Microplastics are stored in the balls.

The U.S.'s flowchart is pretty complicated, too.

We sell soda in 20oz, 1L, and 2L bottles, or 12 ounce cans. Fountain drinks are measured in ounces.

Wine and liquor are sold in 750ml bottles (and other larger format bottles measured in liters), but individual servings are generally measured in ounces.

Our bullets/ammunition are also mixed, probably because we did standardize our military on NATO standards, but also love our legacy calibers and have a bunch of calibers that aren’t used in the military.

And the U.S. isn’t unique in having a bunch of ways to measure energy (joules, calories, kilowatt hours, therms, BTUs), but we’re somewhat unique in having too many ways to measure power (watts, BTUs/hr, horsepower).

Enforcing against screenshots would be difficult, especially if screenshots of Bluesky/Mastodon are allowed but X/Threads isn’t.

It is very clear you and your best friend HylicManoeuvre are one and the same person

I dunno, I think our comment histories are pretty distinct, in both our views/preferences and the topics we’re comfortable discussing. I think that’s pretty clear for anyone who just wants to take a look. Again, by insisting that we must be alts for the same person with a secret vegan agenda comes off as paranoid and delusional.

You are the only one implying preference

Third party here, jumping into this thread. It’s pretty clear that OP didn’t say, or even imply, anything about preference, and even put scare quotes around “preference” when responding to you bringing it up. You come off as paranoid and bizarrely defensive in this thread, and it’s a bad look.

I’m going to answer from the perspective of U.S. law, because that’s what I know.

age is a protected class

The idea of protected classes comes from whether Congress or a state legislature protected that class by passing a valid law prohibiting that kind of discrimination. We can describe that generally with protected classes, as a broad summary, but if you’re actually going to get into the weeds of whether some kind of discrimination is legal or not you have to figure out the specific laws.

First, you have to ask what the context is. Is this employment discrimination? Public accommodations discrimination? Housing discrimination? Education discrimination? Each is governed by its own laws. For example Title VII prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, or national origin. Title VI has the same protected classes, but applies in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance (like universities and hospitals and others). The Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibits discrimination in providing credit on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, and sex (like the Civil Rights Act) and adds on marital status, age, receipt of public assistance.

The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, family status, or disability.

The Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act add protections for discrimination on the basis of disability.

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act prohibits discrimination against those over 40 on the basis of age.

So if you’re talking about neighborhoods, you’re only looking at housing discrimination, and not public accomodations or employment or schooling or anything like that. The Fair Housing Act doesn’t prohibit housing discrimination on age. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act doesn’t apply to housing discrimination (and is one of the few that only goes one way, in protecting only people above 40).

How is that not the same as an “active white living” community that bans other races?

Because the Fair Housing Act prohibits whites-only neighborhoods, or any other kind of race discrimination in housing.

On a side note, there’s also constitutional Equal Protection claims for governmental discrimination that comes from the Constitution rather than any law passed by Congress. Those aren’t discussed in terms of “protected” class, but rather in “suspect class,” where non-equal treatment on the basis of race, color, or religion is reviewed by the courts with “strict scrutiny” (and almost always struck down). Unequal treatment on the basis of sex or citizenship is subject to “intermediate scrutiny,” which sometimes survives court review. Unequal treatment on the basis of pretty much anything else, though, gets “rational basis” review and basically survives if the government can come up with any rational reason for the rule.

At the same time, if a bank goes under, that means they owe more than they own, so “ownership” of that entity is basically worthless. In those cases, a bailout of the customers does nothing for the owners, because the owners still get wiped out.

The GM bailout in 2009 also involved wiping out all the shareholders, the government taking ownership of the new company, and the government spinning off the newly issued stock.

AIG required the company basically issue new stock to dilute owners down to 20% of the company, while the government owned the other 80%, and the government made a big profit when they exited that transaction and sold the stock off to the public.

So it’s not super unusual. Government can take ownership of companies as a condition of a bailout. What we generally don’t necessarily want is the government owning a company long term, because there’s some conflict of interest between its role as regulator and its interest as a shareholder.

They’re killing the middle class though

Some schools might be, but not places like Chicago or Harvard. At least not through their tuition policies. They give financial aid to those up to a pretty high income threshold.

UChicago, for example, gives free tuition to anyone who is the first in their family to attend college, or makes less than $125k a year. Harvard, as I mentioned, essentially gives free tuition up to $150k. MIT’s threshold is $200k. Families in these income ranges are doing pretty well for themselves.

And then when students graduate from these schools they have a pretty easy path to being rich themselves. The degree, the connections, and possibly the education itself provided a pathway towards six figure jobs, maybe $200k+, before the age of 30.

So no, I think these schools are a pretty good value proposition for even the middle class. Upper middle class has to pay the highest percentage of their own income, but it’s still worth the cost for them.

All the schools rip off the rich to subsidize the middle class. You’re essentially subsidizing a bunch of students who are paying close to nothing.m, because you can afford $70k tuition.

As another example, Harvard is free for anyone whose family makes less than $85k per year. Not just the tuition ($56k per year), but also the housing (worth $13k), food ($8k), health insurance ($1600), books, and a modest living stipend designed to cover things like a computer, commuting/travel, other expenses.

And those who make up to $150k per year are capped at 10% of their income to pay for all that. In the end, the average cost of Harvard for the typical student is about $15,000 per year including housing and food.

