Are they working alone, or do you envision groups who can stop, collaborate, and listen?

Dammit for the last time you can’t wear an NBA jersey and shorts here, this is a doctor’s office.

I agree. Stated another way, imagine the trolley is headed towards 5 people, and you have the power to pull the lever to divert it to a path where there are no people. Even if someone tied those 5 to the tracks with the intent to kill, your failure to save their lives (at no additional cost to others) is widely regarded by most systems of ethics/morality as a moral failing. Yes, the person who tied the tracks bears blame, but so does the person who could’ve easily saved them but chose to let them die.

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Unions are legal in all occupations.

One caveat: the legal protections of the right to unionize apply to non-supervisors. If you have people who report to you, your power to unionize is pretty limited.

There are also some specialized jobs that aren’t allowed to unionize by either federal or state law: actual soldiers in the Army, certain political jobs, etc.

But for the most part, if you are employed, you’re probably allowed to unionize (and protected against retaliation even in an unsuccessful union drive).

More specifically, the more recent studies analyze non-drinkers in two categories: those who just choose not to drink (generally healthier than even light drinkers), and those who don’t drink because they have serious health conditions incompatible with drinking or people recovering from substance/alcohol abuse issues who (generally much less healthy than light drinkers). By separating those who don’t drink versus those who can’t drink, the studies reverse earlier findings that non-drinkers are less healthy than light drinkers.

Oh and Best Buy owes its survival to investing heavily into cell phone plans and contracts. They would’ve folded without it.

Radio Shack limped along for maybe a decade after their core business stopped making sense, because of their cell phone deals. This Onion article from 2007 captures the cultural place that RadioShack operated in at the time, and they didn’t file bankruptcy until 2015 (and then reorganized and filed bankruptcy again in 2017).

It feels so real in how disappointing the experience becomes for the straight characters.

This hits the nail on the head. It’s funny because of the point of view of the actual participants.

The funny thing about this thread is that there are so many comments essentially agreeing with the central premise of the sketch, that it’s relatable and disorienting when you stumble onto some kind of established fandom and can’t seem to keep up with why it’s popular or what is or isn’t “part of it.” The popularity is confusing in itself, and the need to dissect the lore (as OP is doing, perhaps even unintentionally following the sketch itself) distracts from the original purpose of going there to be entertained.

In other words, the sketch is funny and relatable exactly for the same reasons why much of the audience doesn’t find it funny and relatable.

Yeah, you can think of it as a simple transaction fee for debit transactions, and a full blown credit and risk shifting system for credit transactions. The banks charge high fees for credit transactions because they’re actually lending money and bearing some credit risk for them, whereas the debit transactions are just moving money from one account to another.

This stuff takes a while to get going.

The FTC sued to stop Microsoft from acquiring Activision in December 2022, but lost.

DOJ sued Google in January 2023, and won their trial last month.

The FTC and DOJ started rulemaking on new merger disclosure and review requirements in June 2023.

The FTC sued Amazon in September 2023.

DOJ sued Ticketmaster/Live Nation in May 2024.

The last two years have shown aggressive antitrust enforcement for the first time in about 50 years, when Robert Bork basically convinced the Supreme Court and all Republicans to impose almost impossible standards for antitrust regulations.

I think this article misleadingly states what the stats show.

Each American generation is less religious than the older generations, and Gen Z is no different. It’s just that Gen Z women are far less religious than previous generations, a bigger gap than the men. From the study that provides the underlying stats:

What’s remarkable is how much larger the generational differences are among women than men. Gen Z men are only 11-points more religiously unaffiliated than Baby Boomer men, but the gap among women is almost two and a half times as large. Thirty-nine percent of Gen Z women are unaffiliated compared to only 14 percent of Baby Boomer women.

In other words, Gen Z men are less religious than Boomer men. This basic conclusion doesn’t seem to come through in the original article, which almost suggests that young men are more religious than older generations.

The kinetic energy in that stardust, and the gravitational potential energy of stardust pulling itself into tighter balls, doesn’t necessarily come from fusion. There’s all sorts of cosmological forces and energy out there, and I don’t think they all trace back to nucleii smushing together.

So is biomass. And wind. And fossil fuels. And hydro.

In fact, I think only geothermal and fission aren’t fusion-based.

I love the way you weave in the cultural context, including the culture war parts of modern political and policy debates, the business/corporate trends in entertainment, in your telling of this history. It’s clear you know your stuff, and you’ve helped me understand something new (the influences these slasher films drew from, from Agatha Christie), grounded in stuff I might have already known (the actual movies themselves and the cultural context they were released into, including how people looked at boobs before the internet).

So thank you. This comment is awesome, and you make this place better.

This is a counter to the Democratic party supporters you see everywhere who always get irrationally upset at third party voters, not about Republicans.

Plenty of us Democrats are very much in support of a ranked choice voting schemes, or similar structural rules like non-partisan blanket primaries (aka jungle primaries). The most solidly Democratic state, California, has implemented top-2 primaries that give independents and third parties a solid shot for anyone who can get close to a plurality of votes as the top choice.

Alaska’s top four primary, with RCV deciding between those four on election day, is probably the best system we can realistically achieve in a relatively short amount of time.

Plenty of states have ballot initiatives that bypass elected officials, so people should be putting energy into those campaigns.

But by the time it comes down to a plurality-take-all election between a Republican who won the primary, a Democrat who won the primary, and various third party or independents who have no chance of winning, the responsible thing to make your views represented is to vote for the person who represents the best option among people who can win.

Partisan affiliation is open. If a person really wants to run on their own platform, they can go and try to win a primary for a major party, and change it from within.

TL;DR: I’ll fight for structural changes to make it easier for third parties and independents to win. But under the current rules, voting for a spoiler is throwing the election and owning the results.

Racists would pay quite a bit of money to be able to target certain ethnic groups.

Why do you care if the person you voted for wins?

Because it’s an election with consequences, not an online fandom.

John Oliver sometimes runs random out of context clips of MILF Manor and I’m not sure actually watching them in context would make them any less ridiculous.

No, no, the bigots hate people who speak French too

Oh you can remember which one is which by remembering that they have a university named USC.