Curtains are stupid expensive, I have a big window with curtains that are in dire need of replacing but I’m looking at several thousand dollars for just that one window.

Longshoreman overtime is ass-backwards though. They clock crazy high OT and do shit like sleep on the clock and they get any shifts outside normal business hours counted as OT. The average pay is well over $100k iirc

They’re also super insular and basically the only way to get a job with them is to be a family member of someone who’s retiring.

I like unions but the ILA is basically a front for the mob. Their leader literally got involved in a ton of RICO charges that didn’t stick because a key witness mysteriously turned up dead in a trunk.

Also part of the reason they’re so insistent on paper records and refusing automation is so they can traffick humans, illegal goods, and steal stuff.

I’d happily pay $20-40ish for a quality textbook. I have many times before. It’s when they want to charge $300 and give almost nothing to the authors that I have a problem with. Extra scummy when they make a new edition that’s just barely different enough you can’t use it for class because the practice problems don’t match or give you one time use online codes that render it worthless for resale.

They let us use them for all my college math classes.

They really don’t help much at all if you don’t understand the math, and if you do understand, you don’t need the calculator most of the time.

For the voters, they really don’t believe it. I have conservative family members. Everything is always “Oh that’s just bullshit cooked up by the crooked Biden crime family” “Oh he didn’t mean the words he said very clearly, what he really meant was blah blah blah” followed ten seconds later by “I like him because he tells it like it is”

I just don’t get it. What makes this guy seemingly have a force field that can make people deny their own eyes and ears? Ignoring morals here, just thinking with those patterns would give me a cognitive dissonance aneurysm.

This can’t be overstated enough. There are huge swathes of the USA where the only stores within half an hour are dollar general or gas station convenience stores. You literally can’t eat healthy on those sources, and the nearest actual grocery store could be an hour or even more away.

Kinda hard to eat well when just getting the ingredients would take half a days time.

Hell, I’m in a city and if I didn’t have a car my only options in walking distance are a convenience store and a couple fast food places. Nearest grocery store is a 12 minute drive or a 3 hour bus ride if the bus even shows up.

I am familiar with marxist theory. The problems lie in what you just said. As Marx said, it is the natural progression of a society that has progressed through the stages of capitalism and entered post-scarcity. People who advocate for other channels of achieving communism are misguided, as post scarcity is a pretty hard requirement and a lack of that aspect opens the mechanisms of resource allocation up to exploitation. And unless you can somehow stop shitheads from being born, someone is going to be enough of one to take advantage.

Even the OG natural progression of society version of communism has issues. For one, you still have the shithead human problem. There’s always going to be people out there who want it all, and they’ll exploit whatever they can to get it. Communism, being stateless, doesn’t have particularly good mechanisms for dealing with that.

Communism is an definitely an ideology. Literally first sentence from Wikipedia: “Communism […] is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology…”

But yeah, it’s kinda suspicious that every nation scale attempt at communism has ended in failure or a system that is decidedly not communist, whether through internal strife or external influence.

Hint: communism doesn’t work in practice on scales the size of nations. The ideology is too fragile and susceptible to corruption and outside influence and you end up with shit like this.

Before anyone says “it’s not real communism” that is the point. It’s useless if it’s too weak against other ideologies to be properly implemented.

Buttons and dials aren’t cheap. Even in economy cars it probably costs the manufacturer a few bucks for each one, accounting for the switch itself and all the trim that goes with it.

It only takes a handful to outweigh the cost of the typical LCDs used in car systems.

Most importantly, this stance doesn’t piss off AIPAC. If you ever want the overarching position of the us govt on Israel to change, you need to do something about AIPAC. They hold enormous lobbying power and will put it behind your opponents if you don’t support Israel.

There was a whole fiasco a while back where Juul got in trouble for marketing to teens. Not explicitly, but if you had seen what ads they were pushing it was obvious they knew it would be pulling in young people.

The answer to that though is of course tighter marketing regulations, not product bans. Banning any type of vape is an absolutely laughable proposition as long as ciggies are still legal.

OSMC makes some good Kodi boxes under the Vero name if you don’t need proprietary streaming services. I use the jellyfin plugin to read from my JF server, works great. Supports 4k, HDR, audio passthrough, many codecs, all the good stuff.

Between that and my PS5 it covers all the bases