Thanks!

One way to put some perspective on this too is with some numbers.

In 2022 every statewide democrat on the ballot got over 3m votes in Florida. In 2020 Biden got over 5m votes. Turnout craters for midterms so this is not atypical.

In 2022 dems lost the NC senate election by 120k votes, the WI senate election by 30k votes, the GA governor by 300k votes, AZ superintendent by 10k votes, WI treasurer by 10k votes, and NV governor by 10k votes… Among many other close elections. There were also absurdly close calls in the elections we won in NV, WI, and AZ all off the top of my head. Texas needs bigger numbers to get over the finish line, but we lost the governor’s race by 900k in 2022 and the senate race by 215k in 2018.

Ignoring Texas and Georgia, all of those lost elections could be flipped with absolutely trivial population shifts out of Florida. I’m not going to pretend that the left is magically going to start leaving Florida in electorally strategic ways (people don’t think like that!), but even just getting 500k FL voters to leave is going to see those trivial shifts start to happen organically anyway.

New York fell 89 residents short of keeping its 27th congressional district in 2020. I cannot for the life of me find the actual numbers for other seats, but Arizona would have had seat 440, California seat 441, Virginia 442, Michigan 444, and New Jersey 445. It wouldn’t have required too huge of a population shift to those states to give them each an additional house seat, and if the exodus was from red states that would be a shift of red->blue in the electoral college and hopefully also the house.

… I didn’t say they can’t do so. I said they’re allowed not to. Since it’s allowed, that’s what they do.

Because they’re allowed not to do so. The answer is shitty yet simple.

Someone not tipping won’t change that either; all that will do is stiff a worker. This needs to be fixed by changing labor laws.

That ship already sailed. Florida is fucked.

From 2002-2022, Florida has held six elections for four statewide political offices: governor, attorney general, chief financial officer, and agricultural secretary. Of the 24 combined elections, democrats won two: CFO in 2006 and agricultural secretary in 2018. Dems won two senate races in that same time frame (2006 and 2012 with incumbent Bill Nelson), and two presidential elections (2008 and 2012, with Obama).

The state has been drifting right ever since the early 2010s. That’s been magnified lately.

The best outcome for democrats is they leave Florida in a mass exodus and go to other states that are close. Locking down nearby Georgia and North Carolina would be way more useful. Any gains in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania would be invaluable. Further away, moving Texas left quicker would be great, and Arizona is far from locked down. Adding more house seats (and electoral votes) to blue states would be better too, since Florida is going to stay gerrymandered to reduce voter power as much as possible.

All we’ll get out of Florida is heartbreak. The state is already lost and we should act with that knowledge in hand. Turn it into a republican vote sink so that conservatives leave purple states for it and have the left leave Florida for purple states.

Service charge I would presume is primarily paid out to the non-wait staff at the restaurant. The kitchen in particular.
Tips go to the wait staff, and they will pay some of that out to other staff (e.g. front staff) depending on how the restaurant works.

These are going to be separate. The service charge is there so they can increase prices by a tightly controlled amount without needing to fuck up the carefully targeted price points ($8 or $7.99 is a lot better than $9.44). Which is shitty, to be clear: it’s a hidden way to increase prices while still advertising the same price. But it’s not something that replaces or complements the tip, it’s just a shitty price-adjustment.

A waiter or waitress is still going to be dependent on the actual tip.

The basic outline of where to split the company seems straightforward to me.

AWS get split off first and foremost, that part is blatantly clear to me.
From there, the retail webstore (what we generally think of as “Amazon”) gets split off from its broad category of services: music and movie streaming and everything in that category.
After that, split anything that involves designing/repurposing other designs and selling a specific consumer product off. Kindle, Alexa, Roomba (if that purchase goes through), Amazon Basics, etc.

I think there’s a decent amount of room to get more granular with the process, but I think that covers it as a basic outline.

Not a final decision. SCOTUS (via Kagan) refused to overturn a stay on a decision while legal proceedings continue. Basically just an order to keep things as-is until the case finishes working its way through the courts.

Which as I understand it is generally how things work: if there’s no clear likely winner, go with the interim situation that most easily can be rectified if it is later ruled to have been wrong. In this case, if the ruling goes against Apple than they can be ordered to give money to Epic and other app-owners based on the revenue brought in from them to Apple during the appropriate period. The opposite case would require more complex estimates (how much revenue was shifted away from Apple incorrectly, in the case where Apple wins) and further it’d result in unnecessary consumer friction: users would go from A to B then back to A again.

It’s smart, I don’t know how people will feel about it but it’s smart.

