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Unions are legal in all occupations.

One caveat: the legal protections of the right to unionize apply to non-supervisors. If you have people who report to you, your power to unionize is pretty limited.

There are also some specialized jobs that aren’t allowed to unionize by either federal or state law: actual soldiers in the Army, certain political jobs, etc.

But for the most part, if you are employed, you’re probably allowed to unionize (and protected against retaliation even in an unsuccessful union drive).

It feels so real in how disappointing the experience becomes for the straight characters.

This hits the nail on the head. It’s funny because of the point of view of the actual participants.

The funny thing about this thread is that there are so many comments essentially agreeing with the central premise of the sketch, that it’s relatable and disorienting when you stumble onto some kind of established fandom and can’t seem to keep up with why it’s popular or what is or isn’t “part of it.” The popularity is confusing in itself, and the need to dissect the lore (as OP is doing, perhaps even unintentionally following the sketch itself) distracts from the original purpose of going there to be entertained.

In other words, the sketch is funny and relatable exactly for the same reasons why much of the audience doesn’t find it funny and relatable.

Yeah, you can think of it as a simple transaction fee for debit transactions, and a full blown credit and risk shifting system for credit transactions. The banks charge high fees for credit transactions because they’re actually lending money and bearing some credit risk for them, whereas the debit transactions are just moving money from one account to another.

This stuff takes a while to get going.

The FTC sued to stop Microsoft from acquiring Activision in December 2022, but lost.

DOJ sued Google in January 2023, and won their trial last month.

The FTC and DOJ started rulemaking on new merger disclosure and review requirements in June 2023.

The FTC sued Amazon in September 2023.

DOJ sued Ticketmaster/Live Nation in May 2024.

The last two years have shown aggressive antitrust enforcement for the first time in about 50 years, when Robert Bork basically convinced the Supreme Court and all Republicans to impose almost impossible standards for antitrust regulations.

I think this article misleadingly states what the stats show.

Each American generation is less religious than the older generations, and Gen Z is no different. It’s just that Gen Z women are far less religious than previous generations, a bigger gap than the men. From the study that provides the underlying stats:

What’s remarkable is how much larger the generational differences are among women than men. Gen Z men are only 11-points more religiously unaffiliated than Baby Boomer men, but the gap among women is almost two and a half times as large. Thirty-nine percent of Gen Z women are unaffiliated compared to only 14 percent of Baby Boomer women.

In other words, Gen Z men are less religious than Boomer men. This basic conclusion doesn’t seem to come through in the original article, which almost suggests that young men are more religious than older generations.

The kinetic energy in that stardust, and the gravitational potential energy of stardust pulling itself into tighter balls, doesn’t necessarily come from fusion. There’s all sorts of cosmological forces and energy out there, and I don’t think they all trace back to nucleii smushing together.

So is biomass. And wind. And fossil fuels. And hydro.

In fact, I think only geothermal and fission aren’t fusion-based.

This is a counter to the Democratic party supporters you see everywhere who always get irrationally upset at third party voters, not about Republicans.

Plenty of us Democrats are very much in support of a ranked choice voting schemes, or similar structural rules like non-partisan blanket primaries (aka jungle primaries). The most solidly Democratic state, California, has implemented top-2 primaries that give independents and third parties a solid shot for anyone who can get close to a plurality of votes as the top choice.

Alaska’s top four primary, with RCV deciding between those four on election day, is probably the best system we can realistically achieve in a relatively short amount of time.

Plenty of states have ballot initiatives that bypass elected officials, so people should be putting energy into those campaigns.

But by the time it comes down to a plurality-take-all election between a Republican who won the primary, a Democrat who won the primary, and various third party or independents who have no chance of winning, the responsible thing to make your views represented is to vote for the person who represents the best option among people who can win.

Partisan affiliation is open. If a person really wants to run on their own platform, they can go and try to win a primary for a major party, and change it from within.

TL;DR: I’ll fight for structural changes to make it easier for third parties and independents to win. But under the current rules, voting for a spoiler is throwing the election and owning the results.

Why do you care if the person you voted for wins?

Because it’s an election with consequences, not an online fandom.

She absolutely is a trash person. I agree. I’m not defending her to be clear.

People who let their dogs off leash in public are assholes and deserved to be confronted and shamed. She was a piece of shit well before their conversation started.

to the downvote brigade I highly recommend go watch the full video and decide for yourself

Yeah it’s obvious she’s weaponizing the police against a guy who she doesn’t like, by knowingly playing directly into the “police will overreact against a black guy” card, and faking panic in her voice. This is violent escalation to a non-violent situation. The faked panic is straight up sociopathic.

