The obvious answer is that it’s fast, tasty, and requires minimal effort for the consumer, especially if it’s getting delivered. But it also tends to be very cheap compared to dining out. I don’t know what you are ordering where a combo is so much but I normally get a bunch of food from Taco Bell to eat over the course of two days. I can get 2000 calories of food I like to eat for $12.

It’s true that Trump had a simple majority of votes, but you can win the electoral college and lose the popular vote; this is typically what happens for Republican victories. Kamala lost MI, PA, and WI by 3% or less. If those had flipped, she would have had her 270. You are right that third party votes wouldn’t have been enough though. The bigger problem was reduced turnout from people not voting at all.

The fact that Republicans also managed to do so well in Congress to me suggests that the problem for Democrats wasn’t really just their choice for presidential candidate. Voters really care about immigration and inflation right now, and those tend to be stronger for Republicans.

This is actually a very good comparison, thank you.

You are still participating by choosing to be a bystander to injustice. Abstaining when you can support something less bad only says to others that you do not care how bad it gets.

It is rich to criticize the Democrats for claiming moral superiority while doing nothing, as a justification for not voting for the candidate who would at least try to put a leash on what Israel is doing to Gaza.

If you want what’s best for a suffering people, you should vote for the candidate not trying to give their oppressors a blank check. All of America is responsible for what the president we chose does next.

It’s important to remember the Holocaust happened largely because people didn’t do enough to stop it. “First they came for the Communists…” and all that. The Nazis were a fairly minor party for years, but they were able to consolidate power because their opposition wouldn’t rally against them. Coalition requires compromise.

I am not happy with the Democrats either, but they were the better option. And abstaining from a decision between bad and worse doesn’t help anyone. By allowing Trump to take power again when we might have stopped it, we are all responsible for what comes next.

Honestly, there is a reasonable chance he gets assassinated this term. No one is out of reach from the sword of Damocles.

Trump is projected to win the popular vote too, the first time a Republican presidential candidate has since 2004. There are more of the other guys showing up at least.

I felt the same way (spoilers for whoever hasn’t read it). The protagonist just kept encountering significant people where it seems like there’s going to be a struggle to overcome, leading to character development and newfound maturity, but no. He just moves on to another scene instead and they’re not seen again. It was just annoying.

The teacher that feels he’s not living up to his potential? The private school friends that he hangs out with but often finds frustrating? The childhood friend who he shares unexplored romantic tension with? The nuns whose meals he pays for despite having dwindling funds? The prostitute he just wants to have a conversation with? Her pimp, who attacks him? The potentially rapist family friend? For pretty much all of them a relevant conflict is initiated just for him to leave it unresolved, probably after labeling them a phony.

The only exception is his sister, who he sees like two or three times. And then the final conflict at the end is like: “Hey sorry for taking your birthday money so I could keep wandering around these past couple of days instead of talking to our rich parents.” “That’s ok, I forgive you. You’re my brother and I love you. But I worry about you sometimes.” “Yeah anyway, I’m bitter about the world so I kinda want to disappear into the wilderness.” “Please don’t do that.” “Ok I won’t.”

I always took the phrase “She is someone’s [whatever]” not to suggest that the recipient isn’t thinking of them as a person, but that they are thinking of them as a stranger. As in, “How would you like it if you knew someone was treating your [person you care about] like that?”. It’s still a criticism for the recipient, but it doesn’t go as far to accuse them of dehumanizing anyone. Instead, it suggests you should treat them like you would someone you are close to and care about more deeply.

None of you should explain anything to five year olds.

The TvTropes links are mostly right though? It matches the third variation of Earth All Along. The linked examples match what OP is describing except not being restricted to Fantasy.

Mr. Bean energy https://youtu.be/4JwBaLrgzUY

First time I’ve seen someone else mention it. Definitely an underrated show with a lot of wild ideas.

I’m not saying it can’t be done, but getting a compromise from a debate is not a primary goal. For competitions, the goal is usually to demonstrate and practice debate skills and the topic and positions matter less. For more serious debates, it is meant to be a way to expose people to the strengths of your position’s arguments and expose the weaknesses of your opponent’s. It’s valuable as an opportunity to persuade an audience of people who haven’t been firmly entrenched in either position, or who may have only been exposed to one side’s arguments in earnest.

The framework does presume both viewpoints are valid, since both sides are expected to believe in their position, be rational, and be reasonably well-informed. An invalid perspective would not be argued by someone meeting these criteria. It does not presume equality as that would be preemptively judging the quality of the argument. Either the debate platform or the other debater would presumably not agree to a debate with someone who cannot be expected to meet these criteria.

This wouldn’t be 25% of your profit, it’s just increasing one of your expenses by 25%. It looks like it’s going up to $3000.

Edit: Enterprise price is negotiated with each company, so there’s not a set subscription price. But it’s still just the price of one expense, not a portion of total profits.

People already can block individuals easily though. But I agree on the problem with centralized control. Preemptively removing posts/comments should only be done for things that clearly violate rules or are such low quality that it is very likely seeing the content would be to the detriment of most viewers, such as spam or advertisements.

It would be interesting to be able to vote on tags that apply to content so you could ignore stuff that was political for example, but that would just be abused more than current systems.

Thank you for sharing this. Mod abuse is both important to call out and entertaining to see when drama unfolds.

It also helps that there isn’t a competitive mode yet. Until recently it didn’t even track your stats in a visible way. Also, people can only get in by being invited, so you have to have had at least one person who has vouched for you in some way, which probably selects against the most toxic personalities.

Yeah I actually work in a dev team where about half of us picked up programming outside of college. That includes our boss, who’s also the most technically proficient in my opinion. He went through a Microsoft-certified boot camp instead. Some of my uncles are engineers that had college paid for by their company, since they were already shown to be valuable workers without it.

I get the appeal of being able to just look for a candidate’s school instead of doing more heavy-lifting when evaluating a candidate, but the growing over-reliance is to everyone’s detriment. Companies will be missing out on some real talent, and qualified applicants have trouble getting the opportunity to prove themselves.