no vinyl

The real challenge

The U.S. methods of choice have been wars, regime-change operations and unilateral coercive measures (economic sanctions).

Because of course, China and Russia would never

You jest but… delay line memory

And the solution to this is always to raise minimum wage, because skilled labor pay must be higher than unskilled labor pay. If minimum wage goes up, other wages must also go up in order to attract and keep workers in more demanding jobs. Raising minimum wage fixes wages across the board.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The Godmakers by Frank Herbert

Self-Reference ENGINE by Toh EnJoe

*Bonus: Low (comic series) from Image

The sonboard:

And here we see the family together:

If 1 motherboard can make 1 babyboard in 9 months, can 3 motherboards make 1 babyboard in 3 months?

Can I ask, why have you settled on this particular idea for a gift if you really don’t know what to get?

Also, if you’re buying this for someone who loves to cook, they must have some cookware already. What kind of stuff do they have in their kitchen? Do they really need an entire set of cookware, or is there maybe a particular thing that they might appreciate?

These kind of official apologies are more important than people think. This creates an official record admission of fault, which can provide a legal standing for lawsuits. It still has to go through court, but the apology essentially makes the government liable for damages.

The phrase is “a few bad apples spoil the bunch”.

Do they… negotiate these things? Is there like, contract bidding?

I suspect the reality is they find people who are already doing this kind of shit on their own and offer to pay them to keep doing it.

pave paradise, and put up a parking lot

very carefully

Every study performed on insect counts has concluded that overall insect populations are declining, though there is not complete global coverage of data. One study in Germany found that the flying insect population had decreased by 75% from 1990 to 2015.

A 2019 survey of 24 entomologists working on six continents found that on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the worst, all the scientists rated the severity of the insect decline crisis as being between 8–10.

Nothing scares me quite as much as the thought that I might live to see global ecological collapse.

Oh yes, this is a good point, make the work visas more available, then everything can be properly documented.

Another idea would be requiring independent contractors to carry their own insurance and provide documentation for it in order to be employed by a company. That way they have life and health benefit coverage, and we don’t necessarily have to get rid of the independent contractor category for this type of work.

Then we just have to push the companies to pay higher wages in order to cover the workers’ extra cost… which could be done by increasing minimum wage for all work.

When Pérez’s partner sought death benefits from G-4 Services, the local staffing contractor that had hired him to work for Thoma-Sea, G-4 rebuffed her. “Pérez was a self-employed independent contractor and thus a claim for death benefits is not compensable,” a lawyer for the company wrote in May. G-4 contends that Pérez “wasn’t working at the time of his death” even though his corpse was found in the ship with his welding equipment.
[…]
Employers with federal contracts are supposed to ascertain workers’ eligibility — and ensure subcontractors do the same — using the government’s online E-Verify system, which checks identity information like Social Security numbers against federal databases. But experts say E-Verify makes it easy for workers to provide false information, and government agencies rarely monitor compliance with these rules.
[…]
G-4 is disputing the benefits claim, citing Peréz’s ineligibility as an independent contractor, saying his partner was ineligible because they were not legally married, and claiming the sudden death of a healthy 20-year-old was not caused by his job. His death, a medical review conducted at the request of G-4 argued, “occurred while he was working but was not caused by workplace related factors or activities.”

So the problem here is a shady subcontractor company which hires undocumented immigrants as “independent contractors”, and probably doesn’t keep track of whether those workers are working on federal contracts or not, and they’re not being audited. These workers are probably uninsurable without valid documentation, so the company will do whatever it can to avoid having to pay out any benefits because they can’t actually carry legitimate insurance.

The solutions are:

1. Increase the oversight on such companies and enforce rules about identity verification.
2. Close the “independent contractor” loophole, forcing all workers to be fully documented and insured through their companies.

*Edit - further thought on this particular situation:

The contractor (Thomas-Sea) violated the contract term which requires the contractor to verify that workers working on the federal contract are eligible (legally documented). Therefore, the contractor has produced a sub-standard product (the ship) which does not meet the terms of the contract. One must wonder which other requirements they have ignored or intentionally violated.

The federal government should refuse to accept completion of the contract/pay for the ship until the issue is resolved. The resolution should be that all workers who have worked on the contract must be legally documented - therefore the contractor should be required to arrange retroactive work visas for any workers attached to the contract who might need them, with no penalization of the workers themselves for not having visas. The contractor should pay to have this process expedited. The family of the dead man should be compensated for the contractor’s failure to ensure safe working conditions (again as a term for accepting completion of the contract). The contractor is responsible for the behavior of their subcontractor, so if Thomas-Sea wants to sue G-4 Services for the cost of the above, then that’s perfectly fine.

So where I live (US) we have carpool lanes - not on the highway, but on regular commuter roads, city blocks, mostly commercial but also some residential areas. These appear on the right-hand lane. You know, the turning lane, where other vehicles are turning onto the road, or turning off of it, where there are intersections and entries for parking lots and driveways and such.

These lanes make no sense whatsoever. I can’t even imagine the logic behind how they were designed. There’s no benefit to being a carpool driving in this lane, because you will always be slowed down by other vehicles turning onto the road or off of it, so there’s no incentive to carpool. There’s no way to enforce these carpool lanes because anyone stopped by a police officer could just claim that they were going to turn at the next intersection, so ticketing non-carpool drivers is impractical.

I can only assume that this was an idea that sounded good on paper to somebody, but was never reviewed by anyone who had actually driven on a road in their life. I understand the logic behind carpool lanes on the highway (in theory, though they’re not particularly effective in practice), but I can’t understand these, or why they’ve continued to exist for more than a year.

Oh please, you can’t just decide that a term falls under a theory you disagree with and then disregard it out of hand.

The term “authoritarian” might be used in horseshoe theory but it is not defined by horseshoe theory. The term has its own meaning independent of horseshoe theory.

You’re just playing Calvinball to redefine and then exclude words you don’t like.

“US bad, mmm’kay”

See the funny thing is, I can point out that you’re kissing autocrat ass without having to lick any imperial Western boots or whatever.

All I have go do is recognize that you’re kissing autocrat ass. I don’t have to take any position beyond pointing out that you’re kissing autocrat ass.

You should do less kissing autocrat ass.