That seems pretty reasonable.

But also, insurance companies have way too much power here. They serve a valuable need, but the company made 15 years of 100% pure profit by ducking out at the first inkling there was of risk. There needs to be a lot more regulation around insurers of all types to help protect consumers.

Right, because the US immediately post-WW2 was an incredibly stagnant society with no visible benefits to the middle class.

Nissan Leaf and Chevy Bolt are those vehicles and they don't appear to be any heavier than their ICE counterparts. This article is just fear-mongering about EVs. Tire degradation may be a serious concern, but it's not actually unique to EVs and this article isn't really setting itself up to be taken seriously.

If the wealthy put in a significantly larger amount while working they will be entitled to a proportionally larger about of withdrawal later.

Why?

The wealthy put in more money towards taxes that go to other things which everyone benefits from equally. The wealthy don't get better roads just because they pay a higher tax rate. Why should they have uncapped benefits from social security? Retired folks being able to live off social security is a benefit to all of society, it's not meant to keep people at a high income with no other inputs. The wealthy can benefit from social security just like everyone else, and payouts should be capped, but they're currently benefiting from society at a greater rate pre-retirement so that should be reflected in their contributions today. If they want to be wealthy in retirement, then they have the means to invest and supplement their future social security earnings.

Edit: I just realized some of my statements conflicted a little. My point is just that tax contributions are not expected to deliver a 1:1 benefit to the contributor for the service that is collecting tax. You don't put in $1 towards roads and get $1 back of road use, or $2 towards schools and get $2 of education back. We all contribute for the betterment and support of society at large. The wealthy can afford to contribute proportionally more. They are getting the benefits of their taxes back in greater proportion than the rest of us by way of their wealth, they do not make that money purely off individual effort. Supporting retirees ensures they are not a drain on society's resources and it's important that the wealthy contribute enough to make this possible.

Please don't give their statement any credibility without adding the important context. Based in some truth may be technically accurate, but when compared to all the other possible causes of bird death it's basically inconsequential.

https://www.fws.gov/library/collections/threats-birds

If there's a solution, such as painting one blade a different color, then great. We can leave it up to the turbine engineers and wildlife agencies to address it, it doesn't need to be part of any news cycle. Giving their outlandish claim any air at all lends it far too much weight.

The criticism of this news is needlessly toxic. Maybe Hamas won't accept the offer, but that doesn't mean it's not a genuine attempt to save some children's lives.

They claim to be anti-abortion. In reality, many of their policies lead to increasing abortions: defunding education, defunding birth control, etc.

Hubris, thy name is Rush

I observed and participated in that exchange and I also found it to be fairly disheartening, especially since it came from an admin. All I can say is that you should try not to let it weigh you down.

For the most part, my exchanges on this site have been positive and supportive and I'd like to think that will be the norm in the future.

It’s not really a “Tesla thing”, it’s an electric motor thing.

Seriously. My Nissan Leaf in Eco mode (which limits acceleration) feels peppy and is super fun to drive.

The US has limits on free speech in the name of public health and safety. There's no assumption of limitless free speech in the US. People who cry "free speech" typically have no understanding of its actual legal definition in the country and just want an excuse to be a bigoted asshole without consequences.

Twitter, not being part of the government, gets to decide what content they allow and doesn't need to worry too much about the legal definition of free speech. But, despite Musk's claims, Twitter is not actually a space of limitless free speech. They've taken plenty of actions since he took over that limit the speech of individuals he disagrees with. Twitter is just interesting in giving a platform to hate. There's certainly money to be made in monetizing hate (see Trump), but hopefully it doesn't work out well in the end for Twitter or Musk.

The managers don’t want a fight so they’ll just give them what they want so they leave.

Unfortunately, this contributes to the problem. It's a reward for being an asshole. I don't blame managers or staffers for giving in just to get rid of the asshole because it's not worth getting screamed at. But it's like the "customer is always right" approach devolved into "being an asshole gets you free shit". I wish corporate culture was "treat our employees well and we'll treat you like a king, be an asshole and you're banned for life" or something along those lines.

Also, your money recommendations are on point and OP should definitely do some smart saving while they have the extra cash. It'll help them out a lot later in life.

I don't want to just angrily respond to a quip, but have you not been paying any attention at all for the last 2 years? Every big win for Biden, along with countless federal judge positions, have gotten approved through Manchin's involvement. Sinema's, too, unfortunately. Sinema is a liar, deserves no respect, and Arizona would be happy to elect a progressive democrat in her place. But Manchin, as annoying as he is, is probably the best we can expect from West Virginia. Him switching to Independent doesn't mean a GenZ progressive is going to win his seat from him next election, it just means we lose an ally that is helping hold on to a very tenuous "majority" in the Senate. I don't like him, but you cannot discount the fact that he has helped the Democrats a hell of a lot in the last couple years by mostly voting alongside them.

i think i’ve more than substantiated the point

How have you done that? You've equated "there is a rationale for using cluster bombs" with "support executing POWs". These are not comparable and have extremely different impacts. War is not black and white and things that are bad are not all the same level of bad.

