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Thoroughlygruntled
1d ago
Honestly, I think most of them are probably sitting in desk drawers and piggy banks because people think they're uncommon enough to be cool and not worth spending over two $1 bills. I remember my parents often using $2 bills for fun little things like the tooth fairy or hiding them in easter eggs.
Thoroughlygruntled
1d ago
I would like to selfishly use your post to get on my own personal numismatic hobby horse: we should stop putting real people on our money (I might be willing to make a singular exception with George Washington). It's monarchical and anti-American. The only people on our money should be idealized personifications of American values like Lady Liberty, Columbia, and Blind Justice, joined by other American symbols like the Bald Eagle, Buffalo, and Liberty Bell.
The quarter should be replaced with Benjamin Franklin's original "Mind Your Business" cent design, the first and best designed coin in American history.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
He means six figures, because once you make 100+ it's "triple digit" because the trailing 000 is assumed
Making 75,000 would be "double digit" I guess because it's "75"
I've never seen that before, but if a friend asked my salary I would respond with "I make 95" not "I make 95,000" so it makes sense
Thoroughlygruntled
1d ago
Ancient Indians seem to have had an uncanny ability to locate their sacred spaces directly on top of valuable mineral resources. Perhaps we should be hiring native shamans to do our mineral surveying for us.
phailyoor
1d ago
You posted a picture of an industrial park, which is full of factories and warehouses. Italy has those too but you didn't post a picture of that. Italy also has highways but you didn't post a picture of those either.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Great question!
This is a tic that makes me think LLM these days. Not necessarily accusing you of using one here, more commenting on the sad closing of the linguistic frontier as various phrasings become associated with "artificial" text.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Yeah, but why is it subconsciously affecting him? What's the peril the sister might be in? You haven't established that sufficiently, the set-up sounds like he would have reacted the same way even if there was no ferry with a sister on it tomorrow. "Whoops, oh crap, what do I do? Manual says get in touch with other person to do the dual key turn", not "I better sort this out now or else my sister's ferry will blow up in the middle of World War Three". I might be thinking "Huh, my sister is going to go down the town to do grocery shopping tomorrow" but that's not making me rush to do something in my job that isn't standard procedure. If there's no danger, there's no reason to be het-up and reacting irrationally.
The tiny scale manipulation seems to be "put pressure on by popping up message never encountered before", not "heh heh dumb fleshbag and his emotional attachments".
I'm asking "so why is it important the sister was going to be on a ferry?" and you're answering "it's not important, she was perfectly safe, that's why he reacted irrationally" and I'm going "whut?"
HereAndGone
1d ago
Apparently that's the Big Mac; it has two 1/10th of a pound patties to the Quarter-Pounder's one 1/4 of a pound patty. 2/10ths = 1/5th, so that's the 1/5 burger right there!
People pick either Quarter Pounders or Big Mac for reasons other than amount of meat; the Big Mac has more options while the Quarter Pounder is plain meat-and-bun (and cheese and condiments). Depends if you want the flavour of the pickles and sauce versus just 'gimme the meat' (and give it to me raw?)
Maybe they failed because they were trying to copy McDonalds too closely? Skip the "we give you a third of a pound for the same price as a quarter of a pound" and instead emphasise "fresh beef, better taste, superior value".
The Third Pound just sounds like really bad marketing, because they were chasing the established hold McDonalds had with their quarter-pounders. I could easily see someone going "but I don't want more meat in my burger; a quarter-pounder is big enough for me!" or if they did want more meat, then they'd go for two burgers.
It's like someone trying to compete against Coke by going "we're just like Coke only we have bigger bottles" - that's not different enough to make me switch from Coke. What's unique about your product?
That anecdote does sound too much like "it can't be our fault the product failed, it was the dumb consumers!" Tell that to New Coke 😁 Even if your customers are dumb, they are still your (potential) customers so if this approach isn't working, scrap it and go for one that does: "bigger and better for the same price!" Don't call it a third pounder, compare "we have over 5 ounces of prime fresh beef in every burger versus 4 ounces of processed meat in our rivals" to sell it, not mess around with trying to copy the brand name of a McDonalds product that is already well-established. Call it the Big Beautiful Burger! 🤣
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1d ago
California's constitution, Article IV, Section 9:
A statute shall embrace but one subject, which shall be expressed in its title. If a statute embraces a subject not expressed in its title, only the part not expressed is void.
(More details here.) And even still, this is, unfortunately, the way the sausage is made, because bagel toppings are baked into the progressive mindset, it seems. But ADU laws, for example, have been successful precisely because they were straightforward simplifications or liberalizations of the law, with few or no compensating tradeoffs. Chris Elmendorf has a good law review article about this.
I think to the extent that something is a big change or faces stiff opposition, this kind of nonsense will creep in. Here, it's not because apartments near transit are anathema per se, but because "local governments know best" is an article of faith here, despite where it's led us, and more importantly for progressives, a lot of new construction means a lot of business for builders, and it's very important ideologically that the benefit the legislature produces be appropriately socialized rather than captured by developers. The mistake being made here is that the benefit is homes for people to live in, and the benefits are already going to incumbent homeowners.
On the gripping hand, much as with ADU law, there will be simplifications and cleanups in future sessions.
