As an individual territory, the U.S. is isolated. As an empire, we have bases on every continent. The risk isn’t being killed. It’s being declawed.

Not advocating for American imperialism, just clarifying the point.

The bigger problem is that the number of seats in the House has been frozen for about a hundred years. Our population exploded, but our number of representatives stayed static, so places with the most people actually get less representation in congress.

On top of this, the number of electors a state has its equal to the number of representatives that state has in the Senate and the House combined. So more populated states also get underrepresented in the presidential election.

The Three-Fifths Compromise was absolutely fucked, but it’s not what is deadlocking the House now and its not what is letting a people lose the popular vote and still go on to be president in 21st century elections.

The real problem is that the size of the House of Representatives has been frozen for 100 years. The number of electoral college votes a state has is equal to the number of reps and senators they have. Since the House hasn’t grown alongside our population, the relative representation for rural areas has steadily grown more and more.

Ending the cap on the House would balance out the electoral college issues and help reduce the constant congressional deadlocks we’re seeing.

or estimated net worth

Walmart credit card. They don’t need to estimate when you willingly provide it.

But if you’re not scanning your card with the checkout, how do they know what you purchased? Scanning on entrance just confirms that you entered the store, while scanning with checkout was used to confirm what you purchased on that trip.

Unless you’re using a Costco-issued card at checkout, too, I would have same question. And if you are still scanning at checkout, then this isn’t the time-saver they’re purporting.

And Bo Duke was from upstate New York.

When I was in high school, the girls’ running team made shirts that said, “Fast girls have good times.” It’s been more than twenty years, and I still think about how funny that double-entendre is.

So, yeah, you would’ve sold a lot more weiners.

if your goal as a parent is to maximize success of your children.

“Success” is very subjective.

“Stick it on Max” still costs money? Royalties, hosting, closed captioning and translation, GUI requirements all are going to keep chipping dollars out of a product that they did not believe would make them money.

And, as you say, DC movies have really underwhelmed. Did anyone reasonably think that the (apparently) worst one was going to draw in new subscribers?

You’re close to the truth at the end there. They spent $90 million on it, found out it was an absolute dog when they started test evenings, and decided to scrap it rather than pay another $50 million+ on promotion and other post-production expenses.

With a $20 million write-off on a $90 million movie, they still lost $70 million. They just didn’t want to lose more.

It still sucks for the actual creators and the fans, but it’s not like doing this actually makes the studios richer. It’s just about not falling into the sunk-cost fallacy.

I agree that it’s got to be how young Lemmy skews. No one who has ever bought alcohol at a self-checkout has said, “This is so quick and convenient!”

Sounds like you should sell that house, dude…

Did you even read my comment? Yes, without minimum wage an employer could theoretically pay an employee less. But minimum wage already doesn’t pay enough for people to survive. All it is doing is giving employers a solid number they can point to and say, “Well, the government says this work is only worth $7.25!”

No one can survive on the current federal minimum wage, but employers are using that as a guideline when offering wages instead of looking at their business needs or local competition. That means the current minimum wage is actively harming employees. So, again:

Minimum wage needs to be adjusted for inflation to match what it was originally intended for, or it needs to be abolished. Right now, it just gives employers a very low starting point for their bad-faith negotiations.

There will always be wants and needs that go unfulfilled

That’s not what ‘needs’ means.

But no one would actually work for free, so now the company has to actually decide how much it values the work at.

Look at what happened with retail and fast-food after lockdowns lifted in the US: wages surged for the bottom 10% of earners. These places couldn’t get people to work for minimum wage, so they had to ignore minimum wage and actually value the work accordingly. As a result, income saw some pretty strong growth for those employees.

What a minimum wage does is set the opening baseline for negotiation. The company can say, “We know this is a shitty job that anyone can do, and the government says that kind of work is worth $7.25.” That creates a hurdle to discourage an employee from negotiating for more.

Minimum wage needs to be adjusted for inflation to match what it was originally intended for, or it needs to be abolished. Right now, it just gives employers a very low starting point for their bad-faith negotiations.

The argument is that raising wages would cost business owners too much. They would need to close up shop rather than pay higher wages, and then the workers aren’t making anything.

And there is some truth to that, unfortunately. Almost half of all private sector employees work for a small business. If small business labor costs doubled overnight, most could not absorb the additional expense and survive. You’d see a lot of places go belly up, and either nothing would replace them or large corporations that were able to absorb the labor costs would take over and raise prices to maintain their margin. A higher minimum wage just strengthens the position of the companies with enough capital to survive the change.

I agree that wages need to increase, but it’s a lot more complicated than just the government saying, “Hey! Pay them more!”

most of the negative sentiment on cops comes from anecdotes

Oh, I thought it came from the years of empirical evidence of corruption, bias, and state-funded violence.

Jaffe always struck me as a perpetual adolescent. The two GoW games he worked on were great for the time, but the stories were shallow excuses to showcase as much gore as possible. His other big property, Twisted Metal, was genre-defining gameplay but any narrative was just edgelord violence and/or crass humor.

The last “big” project I remember coming down the pipe from him was Drawn to Death, which took his signature juvenile tastes and combined them with horrible gameplay and eye-blistering art direction. As far as I’m aware, he hasn’t worked on a game since.

I’m not saying the new GoW games are perfect, but I wouldn’t say Jaffe has a trusted critical eye.

The fun one is where they brag that older workers are making “substantially more” because they’re averaging $22/hr versus $13/hr in 1987. Adjusted for inflation, that $13/hr should be around $35/hr.

More people are working longer for less money.

For the last 40 years or so, Republican voters have mostly been single-issue voters. They care very passionately about one thing, and will let almost anything else slide as a result. Being in favor of cable fees doesn’t matter as long as they’re anti-abortion. Being in favor of cutting social welfare programs that those very voters rely upon is fine as long as they’re anti-trans.

For the most part, each voter only cares about one or two specific things, and the whole picture doesn’t really matter to them.