Goldbugs have a lot of nostalgia for the Gilded Age, so they put the face value it where it would have been in 1896.

Yeah the 13th amendment has a carve-out for prisoners

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lIqNjC1RKU

Both CEOs are horrible but the new one is a former McKinsey consultant with a background in finance and the silicon-valley C-suite. According to statements she put out her strategy is: layoffs and AI.

Tactical nukes aren’t real. They start an escalation ladder that gets you to global thermonuclear war in a few hours. Using a “tactical nuke” is just laying naked your intent to have things go nuclear while giving your opponent a chance to respond.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis Kennedy wanted to nuke Cuba. The joint chiefs told him that if he wanted to do that he would also have to nuke Russia in a massive fully committed first strike.

The way this has worked is that the Japanese economy has bifurcated with the graduation-to-retirement employment being available to a ever smaller group of white collar workers called salary-men. To become a salary-man you have to go to college and get hired the year you graduate through campus recruiting. If you miss your “window” then you can’t become a salary-man and will be stuck in contingent work for the rest of your life.

The people quitting in this case are not salary-men (a salary-man quitting would be pretty unthinkable) but their bosses probably are, hence the cultural divide.

Sometimes salary-men do lose their jobs due to bankruptcy of the organization for instance. Typically the solution if that happens is to jump in front of a train.

My understanding is that the employer side of this contract quit getting honored religiously during the lost decade and employment in Japan is increasingly contingent and precarious.

It’s just a suggestion.

Quebec is also where I learned the phrase “No cop, no stop.”

But I think they were arrested for not saying arrêt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iHr0Hytrls

Some of them are flying the Confederate flag in Alberta!

Historically Europe (and the British Empire) sided with the confederacy because they saw a united USA as a potential industrial rival, whereas the south was more of a resource colony. Interestingly there was a major class divide in Europe where the working classes were anti-slavery and therefore anti-confederate wheras the upper classes saw the confederate cause being in their interest. There’s a book about this called A Cause for All Nations by Don Doyle.

My understanding is that nowadays the confederate flag is used by people outside the USA who are on the fascist end of the spectrum for whom Nazi or fascist symbols are too extreme (or just illegal) in their countries.

If they said they didn’t find any, then everyone would know it was a whitewash. So they decided to “find” a small amount and then pat themselves on the back.

Reality is about to get all melty and people are gonna have six fingers.

US Chamber of Commerce doesn’t exactly seem like the most impartial source…

On the flip side he’s a horrible and absent father so he seems to think that the only thing a man contributes that affects the children is his sperm.

The US has extensive sanctions against Russia and Putins associates and many violators have already been prosecuted.

This video would be considerably shorter but even funnier with cybertrucks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuwwCsUyheg

And laws that do protect the little guys get ignored by our right-wing courts. For instance, the courts quit enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act because, in the words of Scalia, “it makes no economic sense.”

Scamming is bad but I gotta admit… kinda hard to feel sorry for people taking advice from Elon Musk.

Is it really possible to sign away a right to sue a company, especially hidden in an EULA?

Yes it is. It is called “forced arbitration” and pretty much every contract you are compelled to sign has it.

In any kind of just society with a fair legal system it would not be legal. But that doesn’t describe us or our legal system.

doctor who owns a nice house 2 cars and maybe a rental property has more interests in common with an oil baron

Yes he does and what’s more, he knows it! He’s not loyal to the baron because he’s an idiot. He’s doing so because he knows how his bread is buttered.

Yelling at him that he has “nothing to lose but his chains” won’t work because he has a lot to lose besides his chains. In fact he probably suspects (rightly) that his rental property, his medical practice and his fancy car will all be torched in the revolution long before anything happens to the baron.