Onystri
1d ago
6 years ago Riot Games released KDA kpop song. I liked it way more than Golden.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Maybe X produces more social and community value by providing cookies to family and neighbours than Y does by profiteering off potheads?
Throwaway05
1d ago
Uhhhhhh let's see. Lose weight, stay hydrated, have muscles. I believe staying warm and avoiding activity before hand also help.
Ultimately some people just be like that though.
If that's you I'd avoid blood donations - you know it's going to present a challenge and you know you'll have an increased risk of complications.
Unless you have a rare blood type I'd try and do some good by nagging someone else to go in your stead b/c it isn't super viable for you.
HereAndGone
1d ago
But in a modern economy, it is perfectly possible for an exceptional man to produce 1000x the value of a regular man.
But is the CEO of Starbucks that man?
The perceived injustice is "He and the other execs get to vote themselves a 10% pay increase Because They're Worth It, at the same time they are slashing headcount because 'labour costs too high'. Belt-tightening somehow always means the guys on the shop floor, not the managers. And yet the managers get way more perks just for sitting at a desk".
yestrusocialist
1d ago
Maybe the CEO is a specialist in managing decline.
A regular CEO might be able to extract $10B profit from a declining company, but he can extract $15B before it dies. If I were on the board of a declining company, I would surely want to hire this guy.
roystgnr
1d ago
$/hour, I'd guess.
(But yeah, normally when someone says "N-figure salary" they're talking about $/year)
Thoroughlygruntled
1d ago
This has always struck me as a self-flattering urban legend people trot out to mock the burger-eating proles. Turns out the only evidence we have of this anecdote is a quote from the memoirs of A&W's former CEO, years after the fact, attempting to deflect blame for running his company into the ground. "I didn't fuck up; the customers were just too stupid to understand how superior our product was!"
So it might be true, but I'd take that story with a grain of salt.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/07/great-third-pound-burger-ripoff/
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1d ago
To be clear, the construction union situation in California is not what you might expect; about an eighth of workers are unionized (the builder organization refers to "merit shops" rather than "non-union shops"), and are concentrated in cities. Requirements for union labor can sometimes make it simply impossible to get workers to build the project if it's not in a central location.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1d ago
Great question! There's still uncertainty here, and it varies by city. Despite all the state laws, there's a lot of local control, and cities will, to various degrees, fight the state. Consider the history of ADUs; despite being essentially legalized in 2017, the legislature continues to adjust rules and close loopholes. (This year: SB 9 (different from the other SB 9; authorizes the state housing department to void bad ADU ordinances) and AB 1154 (clarify rules around Junior ADUs).)
Tariffs and the resultant high commodity prices are a problem, as is a tight labor market. Local governments still absolutely love inclusionary zoning, which is essentially taxing new housing to provide subsidized housing to poor people; see the graph on page 9 here. And the construction industry is remarkably cyclical, so real chances won't happen until the next boom cycle.
A lot of things have to go right for a project to happen, and only a few need to go wrong. It took us decades to get into this mess, and there's still reluctance to let go of all of the bagel toppings (union set-asides, inclusionary zoning, various extra review nonsense) that have accumulated over the years. And yet the two biggest impediments, CEQA and base zoning, have been swept away. Note also that these reforms are cumulative; density bonus law means that cities have lost pretty much all discretion over the aesthetics of projects, and the Housing Accountability Act provides impressive fines if they manage to block a valid-zoned project, and there's a department enforcing that.
I think it'll have a significant effect, especially in San Francisco and the Bay Area; in Los Angeles, it'll depend on how dysfunctional their city government remains, though AB 253 should help there. But that effect will be delayed until commodities become cheaper and labor becomes more available, and at that point, there will be the usual temptation to make it so projects just barely pencil out, and to "capture" the "developer profits". I think the state of the law makes that very difficult at this point.
I wish I had numbers, and I know this isn't very specific. Hopefully there will be some clear analysis out soon from groups like the Terner Center.
That is true but its also relatively rare. The vast majority of senior managers are extremely replaceable/interchangeable (not by anyone, of course) and the arguments for why their compensation is as high as it is could as well apply to anyone responsible for a system which's continued operation affects a lot of money, from something as lowly as system administrators to say the commissioner of the IRS (that apparently only makes some 200k a year).
A lot of the excessive senior managment compensation is friendship/class corruption and there are reasons beyond "justice" to care about this as well, like why the money isn't going to shareholders or reinvestment in the business.
Excessive compensation for labour is a bad idea. Driven and capable people should be incentiviced to start businesses and compete/disrupt markets, not capture positions for what essentially is rent extraction.
2rafa
1d ago
When AI kills the outsourced WITCH tech sector the consequence on the domestic middle class, consumer spending and so on in India is going to be grim, surely.
Very good points, but the small absolute volumes of REEs required means that effective transshipping will be very hard to stamp out unless all exports anywhere are curtailed, which would draw the ire of most of the regional trading partners that the CCP actually wants to continue to keep onside. The Chinese century is inevitable because western countries will descend into civil chaos due to mass immigration and for no other (major) reason.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
To note- when mildly overhydrated, I'm still a hard stick, and my blood donation attempts result in short draws that can't be used. Is there some way to fix this?
You just unearthed repressed memories of me trying to get home from college and my pants falling down from the weight of all those damn Susan B. Anthony and Sacagwea coins from the train station.
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