The people who will be hurt by the release of the Epstein files are people we need to hurt.

You mean like the Democratic former servicemembers who made a video telling members of the military not to follow illegal orders before the President said they should be killed?

Redistricting unrelated to a change in the number of seats should be banned.

But if we are going to allow them, they should not be allowed to take effect until the following election cycle. This would give the court time to review the maps as well as allow the voters to have input prior to the change.

Now we just make an overnight hospital visit cost $38,000 so so that people without workplace-provided healthcare die instead.

As a bonus - people who get too sick to work have their Healthcare canceled so they’ll die too.

Small rant, but people saying they believe in science is a pet peeve of mine. Belief has no place olin science.

You can’t “believe” in science any more than you can “know” in your religion.

Belief and faith are the realm of the unknowable. Knowledge and fact are the realm of science.

Yeah. They solved protien folding with ML a few years back. And I like using it for things like noise removal in Lightroom.

But so much of it has been focused on useless (at best) bullshit that I just want the bubble to burst already.

It is important because of the reason they cite.

By going after this woman, they’re making it clear to MAGA folk that allowing the rights of minorities to be eroded also removes their own protection. Even racist assholes should be appalled at the civil rights violations being committed.

The city I work for put up Flock cameras with specific instructions from Council that they were only to be used for identification of cars flagged in active warrants.

Within a week of their installation, police used the cameras to track the movements of someone who filed a complaint.

This demonstrates another reason why you shouldn’t obey clearly illegal orders. If you kill someone on the illegal order of a superior and then they deny having given the order, guess who’s gonna hang for it?

This is a great observation, because it works in a lot of situations, and is a useful tool for empathy.

Someone’s level of stress/despair can be very relative. What’s normal life to one person can seem earth-shattering to someone else. And it also explains some of the most ridiculous stuff we see in society.

I’m thinking specifically about privileged people. Much of the MAGA movement, for instance, is fueled by straight, white, Christian men feeling threatened by “wokeness”. All they’ve ever known is privilege, and when people try and balance society to give a greater voice to women, POC, religous, sexual, and gender minorities, etc they start to lose privileges they’ve always known. To them, it doesn’t feel like equity. It feels like things are being taken from them.

They grew up in a world where it wasn’t as hard to find a good-paying job for them. They really could often get by on hard work and dedication, and assumed that was the case for everyone. When they lose the advantage and see women and minorities getting more jobs, they assume that it represents society valuing “wokeness” over qualifications. Pain is relative to each person, and when your life is privileged the loss of that privilege can have the same subjective emotional sting as discrimination.

It reminds me of a small child crying over dropping their ice cream. It’s objectively not a big deal, but to that child it’s absolutely devastating, because that’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to them. As they grow, life will temper them and they’ll get over it eventually. We just have to show a little empathy as we help them move forward.

I tried correcting you by spelling it correctly, but working out the syntax with the asterisks and slashes was huring my brain.

But yes - great show.

Also the only one where I think every cast change was an improvement.

Trapper was just a clone of Hawk, whereas Honeycut was his own character. Henry was fun, but Potter brought real gravitas and represented a good man who was career Army - which was necessary. Burns had no redeeming characteristics at all, whereas Charles served as an antagonist while still hating the war and being a strong character and excellent surgeon.

And the way they transformed Kilnger from a cheap side gag into a fully-fleshed out character was remarkable.

And the decision not to cast a new regular when Radar left was inspired. We felt that hole the remainder of the series.

It’s the most-commonly rejected card. It has high fees without the clout of Amex. Amex customers are typically pretty wealthy and places will accept them because of their high-roller status. But Discover doesn’t have that going for them, so there’s less reason to accept the card.

Where you’ll find it rejected most often is small shops and government agencies.

For instance, my career has been in government, and no organization I’ve worked for has ever accepted Discover. We aren’t allowed to “profit” from our fees, so we have to include credit card processing in the adopted fee schedule. But since we can’t profit, we have to set the fee at whatever Visa and Mastercard charge. That extra 1 or 2 percent Discover charges can be millions for a large government (large city, statewide agency, etc). So, agencies simply don’t take Discover (and frequently AmEx, though they’ll sometimes negotiate).

Large retailers are able to negotiate better deals with Amex and Discover, but for smaller shops it just isn’t gonna happen. And that 1-2% (of the total charge) extra taken by the card processor is huge when your margins are small.

Heck - even the Visa and Mastercard fees are a huge deal. When I worked in retail management, those fees were secretly the big reason we pushed our store-brand credit cards. It wasn’t the 80 dollar commission for the account the store got - it was that if someone used our card in our store, we didn’t pay the processing fee.

We’d give 2% in points back for using the card in the store, which was a great deal for us since we didn’t have to pay the 3-4% fee to the processor.

That’s why nobody takes Discover or Amex. Their fees are higher than Visa and Mastercard.

But the prices won’t go down. Reductions in production costs are only reflected in sale prices when there’s a market force driving the costs down. Right now, people have to own cars, and the barriers to entry into the matlrket are too high for new competitors. There’s no reason for the auto manufacturers to lower prices if their costs go down. They can just pocket the difference.

I legitimately think that’s a relative of mine.

I need to send this to him.

Also, despite being surly in general, he used to carry square-rimmed spectacles he’d put on when children “recognized” him.

The earth is also rotating and orbiting the sun, which is rotating around the galaxy, which is itself moving.

Top of that lorry is gonna be whipping around at relativistic speeds.

Heck, just hitting a potholes will make it move millions of lightyears.

When I was a mid-level retail manager, my philosophy was that my floor worker’s job was to take care of the customers, my store manager’s job was to take care of corporate, and my job was to facilitate both. The best way to do that most of the time was to take care of and protect my floor workers.

Most of the time the customer complaints were baseless. Sometimes they were legitimate. But in all cases my priority was taking care of my workers. I may have had to coach them on something after the complaint (usually on how to better handle asshole customers), but ALWAYS in private, and always calmly.

Sometimes I had to do something for the customer if there was a legitimate issue, like give them a $20 gift card or something.

But no matter what the situation was, if a customer was abusive to my staff they were banned from the store on the spot. I’d trespass them, put their picture on a board for our greeters, and if they attempted to return we’d have polkce escort them away.

If they had been trying to buy a firearm (we were a massive destination outdoors store), we’d blacklist them in the corporate system and I had a text message group with all the nearby firearm dealers where we’d share the names of customers we’d blacklisted.

Nobody’s business was worth allowing my people to be abused. I didn’t care that we were losing a $20,000 sale - my staff was worth more than that, both from a basic humanity standpoint, and also because having a good, experienced, loyal employee is more important than having an unreliable asshole customer. And you don’t retain good employees if you don’t protect them.

Scaling goes in both directions.

My old 1985 LTD had to have its idle set at 25mph to keep from dying.

When going through a school zone I had to ride the brake.

Getting 20 interviews is an accomplishment.

I have a 100% sucess record on getting the job offer once I get an interview l, but getting the interview is the hard part for me.

The thing is, I’m also terrible at coaching others for interviews because I don’t know exactly what I’m doing right or wrong since I effectively have no negative feedback.

At this point I think it’s mostly my confidence that carries me because I basically assume I’m getting the offer. I ask a bunch of questions about the company, working environment, etc and essentially make them pitch the job to me instead of me pitching myself as an employee. I’m also generally comfortable enough due to my past success to mostly be myself, and I think any time you can make the interviewer laugh it’s a good sign.