And it’s gotten much worse since then. The $185 billion number listed as the highest wealth would be around number 5 now, with Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Arnault all having more than that now I think.

My favorite statistic household net worth (includes cars, houses, retirement, everything).

Median from 2022 was 192,000 Mean from 2022 was 1,063,000

The ultra-rich are such incredible outliers that the mean is more than 5x the median.

The 10 wealthiest people in 2024 control almost 1.7 trillion dollars. That’s more than the GDP of the pooreat 100 countries combined.

I like the bleep-boo sounds of the command prompt scrolling by on computers.

The “don’t tell” part didn’t apply to third parties.

I work in the development department of a tiny city that’s surrounded by a major city on all sides. It’s an enclave for the super-rich, with the average new house here costing over 10 times that of the surrounding area.

There’s actually sections in city code regarding the regulation of servant’s quarters.

The houses are mostly owned by shell corporations designed to hide the identity of the actual residents. But I know who a lot of them are, and you’ve definitely heard some of the names, though a lot of the obscenely-rich work hard to start out of the press. There’s a billionaire here whose picture I cannot find anywhere online.

Among my many duties, I review the plans for all the houses coming in.

They have sooo much security. You just don’t know about it. There’s multiple panic rooms, security offices, popup bollards, bulletproof windows, and more.

There are no sidewalks or parks. No sightlines from the street to the house. They build “water features” (moats) and plant vegetative screening to make accessing the house impractical except through the gate - some of which have guardhouses.

They are absolutely terrified of peasants.

The sound is higher-quality than the files we’re getting from the streams, so it’s fine.

For me it’s been “I see you bought this specific laser engraver. Would you be interested in buying that exact model?”

No. I already bought it, and it’s not a consumable. If I decided I needed a new laser a week into ownership, it wouldn’t be because I was thrilled with that exact model.

Hidden manual releases that still require you to push the door through the windows trim. FFS people have already died because of this shit. Why the hell hasn’t there been a mandatory recall on all Teslas over this?

The ndo Uber Eats a few times a week at work. It’s 100% about the time required to do anything else.

The average new house in the city I work for is about 6 million dollars, so I live about 90-minutes away in normal traffic where I can pay $750/month in rent. I work lots of hours (start at 8, usually leave between 6 and 8 with no real break between), so I’m looking at 14-16 hours between when I leave the house in the morning and when I return home. I also think ach night classes at the University on Mondays during the fall and Spring semesters, and have 3 night meetings a month between Council and Planning and Zoning. On the weekends I drive a couple hundred miles out of town to help with my parents.

If paying triple for a meal occasionally saves me 15-20 minutes it’s often absolutely worth it for the stress relief.

Amen.

Felons can try to make amends. Troy just makes Jager bombs at the office and passes at the 19yo receptionist.

Doesn’t matter if the plastics never make it to the recycling center. Only around 5% of plastics in the US get recycled. Sometimes that’s because it’s cheaper to not recycle or because the particular plastic is non-recyclable, but most of the time it’s because it just gets thrown out with the rest of the garbage.

Sorting and separating materials en masse is by far the most difficult part of the process.

I’m a white Christian man in Texas. I know I’m privileged and that that privilege often comes with ignorance, so I used to be really nervous about offending people inadvertently.

But I eventually learned to just ask if I wasn’t sure.

It did help that one of my best friends in college was a black lesbian who transitioned Jr year. I joked with him that he was my token “X” friend.

I can’t be racist because that would be hurtful and wrong.

It’s laziness. Automatics are modified in a way that prevents them from being fully operational as a gun, but not for safety reasons.

They won’t cycle with blank rounds because there’s no backpressure from firing a live round, so they obstruct the barrel to redirect some of the gasses back into the action.

For revolvers, bolt guns, etc that isn’t an issue because they aren’t cycled by recoil or gasses. You can just load a blank and use it.

I do - just not when we’re in the pews.

I will never discuss politics at church in the same way that I will never discuss religion at a City Council meeting. Separation of Church and State is good for both institution.

I’m very Christian and am fully supportive of suing over this bullshit.

Forged documents are illegal. Changing laws regarding how electors are selected isn’t.

Heck - way back in 2000 the Supreme Court hinted at the tactic in the majority opinion in Bush v Gore, saying that the Florida legislature probably could have just selected electors directly after the vote.

Yes. But at the same time I’m actually okay with ads for products that are legitimately good and are relevant to me, so long as I know they’re an advertisement.

Products need marketing. It’s reality. I’d rather get my marketing in the form of a recommendation or review from a trusted source than a random video shoved down my throat.

A easy example of a good source for me is MKBHD. He gets free stuff and sponsorships, but is selective regarding what he’ll accept sponsorships from, is very clear when a segment is sponsored, and will absolutely say a product is bad or overpriced even if he got it for free.

No. Instead they’re gonna have state legislature throw out the results of the election. Which they can probably do, Constitutionally-speaking.

The State legislature pick the electors. Just because they all use a popular vote to do it doesn’t mean they can’t change the law in between the voting in November and the actual election in December.

So I missed y’all’s argument, but I really appreciate how you both realized that you’d made thoughtless posts, apologized, and removed them.

It’s a rare thing to see online.

Frankly - it’s a lot harder to quantify. “Time at desk” is easy to track. Response times to tickets are much more variable and difficult to measure.