Most teachers are amazing people that I trust completely. I still don’t want them to be carrying guns around my kids. For one, there’s always the remote possibility that the teacher flips out and uses it in anger on a student or another faculty. Secondly there’s the possibility that a student gets their hands on it. The bad things that might happen are far more likely than the slim chance of an active shooter showing up and a teacher actually being able to stop them.

In a liquidation sale, common stock holders only get paid if there is money left over after everyone else gets their cut. Creditors, bondholders and preferred stock holders are ahead of them in line.

It’s also worth pointing out that the company is not publicly traded, it’s privately owned, so in effect the shares were always worthless. It’s not clear to me if they were actually ownership shares or just options against the possibility of the company going public at some point in the future.

At what point do they stop pretending they are all about reducing government waste?

Starbucks has a huge corporate office in Seattle.

I’m pretty sure the avian flu outbreaks have had a much more significant impact on the price of eggs than any state regulations. I suppose they’ll try to blame California for that, too.

“We can’t have people working remotely. Look, I’m the CEO and even I’m commuting into the office every day!”

I don’t go around scanning random codes, but often times I have to scan a code for something like paying for parking. How can I know if someone put a sticker over it with a malicious URL?

Edit: apologies - it’s not 30%, it’s closer to 6.5%.

You’re still way off the mark, here. Market cap is the total value of their stock shares on the market at the current stock price. It has zero relation to GDP, which is meant to represent the value of actual goods and services produced. For that, you need to look at their actual revenues. In 2024, Nvidia had total revenues of about $61B. That’s about 0.2% of the US GDP. Which is still massive, but nothing like what you’re suggesting.

And that totally makes sense. If you’ve been pulled over for, say, speeding, and the officer notices that you aren’t wearing your seat-belt then that should get added. But it seems like that would be really easy for the officer to make a mistake or simply lie about as a primary offense. I did look it up and Florida has a primary enforcement law for seat-belts, which means technically they can pull you over for not wearing it without any other reason for the traffic stop. So that sucks. I mean, I want people to wear seat-belts, but that just seems like a statute ripe for abuse.

He refused to provide his license during a traffic stop which is certainly an arrestable offense. However, it kind of sounds like the stop might have been illegal in the first place. They pulled him over for not having his headlights on. During the day. In clear weather. They also say they pulled him over for not wearing his seat-belt, but I don’t see how they could have possibly known that until they had already pulled him over. So you start to see how this looks more like profiling/harassment than a legit traffic stop.

If the traffic stop is illegal, then you are well within your rights to refuse to cooperate.

This seems really important and not like a petty attempt at distraction at all.

Yes, but they still need to have reasonable suspicion to do so. They can’t just sweep an area and pick up every brown person they think might be in the country illegally. Outside of an official border crossing they need to be looking for specific individuals.

Just like police have the ability to pull over a driver, but they can’t just do it because they feel like it. Without reasonable suspicion it’s an illegal stop.

Dude. The Space Shuttle program was initially meant to run for 10 years and 100 missions. It ultimately ran for 30 years and 135 missions,far surpassing every design goal. The tragedy is not that it was shut down, but that there was nothing to replace it when we did.

I would argue that it’s more a consequence of a whole series of poorly thought-out business decisions. Customer service is a cost center, meaning it doesn’t bring in revenue. So it’s one of those things that executives like to target for cost-cutting measures because any amount they can reduce spending there improves their overall bottom line. So we get things like:

• Outsourcing CS. Maybe in the US, but more likely overseas
• Reduced training
• Rules for call handlers that are meant to encourage solving problems quickly, but effectively punish them for providing good service when they are unable to do that.

When the only meaningful metric they look at is “how little can we spend?” the only logical conclusion is that service is going to suffer. The actual cost of poor customer service is a lot more difficult to pin down and measure.

Just so everyone is clear: these books aren’t part of any curriculum. Kids aren’t forced to read them or listen to them being read. They’re just in the classroom. These people are freaking out just having their kids in a room near these books. If your “expression of religious freedom” is to prevent your child ever being exposed to ideas that might conflict with what you are telling them at home, then you should take them out of public school and lock them in a closet. But your faith must be pretty fragile if those are the sort of measures you have to take to sustain it.

You forgot childcare. Tack on another 2-3K per month in expenses for that.

It is, indeed, a whole truckload of crazy.

Fine, here are several things they could be doing that would actually be productive right now:

• Start campaigning hard, now, for the upcoming midterms, telling voters exactly what the Trump administration has done that is hurting them, and how they can fix it. Look at Bernie and AOC for a good example.
• Identify districts where they can help campaign and inject funding to tip the scales.
• Join protests in their districts. Show up and support the people on the ground.
• Keep pushing to get access to ICE detention centers as much as possible. Tell the stories of the people being detained. Show the world that this has nothing to do with rounding up criminals. If ICE agents try to stop them or assault/arrest them, so much the better. That shit is getting people riled up.
• Stand with state governors that are defying executive orders from the president.

I could list stuff here all day. None of it changes the fact that articles of impeachment aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on right now. Republicans control congress and are colluding with a corrupt executive branch. The Democrats in congress have zero power to effect change through their offices right now. They need to do the work to get some power back first. At best, they can do something like this to grab a few headlines and maybe get a few republicans on record saying they explicitly support what Trump is doing. Sadly, a good chunk of the population agrees still, and this isn’t going to change that.

Do you think the only options are “do nothing” or “do something pointless”?

Balls has nothing to do with it. At this point it’s just a token effort. It won’t pass a single vote.