Still side-stepping the question. I couldn't possibly care less about what you think is or isn't fair. Why is it so important to you that the Democrats adopt this position? Why should the federal government be regulating this at all? Why not trust athletic associations, who's entire purpose is to facilitate fair competitions for their teams and players, to make this determination on their own?

Oh, so now it's a safety issue? Alright, well then how far do we take this? Should children be segregated by gender in case the boys accidentally hurt the girls during recess? Should including girls in a pickup game of basketball be considered reckless endangerment? I mean, if professional and academic sports organizations can't be trusted to make these decisions,.why should we trust educators or parents?

As for breaking records, well, if trans girls/women have such a huge advantage (and what little evidence we do have on the subject indicates they don't), again, why is that the government's job to regulate that instead of the athletic institutions? Why do you want the government dictating the rules surrounding this? You know, some schools let upperclassmen playi on the junior varsity team. Should the government be regulating that as well?

It comes down to this; if you trust these athletic institutions to make all of these other determinations about fairness and safety, but feel the government needs to mandate their decisions on trans athletes, it doesn't seem like your issue is fairness and safety. It seems like it's trans people.

Even if trans athletes do have an advantage over cis athletes, why is it the job of politicians to regulate that? There are athletic leagues at every academic level who are supposed to determine what constitutes fair competition and regulate their programs accordingly. Why should federal legislators, who have less expertise than these organizations, be writing their rules for them?

What Snowden did was objectively good, and he did so at great personal cost, but you should be cautious about making any living person your hero. His politics seem to lean closer to libertarian nut-job than anything else, and it's very possible he will disappoint you in the future. Case in point, Glen Greenwald broke the Snowden leaks, and I considered him one of my heros for a time,.but these days he sounds more like Tucker Carlson than anyone else. The point is, admire heroic actions, but don't make people your heroes.

Just gonna add a source to back this up:

The no-tipping policy lasted just six months at Chang’s Momofuku Nishi. Claus Meyer, a Noma co-founder, announced in February that he was ending the no-tipping policy at his own New York restaurant, Agern, after two years, citing slow business as a result of the higher menu prices. Gabe Stulman reversed course at his restaurant, Fedora, after four months without tips, telling Eater that guests were ordering less food than they had before.

People are dumb. Even if they should know they're saving money overall by not tipping, they see a higher number and think it's bad.

Ok, well, most restaurants have notoriously small margins (3-5%) with tipping. So, setting aside what you think should and shouldn't be, what is an actual solution? Eliminate tipping and raise prices? Restructure the agricultural pipeline to lower costs? Cap commercial real estate prices to reduce rental overhead? Because as it stands now, you can't eliminate tipping without getting the money somewhere, and it's not in the restaurants profits.

It would be better to just eliminate the tipped minimum wage and have everyone earn the same minimum wage (and raise that wage to at least $20 an hour). Banning tipping would be hard to enforce, and some people like throwing some extra change in their favorite barista's jar every morning. But if everyone knows that they're all getting a living wage, and your tip isn't a lifeline to servers, it will actually feel optional.

Yeah, I haven't seen any recent data on this, but I suspect that $20 an hour still isn't a living wage. I remember hearing before the pandemic that the, "Fight for Fifteen," was outdated and needed to be the, "Fight for Twenty," and we've had two rounds of astronomical inflation since then.

If the minimum wage was appropriately adjusted, most people in the service industry should be able to make a decent living. The only group that will be difficult will be people who work in vacation towns in remote areas. Some of those people earn their annual income during the tourist season, and even if they wanted to work in the off-season, there just aren't enough jobs. Restaurants can feasible raise prices high enough to subsidize there employees during that time either, so the only real solution is a UBI system.

If someone is being paid a real wage, you are not obligated to tip them. I don't really see the need to legislate away your feelings of social pressure. That being said, you're right that payment processors have gotten out of control with their tipping demands. There is no reason that a simple retail transaction should be presenting you with a tipping option. However, it's important to understand that this pressure is part of an exploitation scheme.

All an employee just needs to qualify for the tipped minimum wage is to regularly make $30 a month in tips, at which point their employer can start using those tips to subsidize their wages. So, let's say you go to your local bakery; you've never tipped their before, but now they have a POS system that prompts you to tip, so you do. Once each employee makes $30 per month in tips, the owner switches to a tipped minimum wage. He tells his employees he thinks they'll make more money overall, and if they make less than minimum wage in tips, he's required to make up the difference anyway. At first it's great for employees; their paycheck is much smaller but the tips more than make up for it. But soon, the owner notices that, on certain days, the employees aren't earning enough tips, ane he's making up the differences. That's when he decides to cut hour to maximize his newfound savings on staffing. Now employees are losing hours, they're overworked and understaffed when they do work, and rhe customer is paying more. Everyone loses except the owner.

