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.

That last point is why I couldn’t play Fallout 4. My son was kidnapped, my spouse was killed, and I need to find out who did it and where they are! Right after I save a library, build a town, and solve some detective mysteries, I guess.

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.

My fiancé was on the phone with her mother yesterday, explaining Project 2025 to her, and her mother literally said, “Oh, Trump wouldn’t go along with all that. He used to be a Democrat, so he’s petty liberal for a Republican.”

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.

“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.

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.

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.

Personally I feel that if someone is chronically ill with a debilitating illness, the most humane thing we can do is allow them the choice of assisted suicide.

I think the most humane thing to do would be to treat them with the best care we as a society can provide without forcing them into massive debt.

That’s a bad take. The case actually affirmed business judgement rule: the idea that the guy running the company knows how to run it better than the shareholders. It’s part of why post-war America is considered the golden age of American manufacturing: Publicly traded companies invested in their employees and wages exploded across the board. A 100 year old court decision isn’t the primary driver on a problem that’s really only developed in the last forty or fifty years.

My BIL is a Catholic Libertarian. Almost forty and still lives with Mom and Dad, so he never had the brush with reality that your friend went through. He thinks he’s politically savvy and always wants “civil debate” with me, but he’s utterly insufferable.

I’m not looking forward to Thanksgiving next week.

Future Me has more experience and wisdom than Present Me. There’s no reason I should do anything when such a better-suited candidate will inevitably emerge.

That’s because you’re reading the chart wrong. It’s showing the change in wealth for those age brackets across time.

People that were 40 in 1990 had a bigger share of the wealth than people who are 40 in 2020.

This. I bought a 32oz Nalgene when I was in high school. Lost it on a camping trip in my early twenties, and replaced it with the exact same one. I’ve had it and used it daily for over 15 years now.