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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Congress could do quite a few things. Biden on his own could do a couple things. I was asking about price gouging specifically?
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Jul 26, 2023 20:05
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Shooting Blanks posted:I was asking about price gouging specifically? Sorry, that was more addressed to the second person. Congress could do some things. Especially in areas where there is limited competition - like poultry production or pharmaceuticals. For stuff like toilet paper or garbage bags where there is a lot of competition, then there isn't a ton they can do. If there are a lot of options on where you can get your garbage bags and the demand is there for them to sell out at the prices they are currently selling for, then they are going to keep selling them for that amount or raise prices. They could also just do a heavy-handed price cap, but that would probably lead to lower prices and shortages if there really is a limited supply due to production capacity and they can sell the limited stock to someone else who doesn't have a cap. They could also do things to encourage production of specific items or lower the costs of producing them via subsidies or tariffs. All of those things will take a while, though. You can fairly easily target specific things, but it is really hard to legislatively hit inflation overall unless you just straight up lower spending and hit most of the population with targeted and meaningful tax increases that are enough to take away some excess savings, but not ruin anyone - which is also incredibly hard to do, even if congress wanted to do it (which they never will).
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Jul 26, 2023 20:13
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Shooting Blanks posted:I was asking about price gouging specifically? There is no federal law against price gouging but most states has one, though they tend to be all over the map and obviously can’t do much about prices of goods imported from other countries. Apparently they tried to pass a federal law in 2022, the Price Gouging Protection Act, mostly aimed at oil and gas prices after they spiked with the invasion of Ukraine, but it didn’t pass.
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Jul 26, 2023 20:16
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DeSantis suggests he could pick RFK Jr. to lead the FDA or CDC
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Jul 26, 2023 20:41
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Shooting Blanks posted:Other than publicly calling them out, is there anything that Congress or Biden can do about price gouging? A ton of various letters to shareholders and CEO statements over the past year have attributed their profit growth to their ability to force higher prices on consumers. Price gouging tends to naturally resolve on its own once the underlying issue is solved, because if all your company's rivals are massively overcharging, then that makes it both easy and rewarding to undercut all of them and attract tons of new customers by simply charging normal non-gouging prices. That's why price gouging is relatively rare and almost always comes after some sort of supply or demand crisis. Under normal conditions, it requires massive collusion across basically the entire industry, while simultaneously providing a huge incentive for companies to betray the rest and defy the scheme.
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Jul 26, 2023 20:47
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OctaMurk posted:DeSantis suggests he could pick RFK Jr. to lead the FDA or CDC
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Jul 26, 2023 20:47
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Sub Par posted:He has made these claims before, in June, in a different interview here. Relevant excerpt: Welp, if he is legit, then the world is a much crazier place than I previously believed: quote:In a Sunday interview with NewsNation, Grusch expanded on some of his bold claims and added a few new ones, though he did not provide any evidence beyond his word. Below are the most eye-opening allegations from his 40-minute segment.
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Jul 26, 2023 20:56
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Welp, if he is legit, then the world is a much crazier place than I previously believed: If he is legit, then the congressional investigation will no doubt manage to find any of the many, many people who've supposedly told him all about their firsthand experience of alien stuff. Until that happens, I don't think it's worth giving much thought to him. His claims are wide-ranging and attention-grabbing, but he has no evidence and hasn't seen any of this stuff himself, nor is he really presenting any specifics. It's just vague insinuations that he swears some guy told him.
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Jul 26, 2023 21:14
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Main Paineframe posted:If he is legit, then the congressional investigation will no doubt manage to find any of the many, many people who've supposedly told him all about their firsthand experience of alien stuff. I dunno. He said it under oath and all the details about the timing and the Pope's involvement do seem to add up.
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Jul 26, 2023 21:16
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Main Paineframe posted:If he is legit, then the congressional investigation will no doubt manage to find any of the many, many people who've supposedly told him all about their firsthand experience of alien stuff. I just refuse to believe that level of coverup, including defense contractors, is possible to maintain for drat near 100 years. And, of course, amazing claims require amazing evidence. Which he has none of.
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Jul 26, 2023 21:21
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If aliens visit the Earth daily and the Earth is no different than if there had been no aliens, and we can know nothing about them, what does it matter? Why even cover anything up? If you can’t learn anything from recovered craft after 80+ years and you have dozens of examples, who gives a poo poo?
