BallsandBayonets

This is quickly becoming the norm in every industry. Every employer wants fewer employees to do more, without paying them more of course.

It is all arbitrary though. There are some weak arguments about mental development but other than the generally accepted rule that human brains stop developing at around 25 years old, there isn't any hard science between 16, 18, 21, or whatever. Individuals hit developmental milestones at different ages, whether they are physical or mental. Each age-restricted activity requires different types of development. A high schooler may be able to make an informed decision on who or what to vote for, but will be subject to peer pressure to drink alcohol to a dangerous level. You can now sign up to potentially get killed in an instant at 18, but you can't intentionally give yourself cancer slowly. Kids have better reflexes than seniors, but are also more reckless (imo both ends of the age spectrum should require more frequent driver's testing and restrictions).

So since it's all arbitrary, either we make everything one age, and 18 is a common median of the age-restrictions, or we ditch the restrictions entirely and rely on more extensive and expensive regulations based on individual development.

It is all arbitrary though. There are some weak arguments about mental development but other than the generally accepted rule that human brains stop developing at around 25 years old, there isn't any hard science between 16, 18, 21, or whatever. Individuals hit developmental milestones at different ages, whether they are physical or mental. Each age-restricted activity requires different types of development. A high schooler may be able to make an informed decision on who or what to vote for, but will be subject to peer pressure to drink alcohol to a dangerous level. You can now sign up to potentially get killed in an instant at 18, but you can't intentionally give yourself cancer slowly. Kids have better reflexes than seniors, but are also more reckless (imo both ends of the age spectrum should require more frequent driver's testing and restrictions).

So since it's all arbitrary, either we make everything one age, and 18 is a common median of the age-restrictions, or we ditch the restrictions entirely and rely on more extensive and expensive regulations based on individual development.

There's a saying, "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing mankind that he doesn't exist."

I disagree. I think the greatest trick would be to prove that you're the good guy, and the other guy is the bad guy. If anything about the Xtian Bible is true, Lucifer is absolutely the good guy.

What is not to like.

Being awake at that hour.

More than just a place to sleep; a place to call your own. And every place I've rented did not feel like my own; most corporate rental contracts make it very clear that this is their property, don't you dare make it feel like home, you only get to temporarily reside there by the grace of their good will (and by paying out your nose, ears, eyes, and ass for the privilege).

Not until a minority tries to off the Toupee.

stop 'non-essential' work

So those jobs they're cutting start with everyone with "Chief" in their title, right?

"We realized the reason voters want Biden to step down is because Harris is his running mate. So we replaced her with the only Democrat in existence less popular than Biden, and the only person in existence to have lost to the Toupee in an election: Hillary Clinton. It's her turn." - Dem leadership.

It said MSNBC had a leftist bias. The bot, and by extension its developers, have as much credibility as your Fox News watching uncle who calls everything they don't like "communism".

They're actually just texting that to every number in existence; most who get the text probably need to take the advice.

Woah, an actual campaign promise? Maybe the Dems do want to look like they're trying after all.

Crazy idea: the day before the election, Biden (or his replacement) makes a nationwide address telling anyone with student loans to just stop paying them, and that if the Dems win, their administration promises to spend the next four years handling the fallout.

If the Dems lose, we as a country will have bigger issues to worry about. If the Dems win, we might finally have a campaign promise that we can hold them accountable for.

And if you wait for a pause to interject, you'll also not be paying attention to anything else they say because you're focused on what you have to say.

In general we all need to slow down when speaking and give lots more room for others to speak.

The US doesn't benefit, but a few privately owned corporations and a handful of already way too wealthy monsters benefit.

But since they own the US government, it doesn't really matter if the other 99.998% of people in the US, plus 100% of Palestinians suffer.

I adapted the spoons explanation to DnD spell slots. Some days I get high level spell slots, some days I have a bunch of low level slots, and some days just casting cantrips is the best I can do.

In their defense, they didn't fuck it up (at first), media publishers saw there was money in streaming and decided that they wanted a bigger slice of the pie. When everyone is trying to take the whole pie for themselves, no one ends up with any pie.

However pretty much every move they have done in the past 5 ish years has been fucking it up.

Maybe I'd be more interested in AI if there was any I with the A. At the moment, there's no more intelligence to these things than there is in a parrot with brain damage, or a human child. Language Models can mimic speech but are unable to formulate any original thoughts. Until they can, they aren't AI and I won't be the slightest bit interested beyond trying to break them into being slightly dirty (and therefore slightly funny).

If nothing else, this should be a sign that Biden stepping aside was the right move.

As someone who was unfortunate enough to have grown up in Indiana, I'd rather Buttigeg stay there and keep trying to drag that state into the 20th* century.

*Not a typo, that state is just that far behind.

What if the tree bears fruit, and an unemployed individual is able to acquire food without giving money to the owner class?

I had a flat tire at midnight once. Tried for about an hour to change it myself before calling a tow truck company that said it was open. Got routed to a call center who said they had to contact one of their freelance trucks, after paying $250 over the phone. A little more back and forth and about 90 minutes later (when they said it'd be 30 minutes), no truck ever appeared. The call center (third rep that night) called and said the one person they had working tonight broke down outside of cell service, can they come out in the morning? I said that won't work, I'll just cancel and get a refund. They said it'd take 3-4 business days to get the refund and there'd be a $50 refund processing charge.

