HubertManne

50% would be fine but it should apply to all income including investments, gifts, etc. maybe let inheritance be amoritized over 10 years or something.

I view the gaming distros as being about out of box. I don’t see anything improving performance outside of how the kernel compiles but I doubt any do anything special.

One thing I am glad about is the press used to tippie toe around calling out lying with him and at least that seems to not so much be the case anymore.

I have no idea how you seem to be drawing that conclusion from my conversation so far so I can’t answer your question. Our you saying im defending it by him dealing with the reality of it???

well im not sure I consider myself and edge case but I get your point.

this has actually benn really interesting for me and im now evaluating how I think of both depression and anxiety.

worst witchhunt in history which is saying something since the last 100 worst witchhunts in history have taken place in the last 8 years /s

yeah. I guess is are they not having it because of anxiety about the future or the fact its a reality now and the future effects are just reality. Is facing reality anxiety?

Im starting to get it. the phrase just to me sounds like its more about a possibility but the replies make me get it. I definitely get anxiety from current circumstances although I guess both my wife and I were discussing that with our depression. Its not like it can be cured because it comes from our current circumstances and often you think about like diagnosis and medication and its like how is that going to help when there are external factors. We think of it as more anxiety/depression for no reason or for reasons that should not cause them.

wow. just wow. with the earlier articles I assumed what would actually pass would eliminate the crazy but:

During its state convention this past weekend, the Republican Party of Texas approved a platform that lays out a Christian nationalist vision for the state, which would be maintained through an anti-democratic elections process that would create a permanent, one-party system.

Party platforms are meant to give voters an impression of what that organization’s principles and goals are. While not binding, they provide a basic idea of the policies a party will pursue should its members win control of government in an upcoming election.

The 50-page platform from the Republican Party of Texas suggests that the party will seek to instill a number of far right policies, including:

Restricting in-person voting to just three days prior to an election day;
Adopting a so-called “parents’ rights” view of schooling, which would forbid any schools from teaching about “sexual choice or identity…in any grade whatsoever” and passing a law “even more comprehensive than the Florida [Don’t Say Gay] law,” effectively stamping out LGBTQ students’ right to feel safe in schools;
Restricting even further the right to obtain an abortion, and banning methods of birth control that the far right considers “abortifacients,” such as Plan B (“the morning after” pill);
And mandating that the state legislature and the state Board of Education “require instruction on the Bible” in all public schools throughout Texas.

The party platform also calls for vast changes to how statewide officials are elected, urging for the creation of a system that would be an extreme version of the federal Electoral College by giving equal voting weight to each county, regardless of population size.

In the proposal, candidates for statewide office would have to win a majority of counties in the state, rather than a direct majority of voters, to win the position they’re seeking. Per the platform:

The State Legislature shall cause to be enacted a State Constitutional Amendment to add the additional criteria for election to a statewide office to include the majority vote of the counties with each individual county being assigned one vote allocated to the popular majority vote winner of each individual county.

Democrats have not won a statewide office position in Texas for decades, but the proposal would almost guarantee that they could never win a position ever again.

The last presidential election provides an example of how extreme this plan would be. Former President Donald Trump won the state against President Joe Biden by a margin of 52 percent to 46 percent, respectively. But under the Texas GOP’s proposed changes, Trump would have won 91 percent of the total counties compared to Biden’s 9 percent.

Even if a Democratic candidate has a majority of voters supporting them — likely through obtaining large margins of victories in highly populated counties — they still wouldn’t win the election. In Dallas County, for example, where Biden won with 598,576 votes compared to Trump’s 307,076, the outcome would be canceled out under the GOP’s proposal by the outcome in Loving County, a sparsely populated jurisdiction where Trump won 60 votes total compared to Biden’s nine votes from people living there.

In short, the Republican Party would likely become the only party in the state under this scheme, although far right third parties could potentially do well under it, too.

On his Substack, historian Kevin Kruse described the proposal as a “throwback to the decidedly undemocratic systems that southern states had before the civil rights era.” Indeed, several states, Kruse noted, had similar voting systems in place that Republicans in Texas are now proposing to bring back; such systems served as a means to prevent Black voters from obtaining any real representation in the state legislature during the Jim Crow era.