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Jul 26, 2023 21:26
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Fork of Unknown Origins posted:I just refuse to believe that level of coverup, including defense contractors, is possible to maintain for drat near 100 years. The coverup hasn’t been maintained as much as plausible deniability has. None of what the dude is saying hasn’t been said before by many other people. It’s not really a coverup if there’s no place to go with your information that is seen as credible, and any outlet you can get into is a channel flooded with genuine loons. What’s weird here is that this is a guy who everybody within the government seems to talk to and then do what you’d expect them to do if he wasn’t a wackadoo. He went through channels, and the people who represent those channels support him continuing up the chain. The IG isn’t out here saying he’s a nut, the IG would need to be as much of a loon as this guy would have to be, it’d have to be these sober, hidebound rules-followers losing their minds and becoming kooks too, all the way down, for what we saw today to have gotten to where it is without some kind of “holy loving poo poo he’s not joking” material underpinning it, at least how I’m seeing it.
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Jul 26, 2023 21:28
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Main Paineframe posted:If he is legit, then the congressional investigation will no doubt manage to find any of the many, many people who've supposedly told him all about their firsthand experience of alien stuff. Secret Invasion just came out, this guy's claims are on par with how Sicario 2 came out and like a three weeks later Trump was going on about prayer rugs on the Mexican border.
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Jul 26, 2023 21:34
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selec posted:The coverup hasn’t been maintained as much as plausible deniability has. None of what the dude is saying hasn’t been said before by many other people. It’s not really a coverup if there’s no place to go with your information that is seen as credible, and any outlet you can get into is a channel flooded with genuine loons. Nah. I refuse to believe that we have had space ships in government warehouses (and a contractor, I guess Raytheon just has one in a hanger somewhere?) without someone, somewhere among the thousands of people necessary stealing a photo, or a document, or literally anything to prove their claim If you had a guy with a credible claim beyond 'Oh yeah, all sorts of people told me all this crazy poo poo about UFOs' then it'd be front page Washington Post.
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Jul 26, 2023 21:39
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selec posted:The coverup hasn’t been maintained as much as plausible deniability has. None of what the dude is saying hasn’t been said before by many other people. It’s not really a coverup if there’s no place to go with your information that is seen as credible, and any outlet you can get into is a channel flooded with genuine loons. It's also not really a coverup if there's simply no evidence of ET visitation of earth and this guy's just insane or lying, which is almost certainly the case.
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Jul 26, 2023 21:41
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I AM GRANDO posted:If aliens visit the Earth daily and the Earth is no different than if there had been no aliens, and we can know nothing about them, what does it matter? Why even cover anything up? If you can’t learn anything from recovered craft after 80+ years and you have dozens of examples, who gives a poo poo? That gets at part of my main issues with alien theories. Why cover it up this much. For example; the Nazis were a national security risk. It was important to not tell people we broke the Engima code so the Nazis didn't know we had that advantage. But like, we didn't try to hide that Nazis existed at all. But that's what is happening with what would be the greatest national security threat of all time? Refusing to pin down if they even exist for decades? It doesn't make sense, not practically, nor if they wanted the power to themselves somehow. They certainly aren't in league with the aliens cause this has gone on for far too long and there's been way too many unwanted shifts of power within both parties for that to be plausible. Them working with the aliens would be the only reason to be this cagey with the essential evidence to support this concern, and that's not the case. And Elon "I like X" Musk wouldn't be beating NASA at their own game to get to Mars if they had even an inkling of access to interstellar tech. And Trump would have spilled the beans because he obviously has zero interest in the stability and security of the US. "Oh they don't tell the President?" also makes zero sense. The people who would have ostensibly benefitted from this information have not done so. For all the might the oligarchs have over the masses they still die of cancer, can't get out of low-Earth orbit, and can get personally torn to pieces in a popular uprising like every other human with power across history.
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Jul 26, 2023 21:41
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We would know for a fact if there were aliens, because Trump would have casually mentioned our secret alien technology to some sycophants at maralago E;fb
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Jul 26, 2023 21:43
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Orthanc6 posted:That gets at part of my main issues with alien theories. Why cover it up this much. For example... The issue with the alien theories isn't anything other than the fact that there's zero proof and the claims aren't falsifiable.
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Jul 26, 2023 21:43
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Caros posted:Nah. I refuse to believe that we have had space ships in government warehouses (and a contractor, I guess Raytheon just has one in a hanger somewhere?) without someone, somewhere among the thousands of people necessary stealing a photo, or a document, or literally anything to prove their claim Bud there are a ton of videos and pics of crafts out there, many of which are fake. I also think you’re putting an enormous amount of faith in journalistic outlets that have acted as mouthpieces for the government, and censored stories at the informal request of powerful people many times throughout their checkered pasts. If you went around claiming that government agents dosed you with drugs before the Family Jewels got leaked, you would’ve been seen as crazy too. Lots of people had crazy stories before they were just confirmed history. Parapolitical history is loaded with this stuff—was the Gulf of Tonkin true before it was false? I am definitely in the “want to believe” camp but am also a pretty firmly grounded materialist, so had no real interest in UFO stuff until a few months ago; it’s the way this process is different in a bureaucratic sense that is making my hair tingle, not the claims. Unless you think it’s the case here that extremely well-credentialed bureaucrats all lost their poo poo simultaneously: AOC, Raskin, the intelligence IG, James Clapper in his front-row seat at today’s hearing, what’s the competing explanation for these alleged kooks, who all had insanely high security clearances, managing to snow all these other public servants?
