tmyakal

They are usually self-employed

That varies wildly depending on city, county, state, and (I’m guessing) country requirements. I drove for a few years in a small-ish city, and neither me nor anyone I ran into at the usual spots were self-employed. We all worked for one of two cab companies, making hourly wages plus tip.

“Not admissible because it was illegally captured” didn’t give me the warm-and-fuzzies this comment sounds like it should’ve.

When I was in high school, the girls’ running team made shirts that said, “Fast girls have good times.” It’s been more than twenty years, and I still think about how funny that double-entendre is.

So, yeah, you would’ve sold a lot more weiners.

That’s why the move is to edit all of your comments into jumbled nonsense and then delete them.

extremely anticapitalist and pro-leftist

There’s definitely some enlightened centrist bullshit crammed in there pretty unironically.

This. Everyone I talk to says, “but socialized medicine has such long wait times.” But these same fuckers avoid going to the doctor until it’s absolutely unbearable to deal with because it costs to much to find out if it’ll get better on its own. So if you’re getting symptoms of something and waiting two months anyway, how is your system better?

if your goal as a parent is to maximize success of your children.

“Success” is very subjective.

“Stick it on Max” still costs money? Royalties, hosting, closed captioning and translation, GUI requirements all are going to keep chipping dollars out of a product that they did not believe would make them money.

And, as you say, DC movies have really underwhelmed. Did anyone reasonably think that the (apparently) worst one was going to draw in new subscribers?

You’re close to the truth at the end there. They spent $90 million on it, found out it was an absolute dog when they started test evenings, and decided to scrap it rather than pay another $50 million+ on promotion and other post-production expenses.

With a $20 million write-off on a $90 million movie, they still lost $70 million. They just didn’t want to lose more.

It still sucks for the actual creators and the fans, but it’s not like doing this actually makes the studios richer. It’s just about not falling into the sunk-cost fallacy.

I agree that it’s got to be how young Lemmy skews. No one who has ever bought alcohol at a self-checkout has said, “This is so quick and convenient!”

Did you even read my comment? Yes, without minimum wage an employer could theoretically pay an employee less. But minimum wage already doesn’t pay enough for people to survive. All it is doing is giving employers a solid number they can point to and say, “Well, the government says this work is only worth $7.25!”

No one can survive on the current federal minimum wage, but employers are using that as a guideline when offering wages instead of looking at their business needs or local competition. That means the current minimum wage is actively harming employees. So, again:

Minimum wage needs to be adjusted for inflation to match what it was originally intended for, or it needs to be abolished. Right now, it just gives employers a very low starting point for their bad-faith negotiations.

But no one would actually work for free, so now the company has to actually decide how much it values the work at.

Look at what happened with retail and fast-food after lockdowns lifted in the US: wages surged for the bottom 10% of earners. These places couldn’t get people to work for minimum wage, so they had to ignore minimum wage and actually value the work accordingly. As a result, income saw some pretty strong growth for those employees.

What a minimum wage does is set the opening baseline for negotiation. The company can say, “We know this is a shitty job that anyone can do, and the government says that kind of work is worth $7.25.” That creates a hurdle to discourage an employee from negotiating for more.

Minimum wage needs to be adjusted for inflation to match what it was originally intended for, or it needs to be abolished. Right now, it just gives employers a very low starting point for their bad-faith negotiations.

The argument is that raising wages would cost business owners too much. They would need to close up shop rather than pay higher wages, and then the workers aren’t making anything.

And there is some truth to that, unfortunately. Almost half of all private sector employees work for a small business. If small business labor costs doubled overnight, most could not absorb the additional expense and survive. You’d see a lot of places go belly up, and either nothing would replace them or large corporations that were able to absorb the labor costs would take over and raise prices to maintain their margin. A higher minimum wage just strengthens the position of the companies with enough capital to survive the change.

I agree that wages need to increase, but it’s a lot more complicated than just the government saying, “Hey! Pay them more!”

most of the negative sentiment on cops comes from anecdotes

Oh, I thought it came from the years of empirical evidence of corruption, bias, and state-funded violence.

Jaffe always struck me as a perpetual adolescent. The two GoW games he worked on were great for the time, but the stories were shallow excuses to showcase as much gore as possible. His other big property, Twisted Metal, was genre-defining gameplay but any narrative was just edgelord violence and/or crass humor.

The last “big” project I remember coming down the pipe from him was Drawn to Death, which took his signature juvenile tastes and combined them with horrible gameplay and eye-blistering art direction. As far as I’m aware, he hasn’t worked on a game since.

I’m not saying the new GoW games are perfect, but I wouldn’t say Jaffe has a trusted critical eye.

The fun one is where they brag that older workers are making “substantially more” because they’re averaging $22/hr versus $13/hr in 1987. Adjusted for inflation, that $13/hr should be around $35/hr.

More people are working longer for less money.

For the last 40 years or so, Republican voters have mostly been single-issue voters. They care very passionately about one thing, and will let almost anything else slide as a result. Being in favor of cable fees doesn’t matter as long as they’re anti-abortion. Being in favor of cutting social welfare programs that those very voters rely upon is fine as long as they’re anti-trans.

For the most part, each voter only cares about one or two specific things, and the whole picture doesn’t really matter to them.

I think that’s more about WotC giving up on cons and tourneys than giving up on artists. If they’re having events at all, they’re not putting as much money into them as they used to.

After the first hour, you can just disengage and start over again.

Personally I feel that if someone is chronically ill with a debilitating illness, the most humane thing we can do is allow them the choice of assisted suicide.

I think the most humane thing to do would be to treat them with the best care we as a society can provide without forcing them into massive debt.