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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 1st, 2023




  • I pay for MLB TV, because I live in a different media market than my favorite team. So it works perfectly! Unless I’m visiting my parents. Or often when I’m traveling. Or is the game is on cable. Or the weird exclusive games like Apple TV. Or if it’s the playoffs. Or because the chemtrails are too thick that day so the lizard people are out. But works perfectly!

    Seriously, though, MLB does work pretty well and I do like some features (syncing radio broadcast with the TV, condensed games if I missed one). But it’s very weird that most of my family who lives within 20 miles of the stadium can’t watch the team when I live hundreds of miles away and can.



  • Because people are rarely single issue voters. There are a few here and there, but given the dominance of the US’s two-party system, you often have to make a choice. If I imagine 2 candidates: one who is strongly pro-choice but overtly anti-gay, and another who is strongly pro-life but also pro-LGBTQ issues, that would actually be a pretty tough decision for me.

    As much as I want to hate Trump supporters, I can still sympathize with them. A lot are lifelong Republicans who are choosing between someone who will probably try to enact 90% of their personal beliefs but is an authoritarian crazy person, and someone who seems sane but disagrees with them on 90% of issues and will do everything to stymie the things they believe to be right. It’s not a simple choice.

    I’m ignoring third-parties here as a caveat, so apologies if that’s the crux of your question. But my opinion is that you should push for and vote for a new system while accepting that the rules are what they are now, and you have to strategize with the current situation.





  • We could avoid this entirely, but the idiot Congress LIKES it. I don’t think any other country has a debt ceiling like the US. Why? Well, because when another country’s government (legislature, dictator, voodoo shaman) authorizes spending on something, they also authorize paying for it.

    But in the US, Congress says (to the executive branch) you can only collect 50 bajillion in taxes, no more, no less. Also, you have to spend 55 bajillion on these programs, no more, no less. Then the president says, “uh, okay, but I’ll need to borrow 5 bajillion to do that because of math.” In reply, Congress stamps its collective foot like a toddler and says “NO NO NO YOU HAVE TO ASK US FIRST! Why are you drowning this poor country in debt you spendthrift!”








  • I don’t usually wear dress shirts to work except for big presentations, but how on earth does it only take you two minutes? Are you only counting active time ironing? Or ironing 10 shirts in one session and giving the per-shirt average?

    Start to finish, from getting out the iron, plugging in to start up, setting up my ironing board and laying out a shirt, waiting to heat up, ironing the shirt plus flipping it around and ironing again, then putting everything away after the iron cools down, it’s usually like 15-20 minutes for me. Maybe you can do something else when the iron is heating up, but it still seems like at least 10-15 minutes. Still a short enough period to not be a huge hassle once a week, but way too much to do every morning.



  • Federal government workers in the US generally have a “base salary,” which stays the same across all regions, so you can easily compare. And then they get a regional adjustment, based on where they actually live, called “locality pay.” I think this is recalculated annually based on the specific areas. It’s almost certainly more complicated than that, but I think that’s the gist.

    I agree with you, and my point is that the US government already does this! So if it’s fine for government workers, just apply that same algorithm to a federal minimum wage, peg it with some inflation index, and we’ve solved made the minimum wage issue a whole lot better, so we can focus on other issues that don’t have huge supermajorities of support.