For the record, I don't support the use of cluster bombs and think it was a bad move by the U.S. to supply them.

I think that's just more examples of it being misused. BMI may be useful to compare populations in certain instances. It has value in being easily calculated based off data that is often easy to obtain. But, there are many situations where it would be inappropriate to use BMI for statistical comparison. That doesn't mean it's entirely useless.

your argument necessitates finding conduct like that acceptable if it occurs

It really does not and you've completely misrepresented that poster's argument. You can try to make the argument that their claim and executing POWs can be linked, but I think it's absolutely ridiculous. Support your opinion, or try to make a logical connection, if you like. At the moment, you're just putting words in someone else's mouth.

Honestly, this story doesn't need to be covered as an opinion piece. The facts that we know at this point are damning enough. There are plenty of articles that cover it better: https://www.npr.org/2023/08/14/1193676139/newspaper-marion-county-kansas-police-raid-first-amendment

The paper didn't initially publish anything. They were following-up on tips and doing some very basic journalism. They opted not to publish some inflammatory stuff because they were worried they were being used in a domestic dispute. The paper only published a story to defend themselves after they were accused of a bunch of stuff by the restaurant owner. Then the raid happened.

I hope everyone involved in authorizing/executing the raid gets absolutely brutalized by the legal system. They shouldn't hold the positions they have because they're clearly not qualified and the paper deserves significant compensation. The founder of the paper died the day after the raid; she was 98 and it's very likely that the trauma of being raided by the police contributed to her death.

Do you have a source for that? I only know the news about his opposition to Putin and haven't gotten too far into his character.

I'm not experiencing that issue either and I have half the amount of RAM that you do. I've noticed an unnecessary autorefresh only after closing out of the browser for a long time, never in the middle of switching between apps. But, that does sound like annoying behavior.

Jesus, that man is a hero. The bigots don't deserve that level of man as their mayor, but he clearly desires to represent everyone, as a mayor should. The fact that this has been going on for so long is extremely depressing to hear. I hope the feds get involved immediately and help set things right.

Do you need Prime for that? I'm not in your same situation, but I used to be very reliant on Prime shipping. Since I cancelled Prime, I still sometimes buy stuff from Amazon, but I realized I don't have a need to get things so rapidly. Free shipping is still an option on most items, it just takes a few more days. When they're small items that don't qualify for free shipping, then I just add it to my cart and wait until I have something else to add that makes it cross that free shipping threshold. And I also generally don't feel the need to use Amazon as much since so many other companies offer free shipping these days.

In my circle, I've seen that people are just so expectant of rapid shipping, but they don't actually need it. I've learned how instant gratification isn't actually valuable to me, but I know that's difficult for a lot of people to accept.

If I had a friend I knew for decades that was convicted of some awful shit like this, I'd find it pretty easy to just not write a letter about their good character. Maybe I never saw even a hint of the monster that was convicted, but it'd be pretty messed up for me to just ignore the reality of the present and talk about how good they were to me in the past. Attesting to someone's character has a limit. They could have very easily just kept their mouths shut on this topic not supported a convicted rapist. My hypothetical friend can go deal with the consequences of their own actions themselves while I try to internally come to terms with the fact that my friend betrayed me by lying to my face for so long.

She's apparently made it her life's work to abuse the vulnerability of both bio and foster parents by leveraging her "knowledge" in a way that favors kids being permanently separated from their bio family. There are certainly circumstances that warrant that kind of separation, but she and that lawyer's office seem to be leading a campaign of child separation. That's pure evil.

I think you can factor it in along with all other benefits. Employees absolutely consider commute time when applying for work. If companies want employees in office and are trying to compete with employers that allow remote work, they need to start making a case for why the commute is worth it. Tech companies tried doing that with ping pong tables and beer, but now that remote work is so common that doesn't carry much weight. Compensating an employee for commute time in some way seems like a reasonable benefit that companies should consider offering.

what’s the point?

Simplicity and overall cost. Pirating is cheaper and allows you to get everything in one place versus 5 different streaming platforms. I see the draw.

And it's hard to make the case that paying streamers equates to paying the content creators with the strikes highlighting how little the actual creators get out of the deal. I'm in favor of paying for content, but you can't say paying Netflix their continually increasing, and more restrictive, subscription fees is actually contributing to supporting creators who make good content.

They made a musical out of it so I'm sure it sold just fine. The pointless disparaging based on no facts isn't very useful to this topic.

undefined_one> It’s the same principle.

It's really not. The system is broken and student loans are extortionate. Borrowers were promised something that was not delivered.

