Is where theocratic dictatorships get their start. They don't stop at banning stupid pornos. They're openly out there telling you that they're not going to stop until you're either all on board with their brand of extremist Evangelical Christianity or six feet under.

That's not an exaggeration. We've all seen them going on and on about how gay people cause hurricanes and earthquakes and we laughed it off. They're not joking they genuinely believe that.

Christian nationalists believe in what I can only describe as a sin thermometer. They believe in a level of ambient sin that if it gets too high God smites everyone and everything in the vicinity.

They know damn well they sin all the time and their attitude is they're doing everything they can to reduce the amount of sin they commit so they have to get out there and force you to stop sinning so the temperature of sin goes down enough that we don't all get smited. So they're going to make you obey and they're going to make you act the way they want you to act because in their crazy ass minds that's the only way to protect themselves.

In other words you are a threat to them. At least inside their minds. And so they are not going to stop at dumb bullshit you can easily get around with your VPN if you are so inclined. They're going to go after those vpns and they're going to go after you. Because like I said in their minds you are an active threat

Wrong question. The question is who pays that cost. It's one of those things where it's easy to externalize those costs onto somebody else. Especially early on

I don't have figures but from what I understand this is just getting the grade to the point where I can handle the number of electric cars they want to put on the road by 2030. It doesn't solve any of the security or reliability or maintenance issues. It just builds out enough capacity that the whole grid doesn't collapse under the weight of all those of EVs.

That said 20 billion dollars is peanuts. To put things into perspective California's annual GDP is well over $3 trillion. I'm no longer a fan of electric cars after I learned that they don't really solve the smog problem and after I was introduced to the concept of High-Speed rail and walkable cities, but if I can't have those things I guess I will take the facts that they at least reduce our dependency on foreign oil. We're making motions to back out of the Middle East and electric cars are a big part of why.

it happens with cops and "school resource officers" (read: cops in school) all the time. And they have way more time and training.

was when a shitty call center I worked for illegally fired a guy. As he was cleaning out his desk He was grinnin' ear to ear over the lawsuit he was gonna file.

The HR rep (an absolutely enormous woman) came darting out to catch him in the parking lot. Never knew someone that heavy could move that fast. He had his job back that moment and the firing manager was reprimanded.

which is that this doesn't solve anything. If China wants to manipulate us they can do it like Russia does with troll & bot farms. And it's probably not a good precedence to set that our government can block off an app from a nation that isn't formally sanctioned.

True but the more popular rules and legislation that the Supreme Court strikes down the sooner the Democrats are in a position to balance the courts. Thomas and Alito are both at retirement age and both very likely going to face criminal investigations for their obvious bribery scandals as soon as the election is over. If the Democrats are still in charge of the Senate and the White House then those two are likely to retire so that they can cash out and the Democrats will have a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court again with Roberts deciding. He's not exactly the most liberal judge but he tends to side with the liberals if they are the majority

Seriously fast food workers have non-compete clauses now and they have been used to bully workers into not changing jobs.

It doesn't have to be legally enforceable it just has to be a threat to someone who's in a weak position.

Tennessee is just as terrible about women's reproductive health as anything else. It's a problem for trans kids too and sure they only make up 1% of the population but when you've got several thousand employees you're going to have a few in there. That's just how math works.

I'm not exactly prime breeding age here but I wouldn't want my kid trying to set up a family in a red state with the way things are right now. Too much risk of criminal prosecution even for a miscarriage

It's the kind of thing Karl Marx predicted would happen but all anyone can remember about him is that a couple of tin pot dictators borrowed his books for rhetoric.

Private health insurance just spends half a trillion dollars scaring our old people with death panel talk, even as they're running active death panels deciding who lives and who dies. They do keep pushing the retirement age up and they've pushed it above and beyond what it can reasonably be so it's possible that will eventually bite them in the ass because old people won't be able to kid themselves if they'll make it into Medicaid. But the real problem is you have to convince people over 55 that healthcare isn't a limited resource. We can just make more of it in the form of cheaper medication and training more doctors and nurses.

But I mean damn when somebody is literally going to spend half a trillion dollars lobbying against something that's hard to beat. And fun fact if you're an American and you're reading this now you paid for that half trillion dollars with your health insurance premiums.

It's texas. They moved from California to Texas so that they could get away from the regulations that required them to treat employees well when they fired them in Mass.

If they're moving to Tennessee it's probably just a tax Dodge. Texas has notoriously high taxes and they've probably started to shake down Oracle. The governor is spending literally billions of dollars showboating on the southern border and that money has to come from somewhere since it's not coming from the federal government... Seriously look it up they've spent something like 6 billion dollars mobilizing the national guard. You could take every single migrant for the next 20 years and pay him $50,000 a year to sit on their thumbs and you'd come out ahead

both sides want to use military spending to keep their flagging economies going. Eisenhower warned us about it, but if it's one thing we never do it's listen.

that writes stuff like "sharply beyond expectations" about low sales. That's the kind of chutzpah one could only dream of.

You work a *lot* more hours. And you do work. Back in the day you'd have time to do research projects to keep my skills up no problem, it was encouraged. These days you're on 24/7 and doing one very tightly defined task because your CEO doesn't want you to be too critical to the company, they want a cog in the machine they can replace as needed, even if that means paying a little more. The predictability is worth it.

I mean, I guess if you're one of those freaks that doesn't need sleep. I've known a few. Get by on 4 hours a night and they're fine. It's like having an extra 28 hours a week in your life. But for us mere mortals we're kinda stuck. We make due with what we've got.