I can’t remember another recent candidate in the US that not only wasn’t super pro-Taiwan, but said the US should just hang them out to dry if the PRC were to invade the island. They probably like that side of him.
Plus, an incredibly vain, greedy and self-confident idiot is not the hardest of targets to get to do what you want.
They may be idealists that don’t reflect a use case I think is reasonable to expect of the average user, but I would also say that it’s very important to have them there, constantly agitating for more and better. They certainly don’t manage to land on achieving all their goals, but they also prevent a more compromising, “I just need to use my stuff now, not in 10 years when you figure out a FOSS implementation” stance from being used to slowly bring even more things further away from FOSS principles in the name of pragmatism.
Eh, non-voters in some states could help Trump win, but it’s hardly a universal thing. My bigger issue with this sort of rhetoric is that criticizing absolutely reprehensible policies advanced by the Democrats does not equal endorsing Trump, as many Zionist shills here like to claim. I want to be able to unreservedly back Democratic candidates in the upcoming elections, but “enables and supports genocide and the massacre of civilian men, women and children,” is one hell of a reservation to make your voters have.
I guess it probably depends on where you’re going. I went to the UK earlier this year, and my experience was mostly painless. Landed in Manchester, and they basically had self-checkout customs. I scanned my passport and looked at a camera once, and that was it. It was actually more of a hassle and more invasive coming back home and getting back into the country.
The democrats are currently pressuring Israel and pushing back politically
Saying “Hey, bud, don’t do x, is I’ll be real mad at you,” and then going “Gee, you did what I told you not to. Well, here’s a few billion dollars more weapons for you, so you can keep doing what I publicly asked you not to do.” is not pressuring them, it’s attempting to give plausible deniability to people who feel bad about supporting a blatantly genocidal state, and to fool the folks who take soundbites in the news at face value.
Current Democratic pressure amounts to fuck all outside of a handful of legislators who are demonized by the centrist and right wing factions of the party. To say otherwise is to either deny reality, or else willfully misrepresent it.
At a national level, I think some of it just comes down to resentment at popular policies being blocked, largely because of lawmakers from southern and midwestern states. I’d also wager context plays a part in this. Sure, NY has its share of rural Republican voters, but our dumbfuck GOP voters mostly manage to just mess things up for our own urban areas, appropriating funds from the MTA budget to build bridges to nowhere in their home districts so they can point and cry about those god-damned socialists in NYC not even being able to manage the budget for a single agency (that they actively work to undermine) so they can further gut public services.
Sure, it’s not ideal, but at least we’re (mostly) only hurting ourselves. GOP Congress-men and -women from southern and midwestern states collectively hold the rest of the nation hostage through their disproportionate impact on the Senate. Whether it’s climate change, student loan forgiveness, universal healthcare, packing the Supreme Court, or any of numerous other issues, these states hold others with vastly larger populations hostage, impeding broadly popular policies in a profoundly anti-democratic fashion.
It may not be fair to the non-GOP voters in those states, it may be misdirected resentment, but I don’t think it’s all that difficult to understand why people from majority Democrat, northern states might be kind of tired of the south and midwest’s collective shit at this point. If the GOP-leaning demographics in those states could either be dropped into a volcano, or, failing this, soundly beaten at the ballot, it would go a long way towards addressing this stereotype
Also, not everyone that is good at a job has the personality to be in management. I’ve found myself in several management roles before I realized I absolutely hate being responsible for other peoples’ work and am just not cut out for it.
A combination of factors made it happen. First up, you had low turnout. Only 20.5% of voters actually voted in that election, the lowest of the past 30 years.
Aside from that, Adams had strong support amongst voters of color. For people who don’t live and/or work in these communities, it can seem like voting against their interests and be surprising, but non-white voters are not a monolithic block. Quite often, majority black or Hispanic neighborhoods in the Bronx can prove more conservative than many people might expect, for example, particularly on social issues. A lot of my older co-workers from Latin America at the time, along with my mother-in-law, didn’t view BLM protests as legitimate actions to begin with, and just thought of them as troublemakers looking to break stuff and loot. The “tough on crime to raise quality of life” message was really powerful for many of the people I know, and they took it completely uncritically. There’s also a ton of super religious folks that won’t support Democrats over things like LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, and other culture war GOP talking points. I can’t really speak to the Black community, but if you learn Spanish, there’s also just a ton of casual racism, sexism and homophobia that would probably shock people.