People who don’t leash their dogs are assholes, and his response to that was relatively tame.

I don’t see how you can watch this and respond the way you have, unless you’re also the type of asshole who feels entitled to walk dogs without leashes, or generally dislike black people, or are completely oblivious to the social context in which police in New York interact with black people.

$83 billion per month is almost $1 trillion per year. That sounds about right.

John Oliver sometimes runs random out of context clips of MILF Manor and I’m not sure actually watching them in context would make them any less ridiculous.

I’m saying that you can reduce birthrates a lot and it won’t make much of a difference, because you can’t go below zero and the rich/high consumption countries are already low.

If your goal is to reduce net consumption, then reduce consumption (or replenish consumed resources through increased production or restoration/replenishment of what is consumed). Preventing births itself won’t meaningfully move the needle.

I’d rather focus on raising up the lowest into a tier of stability

What you’re describing, then, has nothing to do with birth rates. That’s what I’m saying in this thread: reduced birth rates won’t fix the problem of runaway consumption and emerging scarcity.

You’re talking about the bottom 90% of the world and I’m saying that they don’t consume as much as the top 10%, so I’m focusing mainly on the top 10%. If we’re going to discuss resource consumption, the people we talk about should be weighted by the resources they consume. And by that metric, the global rich consume much more, and have fewer children, than the global poor. Therefore, it’s easy to point out that reducing birth rates won’t actually do much to reduce consumption, because the people who have kids aren’t doing much of the consuming.

The jet fuel is just an example of that general correlation, and one of several mechanisms why the childless tend to consume much more. You can argue “oh but all else being equal more mouths equals more resources” but I’m saying that all else isn’t even close to equal, so you should engage with the patterns as they actually exist in the world rather than a hypothetical where everyone is equal.

Who the fuck can afford that?

The fact that you struggle to imagine that these people exist in large quantities tells me that you haven’t actually fully understood the power distribution of who is consuming how much.

On CO2 emissions, the top 10% emit about 48% of the CO2. The top 10% of Americans (where the cutoff is about $135k) produce about 55 tonnes of CO2 per capita per year, and they have low birth rates.

people with kids travel by plane too

Yes, but paradoxically having more children makes households consume fewer passenger miles at any given budget, because traveling with children is slow and less enjoyable, and their tickets are just as expensive. So the DINK couple with the $200k budget can fly for vacations and even weekend getaways once every few months (4-8 times per year), but after having kids might only fly on one trip per year. Even with two kids, doubling the number of people in their household, they might be looking at half the passenger miles by taking 1/4 as many trips.

And if eating all the meat in the world and throwing food in the trash and using disposable diapers doesn’t compare at all to the consumption involved in traveling out of town by plane, then adding up all the day-to-day stuff the family is doing with kids won’t compare to the jet setting couple with the same budget.

Throw in the fact that the people who have the $200k+ budgets are less likely to have kids, and you have the correlation where consumption is negatively correlated with fertility/household size.

Look at how fast those things go through diapers, and tell me the single couple is throwing that much trash away every week.

Are you counting the trash generated by the fact that the DINK couple can afford to go out to eat dinner at restaurants 5 times a week, and travel by plane 4-5 times per year?

You’re thinking about human resource consumption as if it’s a bell curve, where most are within an order of magnitude as everyone else.

But that’s not the case. The wealthy consume literally thousands of times more than the poor, and income/wealth is negatively correlated with fertility, so it can be the case that a single childless millionaire consumes more resources than a dozen 4-person households.

So when comparing the countries where the birth rates have actually fallen below replacement, and where their populations are on the cusp of shrinking, you’ll see that as they have fewer children their consumption still goes up exponentially even when their population doesn’t.

Taking away scarcity by making fewer people compete for those resources doesn’t actually change the aggregate amount of resources consumed. People are perfectly capable of increasing their demand several orders of magnitude if there’s less competition snatching up those resources first.

That’s my point. The correlation already runs the other way. As those countries start to see shrinking populations, they’ll also continue to consume greater amounts per capita, offsetting the population decrease.

China and South Korea are starting to shrink. Do we really believe that their pollution and resource consumption are going to go down in the next 10 years?

And it doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking causation in one direction or another, or a spurious correlation with some other confounding factors. The fact is, the highest consumption populations tend to have the lowest birth rates, and vice versa, so why would we expect dwindling births to reduce consumption?