I paid for my loans, too, but I don't think the next generation should suffer because we bought into a broken system. It's been shown that student loan forgiveness will have a hugely positive impact on the economy. I'd much rather we make decisions that benefit society as a whole versus holding on some misplaced idea that it's more important we punish a group for believing the lies they were told.

Also, "most entitled generation ever" is such bullshit, pure and simple. Wage gap, American Dream© being a lie, housing crisis, etc., etc. This generation was led to believe they had a future, but they just can't afford it.>

Nope, but they did make it so I get suggested streaming providers before my own bloody media.

You can disable this entirely.

They do that regardless of whether there are fares. In my neck of the woods, the suburbanites have fought like hell against installing light rail to connect downtown with the greater metro area because they're worried about the "crime train". Who cares if it would improve commuting for the majority of the population?

i can’t walk you to a conclusion you don’t want to come to, sorry

That's precisely the purpose of a debate. I'm happy to read your rationale for why the two examples are equivalent, but you have not supported that statement in this thread. All you've said is that you're "logically following from those quotes". I don't see the logic you followed, and neither does the OP who vehemently disagrees with your conclusion.

An ad-free web is definitely a pipe dream. But a targeted ad-free web should be a simple option available to users. I'd guess that the majority of the public doesn't care too much about being tracked, and may even appreciate having their relevant interests targeted so that they see an ad that is more interesting to them. The problem is that, for those of us who don't want to be targeted, there is no simple way to disable that. Companies have baked their ad targeting directly into the functionality of their platforms so it's incredibly difficult to avoid targeted ads if you still want to use the most popular sites. I think this is the reality that is unacceptable.

Every browser should have a simple toggle to enable targeted ads and it should be every site should respect this. I'm not super educated on Google's Topics solution, but maybe the step away from cookies could theoretically support that kind of reality. I don't think Google is going to lead the charge on that kind of change, but we certainly need to get away from cookies somehow.

You are well within your rights to pay for that since it fits your family's needs. But, describing it as saving money glosses over that it's a result of a change in the terms of service. Netflix used to gloat about not caring that people were password sharing. They backtracked on that pretty hard.

I cancelled Netflix after they cracked down on password sharing because I'm a home of 1 screen. If the only option for 4k viewing is a 4-screen subscription that I can't share, then that's a ripoff as far as I'm concerned. If they'd offered a cheaper 4k, 1-screen subscription option I would have considered sticking with that. Ultimately, I probably would have cancelled as soon as the strikes happened just to support the creators, but that would be a separate decision from the password sharing stuff.

Cooper is credited as writer, director, and producer on the movie. I don't think you can put this on the studio.

I knew I wasn't going crazy! That press any key habit is so ingrained because it's been around since I played my first game on a 286 PC, probably longer.

That is such an awful experience. I also have a dog with a pretty strong prey drive. Every once in a while a neighbor's cat will crawl along the top of our fence and he goes nuts. If he ever caught the cat, I'm sure it would be the end of it. I would feel so guilty because the cat doesn't deserve that, but what else can I do? I have a strong fence around my yard and my dog is never off leash anywhere else. We've trained him well enough that he's totally chill with our own indoor cat, but outside cats are a completely different story.

Letting your pet roam around wouldn't be acceptable if it were a dog, why is a cat okay?

I think the initial divergence in our thinking is how we define a person's fair share. The U.S. has this pervasive myth that individual perseverance leads to achievement. That is, if you work hard enough then you can get rich and that's the result of your own efforts. I'm not trying to discount the hard work that many people put into their success, but the reality is that they are benefiting from so many different things that they have no direct control over. The family you're born into, the physical location where you're born, your race/ethnicity, etc. These are all more significant contributors to success than individual effort.

A prosperous society supports all its citizenry in some way, but some people need a lot more support than others, and it's through no fault of their own. People who are individually more prosperous should expect to contribute a proportionally greater amount to support society because they've already reaped the benefits of that society themselves.

So that they don't dilute the brand recognition of Nothing. Same reason Toyota has both Toyota-branded and Lexus-branded cars.

Thanks, appreciate it.

Seriously. I get being frustrated with him and wishing for someone better, but that's just not realistic. There are pathways to reduce his power by supporting candidates that can flip a seat in other states, but his seat is only ever likely to get more red.

My argument is that it's not surprising that someone would choose to pay $20/mo for 1 service with all the things they want versus paying $100/mo to deal with 4 services.

The fact that Netflix et al pay their creators squat is a separate component. I was just pointing out that saying you want to pay content creators for their work doesn't really equate to paying for a Netflix subscription. If someone wants to ensure they're paying creators for their content, there are much better ways to do so. You can pay the $20/mo to pirate stuff, then donate to the Entertainment Community Fund, or buy something directly from a writer's website with the $80/mo you've saved.