Michelle Slaughter
Earl Gallows
Trigger Winchester
Otis Hangem
Billy Bob Guilty

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They were going to include one, but they were unable to complete it by the launch date.

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- Has been operating on conventional rail (cost $ vs. $$$ for maglev) since 1981.
- Is holding the world record of 574,8 km/h on conventioanl rail since 2007.
- Is linking all major cities in France and some abroad (Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, UK).
- Has commercial speeds of 280km/h for the oldest ones, to 320km/h for the current generation.
- Costs a fraction of the price of the maglev.

But, YMMV. And by all means go Japan !

This so much!

I am always ranting on the injustices of how we do housing in the world today and so many people reply that poor people should just move somewhere cheaper if they ever want to escape the cycle of working their asses off and not keeping a cent of it because it all goes to paying for rental housing because they can't save to buy because all their money goes to paying for rental housing ad nauseum.

I like to retort that if all the poor people really should move out of nice places, then the rich people living in nice places had better get used to waiting each other's tables and bagging each other's groceries. Of course, if they did have to do that, then they would either not be rich for long, or else those jobs would have to pay enough to afford to live there, in which case the poor people who left could come back to work them and then afford to live there again.

Either wages go up or prices come down, either way, the people working the shit jobs no rich person wants to work have to be able to afford to live where they're needed otherwise those jobs just won't get done.

I'm sure he does, but nevertheless employers withhold taxes from your checks via a formula that assumes you get that kind of check regularly all year long, so if you DON'T, the taxes withheld will be higher than necessary and you get a refund whether you wanted to do it that way or not.

Oh and I guess I forgot to tie it back in to the topic at hand: the average person only needed to work two hours a day to live a comfortable lifestyle, there'd be a lot more need for more people working the rest of the day to keep up productivity, labor would be more in demand, and more people would be employed for the few hours a day they'd need to get by, so there wouldn't really be the need to worry about either a right to employment or a right to welfare because work would be plentiful and easily cover one's own needs.

Or we could stop charging people to live. (read: stop allowing those who hold all the cards to charge others to live, or at least, stop enabling their ability to do so).

I make about the mean US wage and consume very comfortably, and if it weren't for rents I have to pay and money I have to save as quickly as possible if I ever want to stop paying those rents, I could continue consuming at that level for around a full time minimum wage, or working half days at the median wage, or two hours a day at my wage.

An average (mean) American like me has to work about four times as much as I need to just to pay for quite comfortable consumption, just because so few people control all the assets and the rest of us have to spend our income renting those assets and struggling (if we're lucky) to stop renting them.

It's just adding insult to injury that about half of Americans make half or less of that average. (The median is about half the mean).

Fix both of those problems (make mean and median income coincide, and get the assets like housing distributed so that the people who actually use them actually own them and don't have to borrow them from others at a fee) and we could all be living very comfortable lives of luxury very easily.

And the Machete Order of Reformed Jedi-ism watches the same canon as the rest of that denomination, but specifically in the sequence IV, V, II, III, VI.

Oh noes, Apple had to pay almost as high a tax rate as someone making a mean income would, that's soooooo high.

No, that's the older religion, Judi-ism. Full-fledged modern Jedi-ism still holds to the Old Testament of IV-VI, but also has a New Testament of I-III as well.

That's odd, when I went through the screening and they mis-entered me into the scanner as female, it didn't report any anomaly.

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which is what you'd get with absolutely unregulated governance-by-contract set up by those who have the assets that everyone needs to live and won't let them borrow or even buy it from them without agreeing to such dictatorial terms.

It's not so much that the value of their work is being taken by their employers (though it is some of that, but that's a consequence of unequal bargaining power due to what I'm about to say), it's more that so much of what they do make it taken by people who already have enough assets that they can afford to lend them out, as a fee for the poor people to use those rich people's assets. I mean rent, including rent on money, better known as interest.

If such a huge chunk of the income people do make didn't have to go toward servicing the assets they have to borrow from the people who have enough to lend them out, the income issue wouldn't be nearly such a big problem. I make twice the median income and consume quite comfortably, and if it weren't for rent and frantically saving for a big enough down payment so I can eventually stop renting and not pay even more in interest, I could consume at my comfortable level on an income about 2/3 of minimum wage.

As a bonus, if people weren't all one paycheck away from losing everything if they can't make one month's rent on time, they could tell shitty jobs to shove it up their ass, and actually get paid more for their work as well.

All monetary transactions involve one party wanting to charge as much as possible and another wanting to pay as little as possible.

But most of them don't involve negotiation.

Instead the just involve the threat that if the offer/price isn't good enough, the applicant/shopper will go elsewhere.

What's backward in the labor market vs the grocery market (etc) is that in most cases the seller sets the price and the buyer takes it or leaves it, while in this case it's the buyer setting the price and the seller can take it and possibly cut costs or accept losses if they do, or else go out of business.

The labor market right now is like a grocery store where every customer walks in, picks what they want to buy, offers some money for it, and just walks out if the store wants more than that, so the stores for the most part just have to take whatever customers will offer for their goods (and if they can't afford to stay in business like that, tough shit for them eh?)

I've been under the impression that the two groups largely coincided, and conveniently defined their activities as "not bullying" because it's "for a good cause", i.e. the ends justified the means.