In addition to conservative social inclinations, lots of these folks are not what you would describe as well-informed. My elderly Ecuadorian, Dominican and Peruvian co-workers at that time were constantly buying into totally baseless conspiracies they got sent on WhatsApp. That and the 2020 presidential election cycle was super frustrating at home, as my mother-in-law would religiously watch the news on Univision, where they would trot out “scandals” and conspiracies that had been disproven weeks earlier and abandoned in the English-media, but Univision knew they could get away with airing for the significant portion of their audience with limited or no English. I even remember watching the news with her, my wife and her sister, who are both fluent in English, and the three of us getting upset that an interview in which we could hear the original English statements were being translated entirely inaccurately.
When I have an option not to, I don’t. Unfortunately, the way health insurance works here, I often don’t have an option. With the insurance I had through my previous job, basically as soon as I requested a second refill, the pharmacy benefits would go “Hey, we won’t cover this anymore, unless you switch to 90-day refills via CVS Caremark.” At some points last year, that could easily have been $500-$1,000/month more for me to pay for my meds in order to keep getting them at the pharmacy two blocks away, and I just didn’t have it. Instead of going there and having pretty much all my prescriptions filled in an hour or less, I got to enjoy Caremark not letting me refill until the last minute, then encountering shipping delays with medications I really shouldn’t have been abruptly missing doses of.
It just says he was injured, which could happen if you were in close proximity to someone wearing one of the pagers. News here showed one of the explosions occurring in a grocery store, with plenty of people nearby, for example.
Are you in licensed dispensaries? Pretty much all the ones I’ve been to, the edible options are 2.5mg, 5mg and 10mg. My other thought, are you sure you aren’t looking at the THC content of the whole container? I have some 10mg chocolates in the freezer, but dead center on the lid’s label is “100mg THC”, then underneath and in a much smaller font, “per bottle.” I’ve noticed that on a lot of packaging, as well as dispensary websites, they choose to list stupid big numbers by just listing the overall content, and not what you would get per unit.
X doesn’t seem to have any issue censoring accounts for Musk’s autocratic buddies like Erdogan, so let’s not try and pretend that he’s above caving in to government censorship. He’s just pissed off in this case that he’s being asked to do it in a way that would hurt his friends in Brazil. The site has been called out over the last several years multiple times for refusing to take any steps to moderate misinformation spread by Bolsonaro and his political allies in attempts to undermine democracy and influence the results of the last election, like the endless claims of electronic voting being insecure in the lead up to the last elections, Bolsonaro’s COVID denialism and many other examples.
For people with insurance, there’s pretty much always a maximum yearly out of pocket amount, after which things are basically all paid for by insurance.
With a few caveats, yes. At least with the insurance I had last year when I hit the max for the first time, it has to be both deemed medically necessary to do, and be in network. Just because you hit your annual out-of-pocket max doesn’t mean you can get free cosmetic surgery, for example. Out of network treatment also had a separate annual max, so if I saw the wrong specialist or went to the wrong hospital during an emergency, I could still have gotten hit with another $10,000 in bills before that kicked in. And finally, I learned that there are actually annual maximums for certain types of treatment. In my case, I have an autoimmune condition and my doctor wanted me to get blood work done for it every 3 months. In their boundless wisdom, my insurance decided I shouldn’t need blood work more than three times a year, and I got a $1,700 bill for going over the annual limit for such care.
The limitlessness of their wisdom and beneficence is matched only by my pettiness, so I had the pleasure of having my first colonoscopy and an endoscopy the day after Christmas because my gastro said there was a tiny possibility of me having a problem more serious than hemorrhoids and I knew those assholes would have to pay for it, since they pre-authorized it, which added a few grand to what they had to pay for the year.
There’s also just completely failing to account for callouts in planning, which I saw a lot of when I was a manufacturing supervisor. Upper management breathes down operations’ neck to only have people doing the most high cost function they’re being paid for as much of the time as possible. If someone has been trained to run a line, they don’t want to see them doing 5S upkeep or sweeping, they want them running that line the whole shift. Unfortunately, this extends from the most senior positions down to the new hires, so they schedule the fewest people for each role they possibly could safely operate with when they come up with their production plan. Quite predictably, with humans not being robots, this throws the whole thing into chaos the moment one person calls out. Upper management gets into a tizzy about schedule attainment numbers while demanding to know how this could possibly happen, only to sit down with planning and pull the same bullshit with the following week’s schedule.
If you have a couple of redundancies in your scheduling, you can just postpone lower priority tasks and roll with it. If everyone shows up, you can have people work on stuff like training, preventative maintenance, house keeping, and a million other things.
For reasons apparently only getting an MBA will lower your IQ enough to seem reasonable, upper management in manufacturing loves doing those skeleton crews where a single absence means mandatory OT and 6-7 dry work weeks to try and salvage what can be of the production schedule, while demanding to know why we struggle to get and maintain staff for these roles.
