skulblaka

Thing is if they do that there and we don’t do it everywhere at once, the corporations will just move their operations to some other state with a better tax rate and then LA is left with nobody to employ their citizens.

I want to be very clear that I’m not condoning this but the reason this continues so readily is because this keeps the corporations operating in their area. A little bit of tit for tat and money under the table ensures that the labor pool in your area stays employed, at a bit of cost to the people’s well being and the federal coffers. If you just crank up the business tax rates suddenly then within 5 years all the big businesses will be gone. That might be a good thing long term but it’s going to be a very very bad thing short term.

Allowing states to dictate their own tax rates was a trap that we walked fully into and now I don’t see a way out of it without discarding that and taking over control of that federally. Which is something that will never ever fly in American politics.

That’s “jawn” in Philly. It can stand in for literally any object. “These jawns are expensive” “Make a left at the jawn” “Jawn said he ain’t coming” “This jawn is packed”

I’ve discovered that my phone does this once every time it gets rebooted and then doesn’t bug me about it again until its next power cycle.

The point isn’t to find a non-rapist, the point is “just tell us ahead of time so we can sweep it under the rug, dumbass”

They aren’t mad that he did it, they’re mad that the propaganda machine couldn’t get in front of it before it became news.

Hell, I’ll be surprised if they even have to do that. All the limiters are about to come off of every megacorp in America. Especially ones that were complicit in right wing propaganda.

The Greeks had a bit of a story about that…

Hmm. Can’t wait to see this disappear into smoke in a few weeks’ time.

Huh, today I learned that that is a neurological test.

I’m not a doctor, but I was always under the impression that when they do that they’re whacking on the tendon directly and the leg-jerk reaction is just… well, physics. The tendon is manually flexed and the leg should jerk in response and I always assumed this was just testing to make sure your knees are in good shape. But according to Britannica.com where my brief searching led me,

Exaggeration or absence of the reaction suggests that there may be damage to the central nervous system. The knee jerk can also be helpful in recognizing thyroid disease.

Personally I find it silly that bathrooms are segregated at all when stalls exist.

You mean the 3-foot particle board separator with a 2-foot gap at the bottom and a solid inch of space around the entire door, the gap large enough to make eye contact with someone at the sink while you’re sitting with your pants down?

Because that’s what passes for a “stall” in 99% of America. Privacy never even came into the conversation when they designed those damn things. They are designed to give the bare minimum illusion of privacy while still being easily stared through to make sure no one is doing drugs in your bathroom. At any point in time any employee of any company has a right to come into the bathroom, peer through the crack in the door and make sure you’re in there dropping a dook properly and not say, shooting up heroin. And you can’t stop them even if you wanted to, the stalls are designed to make that possible.

So, with that knowledge, I sort of almost understand the people that get all up in arms about this. Because there is almost NO expectation of privacy in ANY American public bathroom. If we had European style stalls this would never have been a problem in the first place. But because anybody can just walk up and literally make eye contact from outside the stall while you’ve got your pants down, some folks can be understandably concerned about that.

That doesn’t excuse any of this mess and it doesn’t make them correct, but non-americans don’t realize how shoddy our typical public restroom is. The anger at trans folks should instead be directed at the cheap-ass building contractors that mandate bathrooms that don’t give you privacy.

Edit: These are what I’m used to seeing.

If you’re tall, your eye level is over the top of that door. If you’re a young kid, the bottom of the door doesn’t even start until your chest or shoulders. If you’re medium height the gap around the door is your peephole, whether you want it to be or not.

For a very long time we had a robust system of public violence that prevented a lot of this. Not all of it, but a lot.

Back in the day if you were a sex pest and an asshole, chances were good that someone who lived in your community would either be firmly escorting you out of the local area never to return, or digging you a shallow hole back behind the churchyard.

Now if you were a royal sex pest then that’s a different story, but guys like Tate? He’s just some dude. In a past age someone would have broken 33 bones in his arms, legs and face and he might have even learned something from it.

He intentionally misgenders his own children so honestly I’m not that torn up about it.

There’s nothing wrong with being a woman, it’s only an insult if Musk thinks it is. We’re allowing him to torture himself with it.

To a better world, free of bigots who feel that they have a right to exist in the sunlight with the rest of us?

I agree.

In a past life, pretty plausible.

Now that Elmo is the First Lady, this is the best TOS that’s ever been written by anyone ever. It’s perfect. It probably trumps the constitution because of how perfect it is.

Sure, but I’ll take the thousand cuts over being shot right directly in the face, pretty much every time.

That’s kind of my point though. The large majority of active voters in America don’t have a damn clue what they’re actually voting for. Many democrats don’t vote, but those who do generally do so because they’re informed and invested in politics. Most Republicans vote, largely because their pastor tells them to and tells them who to choose.

If voters were required to have an informed opinion in order to vote, I bet you’d see a significant change in those percentages.

But none of this is practical anyway, it’s a bad solution to a bad problem. It’s basically unenforceable and any way that it does get enforced is going to be a net loss of rights and representation. I don’t like this idea. I just have a hard time coming up with alternatives at this time. It is clear to me that the situation we have now is not tenable. I just don’t know where to go from here, and it seems nobody else does either.

Yeah, EMPs aren’t hard to do. Pretty much anybody could do that to anybody. You don’t need a nuke for it.

Yeah, I agree, that’s why I didn’t vote for Trump.

Things like this are what make me struggle with the question of whether or not some sort of voting license would be a bad thing.

It would, of course, unequivocally be a bad thing. But would it be worse than this? I don’t know anymore. On one hand, every living human deserves a free and fair voice in the choice of their governmental representatives. On the other hand, maybe you should have to prove you know what you’re voting for before you’re allowed to vote. Because a popular vote decided primarily by “vibes” from criminally underinformed voters is not something that any republic is able to survive long term.

They’re the same picture

Finn didn’t need a badass prosthetic left arm because the cure to male loneliness is Jake the Dog.