Agreed. It takes more than Trump, his cabinet, and MAGA to get here, though. It requires complicity and complacency from a ton of other people.

I need to get back to listening to podcasts. I’ve taken a break since the election because many of my favorites were political and I’m currently burying my head in the sand and screaming “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”.

Maybe I’ll dive back in with BTB. That seems mostly safe…

I agree that governments should be careful about what medical treatments they make mandatory. I think the US government has been pretty judicious with their decisions, though. The vaccines that are mandated for school attendance are wildly effective and have been shown to be safe, both via scientific studies and decades of dispensing many of them.

I 100% agree.

I think that is true for some of the people involved, but I think it is much more complicated than that. There are many people who think vaccines do more harm than good because they believe conspiracy theories and junk science. Not everyone against vaccines is malicious. Some must be, though, for such bullshit to keep propagating the way that it does.

If you want to know more, go read the lawsuit he is associated with to remove FDA approval of the polo vaccine. Essentially, he believes fraudulent research that indicates that vaccines cause autism.

Then, before you take what he says at face value, go read a history of polio.

If you give the materials an honest read, you’ll find that polio is horrific, that the vaccine was one of the greatest medical achievements of the 20th century, and that the evidence indicating that the vaccine causes autism is all junk.

It is amazing to me how short our memories are as a species. There are people who are still in congress who had polio. There are an estimated 300,000 people still alive in the US who survived polio. Even with that, the nominated head of Health and Human Services wants to do away with the polio vaccine.

I don’t know what the problem is. Is it a lack of empathy? Is it willingness to swallow the bait surrounding conspiracy theories? Is it just a lack of education? How did we get to the point where it is even remotely okay for the future head of Heath and Human Services to be against the polio vaccine?

If being pro-polio isn’t disqualifying for being the head of HHS, and if he gets confirmed, the U.S. will have very clearly shown that it is in rapid decline. It will have shown that the government is corrupt to its core and is irredeemable.

I work at a university. When hiring, if someone doesn’t have one of the “Required Job Qualifications”, they are immediately disqualified. We can wiggle a little if we can infer one of the qualifications from other experience, but that is pretty frowned upon.

If we have things that we’d like to have but are not required, they are listed as “Preferred Job Qualifications”. We then create a rating scale for each based on their relative importance and grade candidates one each of the preferred qualifications. We use the resulting rankings to determine who we will interview. We MUST interview every candidate above the lowest ranked candidate we interview.

At some airports it varies by which line you’re in and they yell conflicting instructions within earshot of all of the lines.

I don’t understand why they don’t have a sign at the entrance to security to tell you what to expect. Or, when it changes by which line you go to, why they don’t have a sign indicating the differences between lines.

Instead, they wait for someone to make a mistake, then yell out their mistake like “ALL ELECTRONICS MUST COME OUT OF YOUR BAG” at the same time as someone the next line over is yelling “ELECTRONICS DO NOT NEED TO COME OUT OF YIUR BAGS”.

TSA is infuriatingky inconsistent and incomprehensible, even for someone who travels frequently.

I don’t say any of this to say that I think what Walmart is doing here is ethical, onky to say that it is logical from their standpoint if they assume there won’t be any blowback.

Companies charge what they think they can get for a product. The tax is part of the price. If they think an item will sell for $5.26 including tax, it is reasonable for them to think it will still sell for $5.26 if the item isn’t taxed.

That isn’t to say this is nice on their part, but the current system doesn’t incentivise them to be nice. It incentivises profit.

It does seem like they took the easy route to gain more profit. It is likely that, in the a absence of tax, their profit would be maximized by a price that is somewhere between the old pre-tax price and the old post-tax price.

So, $130M donated to Trump’s legal defense fund. $55K to Luigi’s.

No sympathies? He didn’t choose where to vacation, his parents did. Should children pay for their parents’ mistakes?

So, the other arguments given here are disingenuous. The real argument that would be made (not by me) is that they don’t trust the government to run something as important as health care. They think the government would be more wasteful and capricious in its decisions than the current system. They’ve been convinced that nationalized health care systems are simply worse.

I wish more companies had this mindset. If you treat your employees well and listen to their needs, they won’t need to unionize. When they do unionize, it means they don’t feel that they have been treated well and listened to.

It seems that the end result of this philosophy would be to treat your employees well!

Same for me, but I guess I’m a little younger since my console was NES and, later, a Gateway 2000 computer.

I’m so glad that I had those experiences and so sad that my son won’t. I hope that I can give him enough of a similar experience that he can at least identify with Calvin and Hobbes.

Do you have recommendations for tutorials on this?

For raster imagery (and probably vector) I recommend imagemagick.

It was interesting to read that. Of course you can’t start doing that kind of workout right off the bat. You need to work up to it! Also, of course the workout regimine from “One Punch Man” isn’t well balanced, he is training to be able to punch well, not focused on general health.

Are people seriously just jumping into this routine as a means of getting fit?

Hey, does that guy look like a terrorist?

The one in the middle? Yeah, kinda!

Right then, blast him and his friends. They’re probably terrorists too!

What you said and your statement that “it’s a bit like grief” are dead on. I wasn’t kicked out by my parents, but I lost my dad when I was 27. I’m 40 now and still miss him but the feeling dwindles with time. I’ll always miss him but the impact of that feeling will always lessen as I gain more experiences. I suppose the same is true for any trauma of a similar magnitude. I imagine there are traumas that surpass the loss of parents in magnitude, though, and some of those may not pass in the same way.