I didn't quite blow up at them, but any time I have to stand up for myself I get shaky and struggle to keep the anger out of my voice. I explained (several times) that there was no way that was acceptable and that I would like to speak to their manager. "I spoke to my manager and there's nothing we can do, that's just the cost of processing a refund." Well I paid for services that I didn't receive, due to no fault of my own. Let me speak to your manager. Another hold. "My manager is willing to pay the refund himself this one time." Yeah ok sure thanks bye.

20 minutes later my tire was changed by a different tow truck company who had a real employee answer before the second ring, had multiple trucks on duty, didn't even ask for payment until after the work was done, and it was about $80. I fully expected to have to issue a chargeback for the first company's charge but fortunately it never showed up on my card statement.

Everything Google has done was better before they inserted machine learning. Google Maps used to give accurate lane-specific directions, then they switched to using approximate traffic data to determine directions, and since most drivers are morons, Maps now tells you to turn right in a straight-only lane and make an illegal left turn in 150ft after crossing 4 lanes.

That's actually exactly why it's a bad cleaning agent, at least for sterilization purposes. It evaporates before it can kill any microbes.

When I stream YouTube to my TV, I get 15-30 seconds of unskippable ads with the ability to skip enabling at the 15 or 30 second mark. The full length of the ad is 90+ seconds (according to the timer that never goes down). Would this implementation work similarly? 6 seconds of a silent black screen is fine; 90 or more seconds because the skip button is also missing would be more annoying (or be a nice time for a bathroom break).

I'd like them to do an RPG, something completely off the wall, like the TF2 crew playing D&D.

And by the time we get a $15/hr minimum wage, a living wage in any state worth living in will be $75/hr.

I don't have enough to chop my money into anything other than 75% rent, 20% car payment, 5% food for my dog.

But I do put that rent and car payment in a savings account and pay from that. Those fractions of a penny per month add up; after 5 years I have 77 cents in my savings account!

Every solution that works within the system would be a band-aid. The entire system is band-aids. The government set up by a group of wealthy white men almost 250 years ago for a population 130 times smaller than it is now simply does not and cannot work in today's world.

I applied to a job with a hotel once, now they send me regular emails about other unrelated jobs. But to unsubscribe I have to log in, and apparently applying to the job didn't create a complete profile so I'd have to create an account just to unsubscribe.

They're marked as spam now.

We don't have a democracy, or even a direct republic as our political system. It's an oligarchy of the wealthy (by the wealthy, for the wealthy). Every four years the owner class picks (independently of public opinion) which privileged persons get to play the role of elected officials, then put on a show involving a lot of wasted money and time pretending that the common citizen has the ability to affect the political process.

The owner class has determined that the best way to stay in power is to stoke the deep-rooted tribalism in every person by highlighting trivial differences. This results in one side of the owner class pandering to intentionally under-educated bigots, and the other side of the owner class occasionally pretending to not be bigoted.

Whether by accident or intent, the more openly bigoted presidential candidate has made clear the end game of the owner class: outright fascism. The less openly bigoted side of the owner class has decided it is in their best interests to not put up any meaningful resistance to this.

I'm a bartender. Half my paycheck is tips (and still isn't enough to live in the area, but that's another issue). There shouldn't be a tipped minimum wage. Period. Tips should be optional, not a way for employers to make customers pay their employees' wages.

Long gone are the days when you made $7.25 an hour on your paycheck and took home hundreds in cash per night. People are tipping less, eating out less, and carrying less cash. Paying everyone a livable wage and eliminating the need to tip would help everyone, except the owner class.

Application fee is $600 (non-refundable), additional monthly fees for parking, trash, pest control, landscaping, an amenity fee to cover the twice a year that we set out a bowl of candy in the front office, a maintenance fee, a convenience fee to pay online, and an inconvenience fee to pay offline. Just kidding on that last one, we don't accept offline payments. On move out there's a $400 cleaning fee and a $600 carpet replacement fee that we charge to every tenant whether we clean the place or not, oh and we painted before you moved in so it counts as a renovated unit, so that'll be an extra $150/month.

Gross, I can't believe anyone would do something so disgusting! Using a plastic spatula making everything taste like melted plastic.

Its legs are rooks, so it still can only move straight vertically or straight horizontally.

All those innocent people being abused usually have a reason behind it too; it's just that the reason is usually corporate greed and a lack of ethics in politics.

All the comments saying it's a distraction from how the working class is being oppressed by the owner class are right, but also...

There have always been bigots, small town small minded people who don't "know any gay people" but there was that one skinny boy in their class that didn't like sports so he was bullied until he left town at 18. And now, that generation of bigots is finally dying out. Not only due to age but due to an increased connection with the greater world. A small town bigot might not know any LGBT people personally but they are aware of their existence, due to television and the Internet. So quietly ignoring people who are different than you doesn't work anymore. And a dying animal fights harder than ever.

These death throes are useful to the owner class. But they are still dying out. And if we can exterminate capitalism and figure out a way to survive in a post-warmed globe, we might just see the end of (this particular type) of bigotry.

I'm in agreement except for the wedding planner. Whether they help with the planning from day one or are just the day-of coordinator, a good wedding planner is worth their weight in gold. I'd rather plug an old mp3 player into a portable speaker and skip the DJ before I recommend skipping out on the planner.

You can be validly left without wanting revolution, as long as you're ok with progress happening over the course of centuries (in a world that has about 25 years left before the majority of us are dead from man-made climate change).

Doesn't the entire first family live in the White House? Not to mention servants and the like. I get what they're going for, but occupant is one of the few words they could have chosen that could not be more inaccurate.