merc

It's worse than that.

Blockchain Capital LLC was co-founded by Steve Bannon pal Brock Pierce, a major crypto advocate, perennial presidential candidate, and close friend of Eric Adams. Pierce has dozens of other shady MAGA/Russia ties as well.

https://toad.social/@davetroy/113476797192400901

Dorsey's already out, the people running the project are from the TESCREAL gang.

A feature that makes it easier for their users to migrate to a competitor? Blockchain Capital invests $15M in BlueSky. Insert that Anakin / Padme meme:

Anakin: Now that we've invested, let's make that federation feature priority 0
Padme: As in highest priority, right?
Anakin:
Padme: As in highest priority, right?

tract

rap

various

Playing Red Dead Redemption makes me think that at one point they weren't that expensive if you lived in a very rural area.

• Feeding them probably wasn't too expensive if you had a place they could just graze. Even if you didn't own a farm, there were probably still wild / common areas where animals could graze.
• Shoeing / vet care probably wasn't as expensive when horses were the main means of transportation, so vets and smiths were everywhere
• In a rural area, you probably already had a barn / stable / shack that you could use to provide the horse with shelter, so it didn't need its own additional building. If you did need to build a structure, land was cheap and so it was only the cost of labor you had to worry about.
• Cleaning out the horse poop was a chore, but it could be used as fertilizer, so it wasn't just something you had to dispose of
• You'd still need saddles, stirrups, reins, etc. But, that was made from leather and metal and would probably last decades with some basic maintenance
• Since horses were, ahem, workhorses, not race horses or display horses, they were probably bred to be sturdier and not as prone to requiring medicine or frequent vet trips

It was probably similar to cars today, where some people had expensive, fancy horses that they spent lots of money on, and other people had old clunkers that they got cheap and then rode until they died.

I get the impression that when people today talk about hoses being expensive, a lot of that expense is due to them living in a city. My guess is that if you already live on a working farm, adding one horse is not going to massively increase your expenses.

The purpose of an apostrophe is to warn people that there's an S coming.

Agreed. Also, "Your body, my choice" is possibly meant as a threat, possibly meant as a taunt. But, what it definitely is: a statement of power. Asshole men are saying this because they think the landscape has shifted so much that they can now get away with it -- and they're probably right.

American police are already some of the biggest right-wing assholes. Who do you think they're going to side with in a confrontation where a man says this to a woman? Even if legally a woman were 100% justified in responding with violence, in the real world where men have the power, and men are feeling even more powerful since Trump's victory, being legally right isn't enough.

Voting booths are secret places where people can admit how they really feel without feeling judged. Trump won the popular vote because he appealed to a lot of people who didn't wear MAGA hats, or walk around in garbage bags.

The sad thing is that this isn't really a shock to the rest of the world. There's a reason why, for decades, Americans going on backpacking trips have put Canadian flags on their gear.

The only saving grace here is that it might not be that most Americans are cruel, racist, sexist, classist, etc. It might just be that they're incredibly dumb. I've listened to a lot of interviews of Trump supporters and the vast majority are idiots. They believe in crazy conspiracies. They say they love Trump's policies then can't name any of them. They can't accept that he actually legitimately lost all his legal cases. They regurgitate things they've heard, but clearly haven't even spent a second thinking about, because they go blank as soon as they're asked to elaborate on anything.

And, if the problem is really that they're morons, it may not be their fault. For some reason, the US obsession with free speech and free markets means that Internet companies can keep feeding people bullshit that makes them angry, which keeps them engaged, which keeps the ad dollars flowing. US TV networks can tell absurd lies under the guise of news, and they're apparently immune from being sued for doing it. "Concerned parents" funded by lobbying groups can fuck up the education system so that kids never learn anything that might make them feel bad. The US is allowed to have a government funded state media network that delivers factual video, audio and written news and information around the world. But, most Americans have never heard of it because it's not allowed to compete with the for-profit media in the country itself.

I dunno, maybe the world can save the US. The fact is, Europe does occasionally have strong influence in the US. Americans have to deal with cookie banners because of a GDPR law that doesn't apply in the US. Maybe if the EU took on the US tech monopolies it would actually affect the way Americans are brainwashed. But, unfortunately, I have serious doubts about whether the US can dig itself out of the hole it's in. Right now it looks like the hole is just getting deeper and deeper.

Related: we've all heard the stories of a time traveler going back to kill Hitler before his rise to power. One common theme in almost all those stories is that the attempt fails, that's why history is as we remember. This morning has me thinking that maybe time travel was involved in a couple of Trump assassination attempts.

Don't forget that workers like tips because tips allow you to cheat on your taxes. I've never met anybody who worked in a tipped job who reported 100% of the tips they received.

Another issue is that everybody thinks they're above average. Waiters / waitresses think that if there are no more tips, they (being above average) will lose out.

It's not some kind of sneaky thing where if workers are paid with tips the customers pay more. When workers are paid in normal wages instead of tips, the prices are just higher.

The problem is that many tipped workers love tips because most of the time they can avoid reporting all of them, so they pay less in taxes. Employers like them because it can make their prices seem lower because the price on something like the menu isn't actually the final price someone pays. The people who hate tips are the customers who can never be sure what the final bill will be, and who often have to "tip" a minimum of 10%, often in advance, for service that isn't tip-worthy.

It's ridiculous to pretend that businesses don't have business models that support paying a living wage, or that without tips they'd go out of business. The only difference is that they can list lower prices knowing that the final bill will include a tip. If tips were eliminated they'd just have to list the items with a slightly higher price. The customers also know that that tip is going to be included. Other than European tourists, nobody goes into a restaurant and thinks that the final bill will merely be the cost of the food they ordered. They know they'll be expected to pay a tip too. Getting rid of tipping would just mean that the tip would be $0, and the food would be a bit more expensive.

Sure, everything is gameable if you're a billionaire, but it would require clever lawyers and involve some risk.

Hardly. Historically there has been a lot of cheating in elections. Look at Chicago up to the 1970s. Election fraud was common there.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/1973/05/08/how-the-chicago-tribune-exposed-city-vote-fraud-in-1972-and-won-a-pulitzer-prize/

Nobody can prove that there's less cheating in Chicago elections today than in the 1970s, but people trust that it's more honest.