The US and China are in an escalating economic cold war. It’s goes completely against US interests to invest finite resources into growing the economy of an economic rival — and ditto for the converse of China investing into growing the US economy. Especially in an aggressively competitive economic sector where relative technological advancement is king for competitive purposes.

In theory it’s exceptionally illegal to curtail unionization efforts.

In practice, the law has been whittled away by decades of conservative judiciary decisions and weak department of labor enforcement. This isn’t helped at all by the balance of power.

Companies can afford to scare off some degree of workers, especially at the lower end of the salary range. Big businesses can survive shutting down a store or losing business at locations indefinitely. Big businesses can afford expensive lawyers and to indefinitely stay in litigation over union busting efforts.

For workers, it’s a completely different proposition. Is Walmart or Home Depot or Starbucks going to want to hire someone that is actively suing another major corporation for anything at all? It’s even worse if it’s labor rights related, but just suing them in the first place is going to make it a struggle to find employment at a lot of places. That’s even pretending they can find & afford lawyers. Or that they can handle the transition period from job A to job B even if it isn’t difficult to find job B.

These businesses hold all the cards and they know it. You see similar thinking, though different details, behind Hollywood’s decision to just try and wait out the striking writers and actors. They can survive losing billions of dollars in income a year from now with unmade projects; striking workers will struggle to get by with no salary.

Candidates that will the whole party will find exciting are basically a once in a generation event, if that. This generation’s such candidate was Obama. Democrats as a party are reliant on far too big of a tent to make this a viable strategy or thought process.

A candidate that I, a far left progressive, would get excited about is a candidate that a lot of center-of-left or moderate voters would find boring. Even within wings of the party there’s not going to be lockstep excitement (go back to Dec 2019 and ask Sanders supporters how “excited” they’d be for a Warren candidacy!).

This line of argument is consistently just people pining for candidates that more closely reflect our own ideological views, not a reflection of the reality available to us. There was no such candidate in 2016 or 2020 and won’t be for 2024. I’m not going to hold my breath for 2028 either. Maybe by 2032 we might see the next Obama, someone that excites the whole party.

Superdelegates have never decided a democratic primary.

At the end of the day the delegates are fully aware that if they take the nomination away from the candidate that won the most votes that it would utterly destroy the party and they would be surrendering that year’s election up and down the ballot. Even in an extreme scenario like e.g. credible accusations of sexual assault coming out, they’d still be reticent to do it and would basically be stuck picking how to lose the election.

And before anyone says it: superdelegate pledges do not sway primary voters in any meaningful numbers. I’d wager >90% of democratic primary voters don’t know what the fuck a superdelegate is, and likely only have superficial understanding of the overall process by which a nominee is selected. They’re not going to know the superdelegate pledge counts or any of that bullshit. The people that follow politics enough to know that stuff are also overwhelmingly the people that care enough about politics that they’re still going to vote for the same person, even if they do not outright know it’s bullshit. The audience of voters that could be swayed by those pledges is so vanishingly small as to be borderline imaginary.

Superdelegates have only mattered to give losing candidates a justification they can offer to their supporters to keep running. Clinton tried it in 2008 and Sanders tried it in 2016. Amusingly this makes both of them a bit hypocritical on the subject…

The 2020 primary came down to the not-Sanders wing of the party starting off heavily divided and then consolidating on a single candidate after enough of them were winnowed out by the early states. Biden only survived that long because he ran a frugal campaign and had a strategy on SC that he was going to stick to. Honestly, going in I thought it was a horrible strategy with no chance of success. I was clearly quite wrong.

Bitcoin can fuck off.

The point here is that car companies already charge for these things. The reality is basically two scenarios when ordering a car:

A: You pay $x, and they offer you heating steering wheels for $y. If you do not get them then, you do not get them ever.
B: You pay $x, and you can pay $y at any time to get heated steering wheels.

The business “bet” that (B) represents is that maintaining additional SKUs for each upgrade-feature and splitting off production lines to include or not include various combinations of features 1-2-3-etc. will cost them more money than just including it in every car. Then they can sell it to you on a whim. The actual feature itself does not cost anywhere near $y in either scenario to include, which is an important component of making this possible.

Now, you can say that (B) is a shitty scenario in a vacuum: if they’re willing to include it in every car, they should just charge every car what it costs to include plus some minor markup to allow the business to operate. E.g. if it costs $50 to include, they can increase the price of every car $55. And in that vacuum I’d agree. But it isn’t in a vacuum. That is not the scenario (B) is competing with. (B) is competing with (A). In (A) you are going to pay $200 or $300 or whatever for that $50-cost feature up front, or you never get it ever. In (B) you pay that $200 or $300 whenever you like.