Eliminating tipping will fix this, but it will also hurt the industries that traditionally have tipped employees. I did a lot of service work and a lot of retail work when I was younger, and I can tell you, restaurant work is easily harder. If I had been offered the same wage for retail or service work, with no tips, I'd have gone with retail every time. Now, you might think that the solution would be for restaurants to just pay servers more, but restaurants already have small margins (3-5%), and there would be a price increase just to make minimum wage viable. Without other massive reductions in cost (which would require changes to both the agricultural and real estate industries), there are basically two options; eliminate the tipped minimum wage, which would eliminate employers incentives to exploit the staffing subsidies it creates, and have tipping be a nice perk, or eliminate tipping altogether, which would either lead to massive increases in restaurant prices or staffing shortages in the service industry.

Honestly, Vader's probably the best one up there, even before his face turn at the end of Jedi. When he finds out his son is alive, the first thing he does is seek him out and try to get him to join the family business. Sure, they have a tense conversation which doesn't end...great, but at least he's trying to reach out. Compare that to Worf, who seems to genuinely hate his kid and spends the better part of two shows pawning him off on other people, and it's not even close.

Sure, but you could say the same of Luigi Mangione and that isn't slowing anyone down.

I mean, I would say you shouldn't make him your hero either. Even if you think what he did was heroic, lone gunman assassins usually don't turn out to be very stable, well adjusted people. Hell, Ted Kacynski has some good points about post-Industrial life, but that doesn't mean he should be your hero.

I might suggest that if Glenn had ended up on MSNBC rather than the gutter for FOX News washouts, he'd be denouncing Snowden today rather than praising him.

Very possible, and nearly as disappointing. My point isn't that he changed or became worse, just that I projected more of my ideals onto him than he actually shared.

I don't think you can criticize Snowden because the guy who interviewed him ended up becoming a crank.

To be clear, I'm not. I'm saying that he has some views and beliefs that may lead him to disappoint you in the future. He mostly doesn't comment much on politics outside of the surveillance state, but he has described himself as a libertarian, and said that he believes social security is a scam that needs to die. It seems clear that he is anti-authoritarian, but it's very possible that, if he ever became more vocal about American politics, you'd learn a lot about him that would disappoint you.

Just like we were worse off after the Iraq War. And the Afghanistan War. And the Vietnam War. And the Korean War. Starting to wonder who these are for.

It is very much not brain rot. It is genuinely funny and heartfelt, with very clever writing. It sorta reminds me of an all-ages Simpsons. I would never have seen it if I didn't have a kid, but now that have, I would watch it even if I didn't have a kid.

Oh right. How could I forget.

OK, so, what you're doing here is parroting a study that showed that fast-paced slop content like Cocomelon was bad for developing brains, but you're missing some key points. The takeaway from that study was that fast scene changes, constant music, and bright colors/motion were harmful to kids. These factors prevent kids from processing what they're seeing and condition them to seek constant stimulation.

That is very different than something like Paw Patrol, which (even though I think it's boring drivel), tells a coherent story over a 12 minute period. Whereas Cocomelon is basically just visual noise played over constant children's music, the Paw Patrol characters have to stop, give exposition, and talk to each other. There are breaks where the characters (and viewers) slow down to process information in order to form a coherent narrative. It's not a very good or educational narrative, but it's not actively harmful like Cocomelon.

Also, funnily enough, I just came across an article that happens to have statistics on Bluey's scene changes, and they average 4-6 seconds (compared to Cocomelon's 1-2 seconds) and ranked nearly as high as Daniel Tiger in terms of, "Calm Engagement."

You ever feel like you live in some sort of Murphy's Law parallel universe, where the worst possible outcome of every major event happens?

Reminder that Bannon is an ethno-fascist who's just pissy that he's been sidelined for techno-fascists. If his goals align with anti-fascists for the moment, great, but don't for a second think that he is any less vile or dangerous than Trump, Musk, or any of the other chittering goobers that are gnawing away at our democracy right now.

During the Great Depression, people were so angry at banks that they rooted for bank robbers. Things are so bad now that we're just straight up rooting for cold-blooded executions. Censoring people's online activities won't make this anger go away. The genies out of the bottle now, and if billionaires don't want any more dead CEOs, there will need to be fundamental, radical changes to our society.

Ah yes, you know what's better than a taxi driver? A taxi driver who relies on a camera with a limited field of vision, experiences input and video lag, and receives none of the tactile sensations that allow drivers to gauge road conditions.

The Pelosi interview is honestly batshit insane. She doesn't see the election as a rejection of the party, thinks the Democrats are doing well, Kamala Harris did everything right, Sanders is wrong, and then she made some backhanded comments about how Biden should have dropped out earlier. I know some of that is spin she that she has to say, but it's still deeply out of touch.