The idea of a de minimis is that it’s not worth the time and money to collect the tariff when it would be so small.

People don’t “like him for it” they like him despite it. Just because people like an unlikable person doesn’t mean they like everything about him.

I’m loath to draw too big of a conclusion from one month when seasonal adjustments have been so screwy since Covid, but if this keeps up next month I’d say the Fed should start to cut rates in March.

In India. US number is 35%, here are some numbers for Europe: https://i.redd.it/d8udyq9edyhc1.png

I thought 35%ish in the US was bad. 56% in Russia is one of the more shocking stats I’ve seen about their inequality.

That’s very funny.

Average in the US for a 2 bedroom is $1317 per statista.

Triple that for a monthly income = $3951

x12 for annual = $47,412

/2080 for hourly full time = $22.79/hr

A 1 bedroom (or 2br with a $200/mo UBI) at $1100ish brings the minimum to $19ish.

A 2 bedroom but working 60hrs/week or using 50% of income on rent instead of 33% is around $15/hr.

Just trying to play around with the numbers to see what a real political proposal might look like. Feels great to meme a declaration, people start disagreeing when you start putting numbers to it.

Their point is that they agree with you 100% on slavery, but this isn’t slavery.

Why are 50 percent of prisoners minorities?

Because the system is racist and bad and minorities are disproportionately imprisoned. Nobody here is arguing against that. They are just pointing out that if 50% of the “enslaved” are white, that is a different sort of thing than the race-specific enslavement of black people. Things can be not-literal-slavery while still being bad.

What happens if you refuse to work?

I assume you can’t refuse without a medical exception of some kind. These are imprisoned people, they also can’t leave. Not trying to excuse everything about prison labor but as a society we have decided the state has the capacity to remove rights from people as a punishment after due process has been afforded to them. We can argue that it’s not right or humane to force labor on an imprisoned population without saying it’s literally slavery. “It’s not literally slavery” is not a defense of the system.

We’re not arguing “well prisoners can’t be sold to other prisons so that proves it’s not slavery” because that one difference doesn’t prove anything, just like one similarity doesn’t prove anything.

It may not be inherited at birth but is the system setup to capture successive generations of prisoners from the same families?

…no? Even if you include Capitalism and wealth inequality and racist policing as part of “the system” maybe members of the same family are disproportionately likely to be imprisoned because they are the same race and likely similar economic status, that isn’t because a parent was imprisoned. There’s nothing targeting children of imprisoned people. And even then, you’re trying to compare disproportionate odds to be imprisoned to literal 100% ownership of slaves’ children by slave masters? What are we talking about here?

It’s also time-bound for the length of the sentence. So like sure it’s slavery…temporarily, non-inherited, non-race-specific, as a punishment for a crime, at least sometimes paid.

Which is just a lot of caveats.

Similarly, having a job is just temporary, non-inherited, non-race-specific paid slavery where you get to pick your slave master. Sure you can make that argument but it’s not a very good one.

A lot of stuff about the US prison system is really bad, including this part, it’s just not literally slavery, and it doesn’t have to be slavery to be really bad and need changing.

You can put fake meetings on your calendar and say “oh, gotta get to my 2:30”.

Michigan GOP is in shambles because they elected the “outsider” MAGA candidates who had no fundraising experience, they immediately failed to fundraise enough, it got so bad that their flagship annual fundraiser was a fraction of its normal size.

Instead of pulling together to right the ship they…immediately turned to conspiracy theories, declared each other to be Deep State plants, and demanded the party leaders “open the books” to show how much money there really was, but party leaders refuse because it would prove how bad at fundraising they have been.

Detailed in a recent This American Life.

Pretty sure it should be “valuation”

If I’m low on hot air I’ll just invite [local politician] on the balloon! Oh ho ho ho

The nihilism of legal consequences has so far come from the lack of charging him with anything, mostly when he was president and the policy was not to charge him with anything. He hasn’t actually gotten away with anything that has gone to court.

He lost the E Jean Carroll suit and the Trump Corp fraud case. The other stuff is still ongoing.

Direct Drive tech reduced the number of moving parts so low that it put Big Washer Repair out of business and they had to develop other ways to monetize your laundry.

Personally I had way too many quality issues at that price range. An earbud would be randomly quieter than the other, the battery of an earbud would die, the Bluetooth would suck, or they would be unusable for phone calls. I bought refurbished $100-something headphones for $70 and haven’t needed to buy any more since.

If you ever tried to burn way too many songs to a CD and got frustrated that it didn’t work… it’s time to stretch your back.

There’s a famous example of the poverty trap that uses boots that fall apart every season vs quality boots that last, and I think there is a quality level that is so bad it’s more expensive in the long run. So I do buy shoes that cost money. But I’m not buying fashion shoes or luxury brand shoes which I think is what you’re saying too.

That’s kind of like saying sports cars are the transportation equivalent of a painting because they are made to look good. I guess you could say that, but it’s not really a useful metaphor if they only have the one thing in common and they’re both things everyone would be familiar with so you’re not translating into more common experience.