The planet is great. It’s the fucking occupants that are a problem.

I make a little more than double the cap. I’m in favor of increasing or eliminating the cap but that would double my check in the future. (Not quite, I haven’t made double the cap my entire working life, but it would increase it a lot.) That would still help a bit because not all of our withholdings go to basic social security. Some goes to disability, spousal benefits, etc. Increasing taxes and benefits proportionally, which is the way benefits are structured now, doesn’t solve anything.

I believe social security has a lot of value so I’m in favor of not just fixing the funding, but expanding it as well. But if you want to make it healthier just with payroll taxes they would have to be progressive, like income tax, without increasing benefits.

I guy I work with owned two condos in a development. The HOA passed a rule banning short term rentals. There were a lot of units being advertised on Airbnb and similar services so he put them on the market when he heard the rule was being proposed to beat the rush.

He managed to sell one at market but the second one didn’t sell before all the other Airbnb landlords listed their places too. He had to take about 10% below market for the second one.

Now those two places are owner occupied, and one of them got a nice deal (I don’t know about the ones sold by other people). And everything that sold in that area probably went for a little less for a while due to the glut on the market.

Making renting less profitable works. People aren’t landlords because it’s fun. They do it for the money. Take away the money and you have less landlords.

That’s better. I guess the Aristotle helped with making coherent arguments.

Yes, I did read it. I’m going to need a source that says that was written by Diogenes Laertius quoting sometime else, not a quote of him, and he was quoting Diogenes of Sinope and not one of the other “pretty much all of the famous Greek philosophers”.

Maybe you should brush up on basic logic with Aristotle.

Wrong Diogenes.

Diogenes of Sinope

Diogenes Laertius

I agree it will take him some time, maybe not quite as much as you think, but my point was I don’t think anyone else could even get there. Even Regan had limits in what the faithful would put up with, he wasn’t teflon. But no matter what Trump does, the MAGAts will support him and the moderate republicans, if there is such a thing anymore, will go along to avoid earning their wrath.

There is only one caveat I can think of. Trump can do anything without losing MAGAt support, but he can’t say anything. There have been scattered instances of Trump saying something that deviated from the MAGA ethos and actually getting booed. He can still do the things that would get him booed but say he’s doing the exact opposite and those morons will never question it. He just has to keep assuring his cult he’s hurting the people they hate.

As long as he keeps tossing red meat to those hateful scumbags by abusing our most vulnerable fellow citizens and increasing oppressive efforts on other groups they hate, they will cheer any and every thing he does even as they’re being herded into forced labor ghettos.

The difference is republican voters gargle his balls to an extent I’ve never seen, not even with Regan. The whole thing about being able to shoot someone on fifth avenue might be the truest thing he’s ever said.

What this means is, with the help of a willing Congress he can do anything. Even things previous republican presidents couldn’t without losing support for themselves and their lackeys in Congress. Republicans in purple districts couldn’t pass just anything and expect to get reelected, but with Trump taking the lead you hardly even hear about individual representatives so they’re willing to vote for some crazy shit.

He can feed them shit and call it caviar all day, every day. Republican voters will eat it up and never question it no matter how much it harms them.

Republicans always do this to some extent, but usually there is a limit.

Trump has no limits.

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Maybe at some point in the future someone will come up with a test that determines if you’re high right now instead of our current test that only determines if you’ve used it in the past couple weeks. But until then prohibition for any safety related job is the only option.

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Not only is decriminalization not legalization, even if something is legal your employer can prohibit it as a condition of employment.

I can guarantee you, even if marijuana is completely legal tomorrow and available in every 7-11 I’ll be fired for testing positive, and for good reason. At least the reasons are good for me, for a lot of other jobs drug testing is bullshit.

Balls

I suppose you could bake a brownie sphere in microgravity. That might be hard to get the center cooked without burning the surface though. Maybe a metal ball as a pan that you could coat with batter.

The genocide in Darfur is ongoing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_civil_war_(2023–present)

It’s a shitty headline made worse by a deleted word in the post title. The firm was found responsible for the death in a separate incident at a different plant from the one where they were found employing minors.

I looked it up the other day. The float that’s currently available to trade is 6.32m shares. The total shares are 138.81m shares. And that’s not even counting all the warrants outstanding (DJTWW). As I understand it, those are like options issued by the company, but when they are exercised they dilute the stock even further instead of entitling you to buy existing shares.

Right now it’s just about 4.6% of the shares being traded by idiots who think Trump will make them rich and people taking advantage of those idiots. As soon as all those restricted shares hit the market, they’ll be worthless. And I’m not just talking about Trump’s shares, there are a lot of other insiders with restricted shares.

It’ll be interesting though. It’s kind of like a prisoners dilemma. If they all just hold and trickle out their shares over a long period of time, they could fleece a shit-ton of money from MAGAts before the bottom drops out, leaving them holding the bag. But they all know if any one of them dumps, the stock will tank and maybe even the idiots that buy trump bucks can’t bring it back up.

What do you think the chances are that they’ll all rush to be the first ones out because they think at least one other person will do the same causing it to go to pennies within days of those shares becoming available to trade?

It’s a lot easier to tolerate the copaganda when they’re almost exclusively going after rapists.

The thing I found funny about SVU is someone obviously said “shit, Olivia has been at this for decades, she should be a captain by now,” so they made her one but she’s still taking calls, the first on the scene, and participating in the investigation.

Season 2 is out and there is a third season on the way. They’re beyond the book, obviously, but Gaiman co-wrote it.