Would it only be Texas though? Is there a chance that other US states might also join along with them, not because they wanted to secede before, but because the GOP is a cult and they can convince their people to go along with anything? Plus, how many military personnel would “defect” over to this new Texas Republic? The idea of Texas leaving and trying to go it alone against the rest of the current US is fairly one-sided, but what if Texas peels away a sizable chunk of the US with it? I wouldn’t doubt that Trump would support it if it meant saving his skin from all the trials he’s involved in (though given the status of most of them it may not be necessary).
I was just thinking about interactions like this I've had a few times with different nice drivers, where I think they'll be trying to wave me through (no flashing brights or anything), I'm assuming to be nice, but they're far enough away that I can't see them, so I'm not entirely certain of their intent. Usually it's a busy road, so there's very little margin for error, if I misjudge what they're doing, then there's gonna be a problem. And then you both end up missing a chance to go because they screwed up the process, when, if they just hadn't tried to be nice and just went like they were supposed to, we both could've gone. Just follow the dumb traffic laws.
The exception to this though is at my kid's school. To turn into the school, there's a system that most of the parents follow and it works well, we essentially treat the entryway as a modified 3-way stop. Whoever has the easiest time to get in/get out go last in the order. So people needing to pull out and make a left turn onto the main road get first priority, then people needing to make a left turn into the school, finally people making a right-hand turn either into or out of the school go last. Anyone not going into the school just keeps going.
This system works better than when a traffic cop is occasionally posted to direct traffic (for whatever reason). With the cop, traffic gets backed up everywhere around the school and it takes everyone forever to get where they need to go. Without the cop, most people follow "the system" and traffic flows smoothly. When someone doesn't follow the system, it's not necessarily a surprise because they just don't wait, but usually a car or two later follows the system and everyone goes where they need to. You're rarely waiting for long.
“Yes, and she’s scrabbling around to get them back on again, but even before she can get her knickers on, I’ve seen everything. Yeah. I’ve seen it all.”
I have accounts with Ally, Fidelity, and Schwab currently, though Ally has been my main e-bank, Fidelity for an inherited IRA with various stocks (though I’ve only been selling these off as I need to eventually clear the acct), and Schwab is for a few $100 in “play” money I blew on meme stocks that have since gone to shit. I was planning on cashing everything out of Fidelity when the market improved a little more (knock on wood) and moving it all to Ally, but I may rethink that after reading this.
I didn’t realize the SPAXX fund was a money market acct that earned interest (I know it’s literally in the name), it’s just the default position if you sell off stocks. When it’s listed aside all the other stocks in the acct though, it doesn’t give any indication that it earns any interest.
Is there a good amount to buy t-bills at if doing a t-bill ladder, or would you just take however much you plan to invest in total and divide by ~26 (every other week for a year)? What’s the min amt you can buy at?
What arguments would people even have about Rise of Skywalker? How bad it actually is? Do those that think it’s utter shit get frothy at the mouth if somebody says they thought it was just “kinda bad”?
Years ago I had been out of multiplayer gaming for a number of years and had really only had experiences with PC games, where multiplayer is/was just this standard thing. You already bought the game, playing multiplayer with other people is just a thing you can hop on and do whenever you want for free (provided there’s other people to play). I owned consoles, but never played multiplayer games on them, so never dealt with game passes or anything like that.
When my oldest son started getting into gaming, we wanted to play couch co-op on an Xbox game, but then ran into a problem with it requiring an Xbox game pass for a co-op mode (it had been couch co-op in previous games from the series; basically a horde mode where you go against bots, so no reason to go online). Requiring a game pass for that just seemed like a shit way to get more subscriptions.
When I complained about it on Reddit, people swarmed to tell me what a jackass I was and that of course you have to subscribe to play with game pass, like what kind of world was I living in where I expected free multiplayer gaming? Apparently I hadn’t realized what a golden age I had lived in when something like free multiplayer gaming was just a standard thing.
Hitchhiker’s Guide is more like a sci-fi fairy tale, though without any sort of moral teachings or any life lessons outside of “Don’t Panic”. It’s just characters going from one improbable situation or interesting conversation to another. Outside of maybe Marvin the paranoid android and Zaphod, none of the other characters are particularly interesting, they’re just sort of blank vehicles to keep the story going or Arthur as the cabbagehead/Watson-esque character to ask questions for the reader.
On the one hand, as a worker, I absolutely think it should be considered part of the work day, HOWEVER, there’s so many factors that go into what constitutes your commute, that I’m not sure how businesses would account for that. Is it based on distance, so the farther away you live, the more compensation you get, just because you live further away? That seems to unfairly reward people people who live farther away. Do you just give a blanket extra 1 hr (30 min before/after the work day) to everyone to account for it, assuming that that covers most cases?
It does seem to be a standard for most businesses that travel, you’re paying for their time just to come out. I’ve had plenty of plumbers/handymen/house fixerish people who have charged just for gracing me with their presence for <10 min, even though they didn’t actually do any work, there’s usually a ~$50–100 minimum charge for house calls. I’m assuming their travel time is getting factored into it, so why shouldn’t other workers travel time be factored in as well?