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Comment Re:barely budged??? (Score 1) 142

Let's see here... In the 40 years you cited, the minimum wage went from $3.25 to $20 and you dismiss that?

Taking credit for the wealth building power of inflation? Also what brand of crack are you smoking to get a minimum wage of $20/hr anywhere? The Federal minimum wage is just $7.25 and the highest of any state is $16.25.

Lets see here - it is better to use a longer time scale as 1985 was after high inflation in the late 1970s and a restriction on minimum wage increases (to fight inflation, you see) led to a serious erosion of minimum wage salaries.

A better comparison is to use a 50 year time line. In 1975 the minimum wage was $2.10/hr which adjusted to inflation is equivalent to $13/hr today. The current Federal minimum wage of $7.25 is so manifestly inadequate that few employers reference that anymore for setting salaries as it is impossible to staff any sort of position offering below poverty level (for a single individual) income. So states have been raising minimum wages to higher levels that have some correspondence with economic reality. But what the sycophants of plutocracy really do not want anyone to think about is that over this same period of time the real per capita income in the U.S. nearly doubled, so that even restoring minimum wage to $13 an hour to eliminate the inflation erosion of the last 50 years, it still avoids passing on any of the doubling in national wealth that occurred during that time.

Comment Re: I want free shit too (Score 1) 142

My understanding is that farmers went down big in the last Trump administration

The first Trump Administration created a trade war that crushed the business of many farmers who depended on exports. So Trump handed out tens of billions of dollars to make them whole again so naturally they farmers remained hard core Trumpists, since they knew that no matter how badly he hurt their business he would give them other people's money so that they felt no pain.

The fact that you did not know this, and the in fact this is not widely appreciated in the U.S., is due to the corporate owned MSM's preference for burying the dirt on Republicans.

Comment Re:Russia Russia Russia (Score 4, Interesting) 145

I would have thought that too but that this study shows that conspiracy theorists think everyone agrees with them, suggests that it isn't as much about being the special, unique person.

Cognitive dissonance. They believe both things at the same time. You don't look for intellectual consistency in hoax believers.

Comment Re:What's old is new again [as a clone!] (Score 2) 72

Not sure about humans, but surely someone has cloned John Henry the horse. Think of the stud fees!

Nope. The clones and their offspring would be worth as much as a regular horse. The Jockey Club that controls American horse racing bans everything but natural breeding done the old fashioned way. Furthermore the U.S. stud book, like the British stud book, is closed -- only horses already registered can be parents of future thoroughbreds. No new genetic material can be introduced.

Comment Like Real Estate Bankruptcies (Score 1) 24

A common pattern in expensive real estate developments (say, hotels) that get built then go bankrupt, unable to pay off their construction loans. The development gets sold at auction, for deep discounts on the dollar, to another entity that takes over with much less debt and can then operate the facility profitably. This "other entity" taking ownership may in fact be controlled by the original owner but is separate by legal incorporation fiction.

Seems to be the case here. Same owner, same company, still operating with same assets, but all the creditors have been stiffed now.

Comment Re:Should have just waved at the camera (Score 2) 81

Let that be a lesson to all exec suite cheaters. If you take your cheating to a public arena and stand-up to be seen, then you should first game-plan it out. If showcased on the kiss-cam act completely normal and casual -- but don't actually kiss on cam because that might go viral too.

There are probably consultants that can give good advice on avoiding detection to rich adulterers. Also there are consultants (usually called P.I.s) that are expert on detecting rich adulterers. Lifestyles of the rich and powerful.

Comment Re:The disadvantage of a bigger laptop (Score 1) 40

That's part of why I was so disappointed that manufacturers suddenly discontinued 10.1" laptops at the end of 2012.

I also was stunned by the sudden, complete disappearance of the netbook, which I thought was an ideal combination of form, capability and price (they were cheap). I had kept on running on Linux for years.

Comment Re:Is this a place where a SuperNova once happened (Score 2) 33

As for individual solar systems, according to what I just looked up, stars fizzle out and become either a white dwarf, or (for massive stars) a neutron star or black hole - but not again a star in any case.

Well, that's not quite the case. As stars age, a portion of their stellar material gets dispersed in planetary nebulae. If a star becomes a supernova, he huge explosion also disperses a lot of stellar material. Even if a star collapses to a black hole, some stellar material still gets ejected via relativistic jets.

Additionally some white dwarfs collect enough matter to become unstable and explode throwing their entire mass back out as a mass of new elements, and some neutron star pairs merge and generate kilonovae that pump out the very heaviest elements formed in the universe due the intensely concentrated neutron fluxes produced (the r-process of element formation).

Comment Re:Is this a place where a SuperNova once happened (Score 2) 33

"As for individual solar systems, according to what I just looked up, stars fizzle out and become either a white dwarf, or (for massive stars) a neutron star or black hole - but not again a star in any case."... I think that is interesting but is not intuitive to me. It is like a bunch of dust floating around, mostly hydrogen, just collapses in on itself and becomes a solar system. It seems strange.

What really happens is that there are huge clouds of gas and dust that become stellar nurseries (we see one about 800 light years away in the constellation Orion). These huge clouds collapse and start producing density centers that collapse into stars, some of these a very massive, live for a short time, explode with core collapse supernovas and send shock waves and newly formed elements into the huge cloud forcing more collapses into star to form. This process continues for hundreds of millions of years until all the gas and dust is used up or blown away by the stellar winds and results in a large open cluster of thousands of stars. In addition to core collapse supernovas other types of stellar events like exploding white dwarfs and merging neutron stars create more shock waves and bursts of new elements of different masses.

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