. Yeltsin’s critics would have included any anti-democratic groups. This was a period of unprecedented cooperation and trust that was growing until Russia turned its back.

Before Russia did their heel turn in the aughts, they almost joined NATO after a period of significant cooperation. Russia seeing the U.S., or it’s allies, as enemies is a symptom of Putin turning a fledgling democracy into a dictatorship, not the natural state of affairs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia–NATO_relations

Go to the “Development of post-Cold War cooperation (1990–2004)” section and check out “NATO-Russia Founding Act”, “NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council”, and “NATO-Russia Council”.

Back then the talk was pearl clutching over NATO with Russia being seen as some racist white alliance against China, MENA, India, and others in the global south.

Russia only sees us as enemies because Putin needed to create enemies to seize and consolidate power.

Nominal is more than inflation so real is above 0.

Real just has to be above 0 for inflation adjusted wages to be going up.

I still call bullshit though without knowing where the increases are. All the increases could be in the top 10% with everyone else going down and only the average is above 0.

Edit: I was wrong, the growth is actually weighted toward the lower end.

I make a little more than double the cap. I’m in favor of increasing or eliminating the cap but that would double my check in the future. (Not quite, I haven’t made double the cap my entire working life, but it would increase it a lot.) That would still help a bit because not all of our withholdings go to basic social security. Some goes to disability, spousal benefits, etc. Increasing taxes and benefits proportionally, which is the way benefits are structured now, doesn’t solve anything.

I believe social security has a lot of value so I’m in favor of not just fixing the funding, but expanding it as well. But if you want to make it healthier just with payroll taxes they would have to be progressive, like income tax, without increasing benefits.

I guy I work with owned two condos in a development. The HOA passed a rule banning short term rentals. There were a lot of units being advertised on Airbnb and similar services so he put them on the market when he heard the rule was being proposed to beat the rush.

He managed to sell one at market but the second one didn’t sell before all the other Airbnb landlords listed their places too. He had to take about 10% below market for the second one.

Now those two places are owner occupied, and one of them got a nice deal (I don’t know about the ones sold by other people). And everything that sold in that area probably went for a little less for a while due to the glut on the market.

Making renting less profitable works. People aren’t landlords because it’s fun. They do it for the money. Take away the money and you have less landlords.

That’s better. I guess the Aristotle helped with making coherent arguments.

Yes, I did read it. I’m going to need a source that says that was written by Diogenes Laertius quoting sometime else, not a quote of him, and he was quoting Diogenes of Sinope and not one of the other “pretty much all of the famous Greek philosophers”.

Maybe you should brush up on basic logic with Aristotle.

Wrong Diogenes.

Diogenes of Sinope

Diogenes Laertius

Balls

It’s a shitty headline made worse by a deleted word in the post title. The firm was found responsible for the death in a separate incident at a different plant from the one where they were found employing minors.

It sucks that Netflix doesn’t have as much as they used to because stuff has been pulled for other services but the value proposition for streaming still blows cable out of the water, even with price increases. Adding free or low cost commercial tiers for more price sensitive people doesn’t give me commercials.

With all the premium channels and three HD-DVR boxes I used to pay over $200, before internet, more than a decade ago with much of that going to a shitty middle man company. And that’s for commercial, appointment TV. Even with the premium stations you had to DVR shit to watch later. I subscribe to a ton of services, even some fringe ones, so I almost never come across something that I can’t watch immediately with no commercials on any device I have access to anywhere in the world. And with annual rates, discounts from my phone company, and kickbacks from credit cards I’m still under $100. And now the money goes to companies that actually produce content, even if some of them suck for other reasons.

With what I’m getting I would pay double what I used to for cable, but as it is I’m paying half. It seems like a lot of people complaining never paid for cable with all the packages/premium stations themselves and don’t remember how much appointment TV sucked.

Even if Tesla somehow managed to de-Elon themselves and address the quality issues, those cars look so dated compared to other EVs that are available and what’s coming soon.

They gave the model 3 a facelift but they really need a major bodystyle update across the whole line. Nothing in the entire line looks much different than the 2009 prototype model S.

They went from being futuristic to boring as fuck.

Edit: Except for the truck, of course. But that’s just something else entirely and I don’t feel like writing an essay.

It’s a lot easier to tolerate the copaganda when they’re almost exclusively going after rapists.

The thing I found funny about SVU is someone obviously said “shit, Olivia has been at this for decades, she should be a captain by now,” so they made her one but she’s still taking calls, the first on the scene, and participating in the investigation.

I wonder about that. During the deepest part of sleep does your brain have enough activity to maintain a continuous stream of consciousness? If you go through two sleep cycles in a night does yesterday you die, and you from the first sleep cycle who only dreamed die, and you’re a new consciousness in the morning?