I'm not complaining, I fully understand why those places don't take Amex. It's still great to have for the bigger chains. I was merely questioning the OP's claim that they only encountered a single establishment in 25 years.

Do you only eat at chain restaurants? Because in my 2 years of having an Amex, I have encountered three coffee shops, four restaurants, and a comic book shop that all won't take Amex. All local, independent establishments.

The post-war boom is not why we are forever stuck with this asinine system where employers cover employee health insurance. That is a direct result of wage caps imposed *during* WWII. Because they could not offer higher pay, employees had no way to incentivize top-tier employees to work for them. So they invented "benefits" that could legally be offered on top of wages. Free or low-cost healthcare proved to be the most popular idea, and soon every employer had to offer it if they wanted to be remotely competitive in the hiring market.

That accident of history is the main reason our healthcare system is so broken now. It is completely regressive, because well-paying jobs *also* have better health plans, and you're punished extra for not having a job both logistically and financially by having to find a private plan. This is the main reason for the proliferation of insurance carriers that drive up prices, and hospitals being completely unable to what something actually costs because they negotiate a separate prices with every single carrier. Think about when you go to fill out a medical form online, and the dropdown box for insurance has hundreds of entries even if it's only in your area. Compare that to home and auto insurance where there are only a handful of players, plus the odd mom and pop establishment here and there.

I fully support nationalized healthcare, but it's not necessary to improve the system. Just separate it from employment and let there be an actual market.

It's clearly a Monty Hall problem.

a) None of this is available "publicly" on the internet, at least not intentionally by the copyright holders. Even if it were, that does not remove copyright protections unless the holder does so specifically and separately.
b) You seem to be suggesting that they are actually encouraging indexers to consume their content? I don't really follow what point you're trying to make of that.
c) robots.txt is not security protocol or something, it is just asking nicely. Some crawlers respect it, but AI scrapers completely ignore them.

Always with the "personal responsibility" rhetoric. Were people on average really more personally responsible 20, 50, 100 years ago? Surely it can't have anything to do with the cost of healthy, fresh foods steadily rising compared to processed, sugar-laden crap? Or the spread of food deserts? Or the decline in real wages for the lowest-income earners, and when you work three gig jobs to make ends meet, you don't have time to go to the gym, make regular grocery runs (since non-processed foods go bad faster), or cook?

Let me guess, they should have thought of all of that before they decided to be poor, right?

True, but the $millions of unpaid child support in this country are pretty strong evidence that the ability (or will) to actually enforce these sorts of things in practice is severely lacking.

Family court judges have extremely limited power outside of their own state.

The majority of executive orders (from both sides) are valid until they are challenged in suit and found to be obviously illegal.

Let's say you're in an advanced class with only 10 total students. Let's also assume that, on average, only 1 in ten people truly outperform you in that class. But there's a lot of fluctuations in how many of those people end up taking the class at the same time as you, since you're only going to take it once and therefore your sample size is one. As an exercise for the student, show that there is a 26.4% chance of having 2 or more people that outperform you in any given class size of 10.

So if you take that class in Spring 2026, maybe only one better performer sigs up at the same time, and you walk away with an A. But if you instead take it in Fall 2027, maybe there happen to be two of those outperformers and you end up with a B even though your performance is exactly the same. Why should my grade depend on who else happens to sign up for a class at the same time as me?

Almost completely off-topic, but one of Rupert's most famous contributions is Prince Rupert's drop. Cool molten glass in the act of dripping, and you get a teardrop shape with an elongated tail. All the stresses are aligned in the drop and concentrated at the tail joint. The drop body is damn near indestructible, but the slightest stress on the tail and the whole thing instantly turns to sand. Super-cool and mostly useless bit of fun material science.

Real median household income has risen about 20% since the 80's
Unless you didn't go to college, in which case your income has been stagnant or went down in real dollars.
Meanwhile, the cost to raise a child has increased by over 60% in that time.
In other words, it is 3 times more expensive to raise a child now than it was in the 80's. And that isn't even considering college, which has gone up even more. And a much bigger fraction of those jobs in the 80's came with pensions, which are not counted in those income numbers. Today that "extra" 20% you make goes into your 401k if you want a chance at a decent retirement.
There are definitely changing societal norms that are influencing this trend. But waving away the very real and significant cost increases is omitting a huge piece of the picture.

Great example of how worthless ChatGPT is. How can ANY post in the style of our GREAT Orange Leader miss out on the RANDOMLY capitalized WORDS?

Are you serious? Nazis have been the acceptable go-to bad guy punching bags for as long as they've existed. Roughly half of time machines are invented to go back and kill Hitler.

On the off chance you're not trolling, the major difference is this: modern Germans, except for a very very small minority that is rightly reviled by the rest of them, all denounce what the Nazis did. In the US however, there are still non-negligible fractions of people that still refer to the civil war as "the war of northern aggression". There are still people that legitimately try to argue that slavery wasn't all bad, because most owners took good care of their slaves. There is a huge part of the populace that believes white males are being systematically vilified. If the game's hero is a former slave freeing his fellows from evil white oppressors, that part of the population, which overlaps heavily with the gaming demographic, will boycott. If you play somehow supporting southern white landowners, everyone else will protest.

Everyone agrees the Nazis were evil. Somehow there is not yet universal agreement that slave owners were, too.

Are you a medical professional? Because if not, your *opinion* about anything medical isn't worth dirt.