Time to go take the Browns to the Super Bowl.
The Shin Megami Tensei games have some replayability between multiple routes, NG+ and coming up with the perfect team. Grandia is just one of the first jrpgs I really got in to, and I still love the characters today.
Maine is also plenty drunk, somebody needs to cut off the Allen’s coffee brandy supply and let them sober up.
Yes, clearly everyone is in a position to just walk off their job at any point in time, with no consequences for being unemployed.
I don’t know why you’re trying to say that the people who work these jobs, and largely live paycheck to paycheck, have the same sort of freedom as people who are financially stable. I was making my state’s minimum wage at the time, which was entirely insufficient to pay for any decent standard of living. My co-workers who were undocumented were paid even less, had no recourse if they were fired for complaining about conditions or working “too slow” according the bosses, did not qualify for unemployment insurance and had a significantly harder time finding new work than I would. Just like the majority of people out working on farms in the US today. But yeah, let’s pretend it’s as simple as walking off the job if it’s uncomfortable for everyone.
Your comments make it apparent that you’ve never worked these sorts of jobs or been in these sorts of conditions. What, you’re going to just walk off the job because it sucks and become homeless when the weather and working conditions suck? Because that’s the sort of choice that faces millions of people in the US today. It doesn’t even need to be in agriculture, you can find similar conditions in so many non-unionized positions doing things like landscaping, manufacturing jobs, kitchen work, etc. Florida literally just passed a bill that removed employer responsibility for providing rest and water breaks based on heat stress during work being performed earlier this year.
But sure, everyone has several months’ expenses in their bank accounts and work in a field where they can get another job from one day to the next…
How on earth is this enlightened conservatism to point out that these are not fatal temps for an otherwise healthy individual? I guess the whole population of the third world that lives in the tropics and doesn’t have air conditioning just have superior genes according to you? Fucking hell, literally millions of people around the world live in conditions where they see temperatures as high, or even worse, and you want to pretend like it’s saying “Well this guy should have just been stronger and worked harder,” to point out that these conditions are generally not fatal for a person without other issues.
No, they are not good conditions, and the state has an obligation to provide decent conditions to all those who are incarcerated, but it’s asinine to act as though healthy individuals routinely drop dead from spending several hours at 96°F or higher in high humidity environments in absence of some aggravating condition.
Part of this seems like it’s attributable to changes in lifestyle and material conditions of younger people, relative to their parents. Different aesthetics might mean their parents’ stuff looks incredibly gaudy to them, and doesn’t go with anything else in their apartment. My parents’ home is larger than any place I can reasonably expect to be able to afford, so I also don’t want their big dining room table that I’d have to pay for storage on for years before I can afford a space that it will immediately fill all of. Even if it’s a nice piece of furniture, that’s just a pain in the neck to go through, all for something I might never get to use.
On the topic of collections, boomers just fundamentally ignore key parts of collectibility. First, old collectables only became so valuable precisely because people weren’t obsessively hording and caring for everything with the intent of selling it down the line. Old Superman comics are rare and valuable due to people who bought them at the time they first came out largely treating them as disposable. They didn’t assume they were anything special that merited being held on to and cared for, so they didn’t. When everyone and their dog buys up commemorative plate sets, or Beanie Babies, or whatever other collectable grift boomers fell for, and they take great care of them, they don’t generally see their value do anything but decrease. The supply doesn’t get significantly reduced, and everyone else can see that they didn’t pan out as the collectable investments they were billed as, so who would want them?
That said, even for collections of items of genuine worth, you mostly need to hope that whoever you’re looking to give it to is as into whatever hobby as you are. If I were planning on having kids, I think it would be pretty unreasonable to expect them to know what to do with my fountain pen collection, unless they were into them as well. Otherwise, it’s just a ton of fussy pens that seem to have a fair number of duplicates that are really only distinguished by knowledge I couldn’t expect them to take the time to go gathering. Then, it’s still a big pain to actually identify things, make sales listings and sell them off. Hell, I have the knowledge, and even I find it annoying to do so.
Maybe we could address this, in part, by normalizing expanding options a bit for inheritance. If my hypothetical kids aren’t going to know how to make heads or tails of my pen collection, but I’ve got a younger friend who is just as into the hobby as I am, it would be nice if I could just leave them that specific collection, without having to worry it’ll kick off some acrimonious squabbling. Failing that, have parents indicate who they trust to sell an item for a fair price if nobody wants it. You can take it and think about it, but if it’s just not for you, you’ve got a trusted source to sell it off for you, so you (hopefully) don’t have to go through an ordeal trying to find someone to sell it for you that will give you a fair shake.