In other words, attending Harvard is cheaper than not attending school for anyone whose families make less than $150k, which is basically 75% of the nation. So if you’re actually paying full tuition, you’re probably pretty rich.

Ok, I see where your source went wrong. Par for the course for Investopedia, which tends to get a lot of little details wrong (and sometimes misses the mark on the applicable scope of data that someone else has reported). But they’ve cited the Economic Policy Institute study of 2021 incomes, which looks at the average (mean) earnings within that group, rather than the actual amount that represents the boundary of that group. So it’s not that it takes $3.1 million to be in the top 0.1%, it’s that all the people of the top 1% average out to $3.1 million per year. Which, for the type of power distribution for household or individual incomes, is skewed heavily by the people who have the highest amounts.

And looking at the mean within that group can be fine, for certain purposes, but they’ve gone with the incorrect headline of saying “how much income puts you in the top 10%, 5%, 1%, 0.1%?” So it’s a headline that is wrong, that reports on a different number within the data.

And your own comment, saying that reaching each percentile “starts at” the reported number, is also wrong.

Because holy shit does “dqydj.com” look sketchy as fuck.

It just stands for “don’t quit your day job” and I’ve found that it’s a reliable resource for statistical data that’s widely available (like the ASEC numbers published by the Census Bureau and left to other people to actual turn into data visualization). It’s up to date, and the data matches the summary report on the Census website, so what’s the problem? The summary only reports the 90th and 95th percentiles, though, so I needed to find someone who actually reported on the thresholds for 99 (and not the averages within the top 1%).

Not sure where you’re getting your income percentiles from.

This site shows that 90th percentile (top 10%) household starts at $230k and 99th percentile (top 1%) starts at $631k.

For individuals the same site shows that the 10% starts at $150k and the 1% starts at $430k.

there was a $10k bounty,

$60k. $10k from NYPD and $50k from the FBI.

I think that some people had trouble with the raised angle of the hostel smile photo, and the way that cameras of different focal lengths (technically, more a function of distance between camera and subject) tend to flatten three dimensional features in slightly different ways. The posts where people were saying that various pictures don’t look like the same person, but like you, I think they look pretty similar.

Which business leaders were killed on the way to securing a 5-day workweek? Those gains were achieved through direct action affecting business bottom lines: strikes, sabotage, and direct action on the streets, not secret targeting of soft targets.

Put another way: there were two attempted assassinations of Donald Trump in the past year. Do you think that will change his political actions to be more popular?

Do you think that United Healthcare’s next CEO will suddenly forgo profits? What about hospital administrators, pharma CEOs, or any of the other tens of thousands profiting off of this fucked up system? Do you think that a mass assassination campaign will actually happen in large enough volume to change any behavior at all?

You’d take the 2nd choice and hire bodyguards. Sure, you might. But not everybody would.

No, the question isn’t whether everyone would. It’s whether anyone would. And the answer is obviously yes.

So now the position is filled. Did the healthcare system change?

My argument is that no, you can’t kill your way to reform on this one. There will always be another CEO to step into that place.

And the ratio of dead would-be assassins to CEOs would also pile more bodies on.

This is ludicrous. A person faced with unpopular decisions that might send assassins after him is going to make himself harder to assassinate, not less hated.

There’s a difference once they start considering their own lifes on the line.

They won’t. Anyone who has a semblance of belief that their decisions in the job might actually cause their own death just won’t do the job. Instead, it becomes a filter for choosing even more narcissistic/sociopathic people in the role.

And once they’ve internalized the idea that any decision made by any one employee of the company, including their predecessor CEOs, can put them in danger, it’s pretty attenuated from the actual decisions that they themselves make.

It’s a dice roll on a group of people, which isn’t enough to influence the individuals in that group.

We all know that the death of a CEO is a blip in the actual day to day operations in the company. The teams and departments will continue operating as before, and the broad strategic decisions made by the executives aren’t going to factor in a remote likelihood of violence on a particular executive.

After all, if they’re already doing cost/benefit analysis with human lives, what’s another life of a colleague, versus an insurance beneficiary?

They’ll just beef up personal security, put the cost of that security into their operating expenses, and then try to recover their costs through the business (including through stinginess on coverage decisions or policies).

You’re absolutely right and I’d argue it boils down to the fundamental error in OP’s shower thought:

Killing the CEO doesn’t save the lives on the other track. It just adds another dead body to the pile.

Figuring out grid scale storage isn’t easy, but the good thing about it is that you can figure out storage at slightly smaller scales to alleviate the problem somewhat, and build on that success to try to get to daily storage to meet nighttime demand, then up to weekly storage to handle fluctuations in weather, and maybe even seasonal storage to deal with seasonal variation in both supply and demand.

But storage doesn’t have to just be chemical batteries, either. Some can be demand shifting, like desalination or water pumping based on excess power supply. Maybe even intermittently powering direct air capture of CO2 if there’s so much excess energy they don’t know what to do with it. Some can be storage of heat, whether really hot like molten salt that can run turbines for dispatchable electricity, or just at the residential scale with a bunch of distributed hot water tanks, or everything in between. There are also some storage technologies relying on gravity (pumped hydro if the geography supports it), compressed air, flywheels (could be important for maintaining grid inertia for stability).

And there’s always curtailment, where you just don’t generate the power, and turn off some the panels in the middle of the day.