It operates in a similar world to how Apple charges $200 to go from 8gb of RAM to 16gb of RAM, when that might cost them $10-20 at volume pricing. Or to use a well-liked company, how Valve charges $250 for a ~$10 SSD + ~$5-10 carrying case + ~$5-10 glass coating, on the base Steam Deck vs the fanciest Steam Deck.

This is not a “as a service” model. It’s a simple upselling business model. Profits on base models are low so as to have a low sticker price, and then they try to create profit off of upgrades. In this case, the software locked version is preferable to the consumer over the default version because it’s something you can unlock at any time, instead of only at purchase. It is not a new business model, nor is it even limited to electronics. The overall business model is shitty, but that applies to every instance of it: (A) and (B), and (B) is not differently shitty.

Service based systems are based on recurring revenue, in this case anything with a subscription. Which I specifically called out as something that would make it shitty and pointed to their subscription based or subscription-incentivizing behavior as shitty.

You did not understand what I wrote if your retort is on the “car as a service” subject.

Also I’m p sure Ko-Fi has a better revenue split with those who use it than Patreon does

This line made me curious so I looked. Best I can find is that Ko-fi charges either 0% or 5% on donations, dependent on the type of donation and the type of account the receiver has with them.

Patreon used to charge 5%, but now has: 5% for grandfathered pro accounts, 5% for lowest tier accounts, 8% for non-grandfathered accounts on a pro plan, and 12% for a higher premium tier.

So yup, Ko-fi has a better split.

Most car manufacturers charge money for those kind of upgrades. The difference is they specifically build or do not build the features into the car. If Tesla doesn’t charge meaningfully more and if they do not turn it into a subscription, I wouldn’t knock them for it.

There’s a lot to bitch at Tesla about, but being able to decide after the fact that you want a heated steering wheel isn’t one of them. FSD being bullshit even if it was free (and it is far from free!), the refusal to allow Android Auto/CarPlay, the intentionally rosy range estimates, the association with Musk… those are what I’d focus on. Unlockable steering wheel heating is not an issue.

This is a direct result of congress intentionally giving greater funding to the IRS with the explicit goal of increasing revenue by decreasing tax evasion by the wealthy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act

The chances of congress shutting it down comes down to if republicans gain control over government in next year’s elections.

You’re also making the implicit and incorrect assumption that this assumption of future income is not already the status quo. It is. The IRS already does this with your automatic withholding. It just does it at a higher level than necessary, due to what I mentioned above. Withholding basically assumes that a person will continue to earn whatever their paycheck was in every future payment period (weekly, semimonthly, whatever).

Your assumptions on how this would be dealt with are not realistic. The outlines of how to implement this not only already exist, they are already used and have been used for decades. All the IRS needs to do is glue together its knowledge of your income sources and lower the withholding amount based on being able to predict an individual’s income far more accurately.

Data on seasonal income is known too, for the record. Consistent trends in income changes with parts of the year are not a surprise to the government agencies that care about it.

For the majority of people out there, all their income is going to have digital records. A cash only store still deposits money in a bank, after all. For the people that don’t… chances are their income without a digital footprint isn’t being reported, and is small enough that no one is worried about that in the first place.

If the IRS is being told by a person’s work how much they’re paid, by their bank how much interest they got, by any Etsy-esque services how much they were paid… then the IRS has every bit of information it needs to get automatic withholding correct.

Right now withholding systems default to taking too much money out, because it’s easier for the government to send you money than it is for them to request money from you. It also avoids the headache of most people being hit with surprise IRS bills. The IRS could keep that default, and then as the year goes on it could shift that withholding down until it’s laser close. The negative there is that variability is bad for budgeting too, but with some work they could make it start close enough that it shouldn’t be all that variable.

The report gives a quick summary of what they include, but not any details or math.

The cost of underlying energy (gas, diesel, electric)
State excise taxes charged for road maintenance
The cost to operate a pump or charger
The cost to drive to a fueling station (deadhead miles)

Elsewhere it says it assumes 12k miles in a year and is focused on the midwest and Michigan in particular. As it so happens, Michigan charges for registration based on the car value. EVs cost more than ICE vehicles in the same market segment most of the time. This would fall under excise taxes that they include.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they also tacked on the cost to install a L2 charger once as “cost to operate a pump or charger” — intentionally ignoring that it’s a one-time fee to support EVs at a home. With those two data points they could easily add >$1000 to the cost to “charge” an EV for one year if that is what they wanted to do.

The people making the report clearly picked criteria that sounds reasonable but also intentionally misleads people. Not a surprise.

That’s the weight of the THC dose, not the total weight of the whole product containing the dose.