Have an updoot, Offspring-fan.

In some schools. In my public school, we took practice ACTs and SATs.

Just because something’s “been done for decades” isn’t a good reason to keep doing it, much less to expand the practice. I mean, 50 years after the draft ended, but men still have to register, isn’t a good reason to sign up women.

It’s hard for imprisoned people to have a fair vote, unhindered by pressure from guards, administration, or gangs. You think for-profit prisons selling slave labor of their inmates is bad, just offer them the opportunity to sell their votes.

Woodworking planes.

You can go to Home Depot and get a plane for $15-20, and it will - mostly - cut wood. Spend $50-60 and get a decent name brand tool that gives a lot less grief. Spend $500 and get a Lie Nielsen that’s just on another level.

Here’s the thing, though: you have to be pretty competent to appreciate the difference between the $50 and $500 tools; and if you know what you’re doing, you can easily tune the $15 so it works almost as well as the $500. Buy cheap to get started; upgrade if it turns out you stick with the hobby. I’ll never know if I could have learned easier/faster starting with a $50 plane, but my guess is that I’d still have been gouging the shit out of everything.

University is ok if you’re starting at zero and don’t even know what’s out there. It’s for exposing students to a a breadth of topics and some rationale of why things are as they are, but not necessarily for plugging them into a production environment.

Nothing beats having your own real world project, either for motivation or exposure to cutting edge methods. Universities have tried to replicate that with things like ‘problem based learning,’ and they probably hope that students will be inspired by one or two of the classes to start their own out-of-class project, but school and work are fundamentally different ways of learning with fundamentally different goals.

Trump is exactly the kind of Karen who would describe anyone disagreeing with him as ‘having a mental health episode.’

I make too much to qualify for Medicaid, but my ACA premiums, net of tax credit, are $0. Sorry it hasn’t worked for you, but that’s obviously not the universal outcome.

It kind of sounds like OP morphed from hobbyist to investor, then lost interest when his investment lost value.

There’s a lot of hobbies that offer a path to professional, and I’ve watched friends go down that path. It’s rarely a good experience - there’s all kind of things you have to do as a professional to make a living that you can blow off as a hobbyist/volunteer. There’s a lot more stress when success or failure is tied to whether you eat or not. You lose a lot of freedom to tell dickheads to fuck off.

Never been into collectibles, myself, but the investment pressure seems insidious. Like, it’s one thing to trade cards among friends because you got doubles of something your buddy’s missing, but buying a rare card because it’s “underpriced” to hold until its price recovers is very different. The money is pressure to change from looking at your collection as good, fun, or complete and to looking at its presumptive cash value. Then you’ve stopped being a collector and started being a businessman.

Without an adblocker, I used to mute the system and put youtube in a background window. Do something else long enough for the video and all its ads to play, then go watch it. They wouldn’t play the ads on a second play through, and it would interrupt the cycle of constantly playing a new video.

You know that people pay taxes on the wealth embodied in their house, every year, right? Not even their equity in the house, but the full value - both the piece they own and the piece the bank still owns. Their primary residence is most of the wealth for most of the middle class, so we already have a wealth tax for everyone but the ultra-wealthy.

Tax on hoarded wealth is pressure to make that wealth do something productive. If you can’t get enough return on your invested millions to pay the tax, then you will slowly lose that wealth. Property tax works similarly for farmers and landlords.

The ultra wealthy are exactly the people who should be making big, bold, high-risk bets with their money, because they’ll be just fine if they lose a few million. Yet these are the same people who can live a comfortable, even lavish life off the lowest risk, lowest return investments, like government bonds. The rich say social safety nets discourage poor people from working, and I say that tax-free capital discourage it from working.

Also, very important to remember that wealth tax proposals generally target only wealth over a very high threshold. US proposals have been $10-50M, which seems pretty equivalent to the Spanish implementation.

I’m sure you’ll understand if the rest of us are skeptical of a guy worth $20M arguing against a wealth tax.

I mean, you’re right that restricted shares are a special problem in assessing “wealth,” but that’s why tax laws are complicated and full of loopholes.

Typical cat just knocking things off shelves - the library is an inexhaustible playground.

I have something similar, but wifi. Never even tried to connect to it, because you just use the buttons to set temp & time.

I can imagine, though, that an app might have buttons for ‘eggs’, ‘yogurt’, ‘steak’, etc. Or maybe let you program temperature-time sequences. Or let you check how much time is left from the next room. Conveniences. Definitely no need for them to phone home, though, except maybe for an ad-driven ‘recipe of the week’ type thing.

I need to eat every day whether it’s profitable for Jim Perdue or not. Capitalism is a terrible way to run food distribution or healthcare.

Colon is part of your large intestine.

You’d need some way to cache that video, though, because it’d take 24 hours to write 8TB at SD card speeds of 80 MB/s.

Already been done. GA passed a law in 2021 allowing the legislature to take over any county election office they deem ‘incompetent’ and promptly started the investigations that will let them throw out Atlanta ballots.

The one time Jesus went HAM, chasing religious leaders around their temple with a whip, and whose temple was it? Zeus? Bacchus? Any of those graven-image, many-gods cults? No - he went after his own Father’s priests for being money-grubbing hypocrites.

I’m guessing that story doesn’t come up often at CPAC or prayer breakfasts.

It’s like a bear-sized Matchbox car. And when they take it away, he starts eating the fluff, like a 2-ton toddler.