Those systems were invalidated by a series of Supreme Court rulings that created the standard of “one person, one vote” in state elections. If Texas tries to reimplement the plan, however, it will likely return to the Court, which has taken a decidedly right-wing turn over the past two decades, and may give reconsideration to those past precedents.

I have said it before but I am blown away by what he has accomplished in one term with such an adversarial setup. I loved obama but he pretty much flushed his first term down the toilet trying to work with the rebulicans. Granted joe had that as a lesson learned by that time. There are to many lessons in recent history to ignore. How much better position would we be environment wise if the president after carter had not symbolically taken down the solar panels and had a deregulation emphasis and then put in gore whose main platform was global warming instead of bush jr. Then we have had 45 years of tax cuts (any time its been raised its by an insignificant amounts next to the cuts) and it has not been a good thing. As a matter of fact from my experience the time following tax increases have tended to be better right up to about when they cut them again.

Its happening now though. Its like being anxious about walking down a dark alley because you might get the shit beat out of you as opposed to being anxious about the medical bills you will have while your getting the shit beat out of you.

Exactly. He should be doing something about student loan debt. Like blanket forgiving it and if they stop him in the courts then he should turn around and use the judgements to identify more narrow actions he should take. He should get rid of the bs of companies calling all their employees exempt and not paying overtime. Or do something about non compete clauses in contracts. Or fight the roe vs wade and get an over the counter birth control pill available. At least get passed a large budget bill that prioritizes encouraging energy efficiency and green energy. Maybe getting our aging infrstructure more healthy while your at it. How about do something about all these bs fees companies charge. Or hey given jan 6th how about revising the law to make it clear the vice president can’t just choose the presidential electors. Maybe incentivize important production capacity for the country like microchips. Cancers been around for awhile. How bout putting more effort toward eliminating that. Or jeesh at least make the airlines not blow you off if they cancel a flight. I mean common. Show us something with the one term youve gotten. Anything at all. Something we can measure against trumps accomplishments in the term he got.

and regulate it. One thing that annoys me of the current state of weed, booze, gambling, strip joints, etc is the advertising. I wish they had restricted advertising for the establishments to the establishments and regulated the words and signs of signage. I don’t want to put people in prison for the stuff but I don’t want my environment to look like vegas. Its like the politicians don’t realize regulation and sensible regulation (not about punishing folks but about reigning in the businesses) are part of legalization.

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yeah I always looked at it as more of an out of the box thing being the idea. I mean really for all distros to some degree. To some degree people, I recognize there are other things but I can feel the heat of the torches from the pitchfork wielders already even before I post this.

I mean if i get to maximum out of pocket its a bit over 7 grand now which tends to be about the same as my monthly cost on the insurance for the year and one kid will raise my monthly cost from spouse only to family (although keep em coming as after that they are all free). One decent surgery can pretty much push to max out of pocket. Of course that is max out of pocket for what is covered. Like this machine that automatically ices and puts pressure on an area and is proven to have better outcomes from surgery is not covered (one of the many health insurance chicken contests. sure we will pay more because you will have more issues if you don’t get it but you will have to live with lower quality of life). Anyway just some perspective on cost because while not 22k it can get up there.

Its just so funny how we literally have the most insider folks that are the most responsible for the state of the country walking around like they are oppressed and need to rebel against the repression. The repression they speak of is of course enforcement of laws around corruption or fighting said corruption.

This is outright wrong. Physical attractiveness is way bigger of a deal in women than men and there is a lot of hypocrisy around it. I had a friend in high school who was, without beating around the bush, fat. He would bemoan how women would not give him a chance because he was fat but then he himself would not go after women of his same build. He preferentially went after thin hot women. Worse he was when he finally was in a realtionship with a woman of equivalent hotness he started one up with her hotter friend. Im way hotter male wise than he was and he could not figure out how my more sincere approach to relationships was likely a bigger factor than my relative looks. Now that is anecdotal but I have a second hand thing to. It was a news piece and I don’t have the reference so take my word or not but it was a study on tips between male and female servers. They both had to be cordial and pleasant and provide good service but controlling for those factors they each had one factor that would increase the tips. For women it was looks. For men it was making their customer laugh.

is this written into the law as covered before deductible and maximum out of pocket?