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Jul 26, 2023 21:47
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selec posted:Bud there are a ton of videos and pics of crafts out there, many of which are fake. I also think you’re putting an enormous amount of faith in journalistic outlets that have acted as mouthpieces for the government, and censored stories at the informal request of powerful people many times throughout their checkered pasts. Are AOC, Raskin, the intelligence IG, or James Clapper actually saying that they believe the claims about extraterrestrials? A pretty firmly grounded materialist would require some real evidence which still doesn't seem to actually exist.
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Jul 26, 2023 21:54
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selec posted:Bud there are a ton of videos and pics of crafts out there, many of which are fake. I also think you’re putting an enormous amount of faith in journalistic outlets that have acted as mouthpieces for the government, and censored stories at the informal request of powerful people many times throughout their checkered pasts. The thought process you've laid out here is exactly how people get tied up in conspiracy theories. Taking something that you want to believe and bringing up the fact that previously "crazy" ideas have been proven true is asking for trouble. There are endless non-alien reasons why you might have a spooky hearing like this one. Politics is full of people who don't need to behave rationally. You need evidence and a falsifiable hypothesis. There is no real evidence to suggest that aliens have visited earth.
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Jul 26, 2023 21:57
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DeadlyMuffin posted:Are AOC, Raskin, the intelligence IG, or James Clapper actually saying that they believe the claims about extraterrestrials? They don’t have to show up to hearings and ask questions if they don’t want to, and all the reps treated the three witnesses as credible and helpful—you can go watch yourself and form your own opinion, but these guys, if there is anybody in our government who would be able to know what they claim to, would be the guys. The IG is also another filter—that’s where you cull out kooks or people with shoddy cases. That the IG has heard this out and continues to, in the narrow way someone in the position is able to, sustain the effort, is another big sign to me. That’s where I am hooked here: these guys aren’t getting the kook treatment from the many layers of government designed to screen out kooks, and it’s not like they showed up saying TRUST ME BRO: they worked for the specific arms of government designed to get up to secret squirrel poo poo. It’s not some random Raytheon contractor, these are people speaking to the specific jobs they had within our government. I mostly ignore the claims for now; it’s interesting but ultimately if they’re right it’s possible we only have the vaguest understanding of what we’re seeing. What has me interested is that they keep floating up through the multiple layers designed to keep poo poo that isn’t worth bothering with off Important People’s schedules, get on those schedules, and are being given a bipartisan hearing where everybody seems to be taking them very seriously. If they are frauds, it’s a devastating indictment of the oversight functions of government that they were on CSPAN today. Ironically; if they’re not frauds the same thing is true, but only because it takes whistleblowers to expose secretive projects like this to the people ultimately charged with overseeing them. There’s no outcome where the oversight process comes out covered in glory here, it would be embarrassing either way.
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Jul 26, 2023 22:05
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Believing in aliens is the same as believing in devils and angels: there is no proof either exists and the main purveyors of these stories are all a little crazy. I'm not saying there are no aliens; I'm saying there is zero proof aliens have visited Earth. Conspiracies that say the government is hiding something run into the same problem as conspiracies 9-11 conspiracies: there is no way that many people could keep something like that secret.
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Jul 26, 2023 22:06
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Jesus III posted:Believing in aliens is the same as believing in devils and angels: there is no proof either exists and the main purveyors of these stories are all a little crazy. Learn your Kojima! You don’t keep it secret; you flood the channel with disinformation, and punish insiders for deviation. Two of the things the whistleblowers are calling out specifically, in fact. I don’t know that there are aliens, but I think there’s something big and weird the government is sitting on, and the bureaucratic response alone to the allegations tells me it’s being taken very seriously by people who don’t tend to gently caress around with unserious poo poo. If you were to just slough off the stuff about aliens, and just look at the bureaucratic response and steady escalation this story has been through, it’s obvious people believe something serious is happening, and are being shown things in the SCIF that make them continue to pursue the process despite the claims sounding wild as gently caress. Why wouldn’t AOC have come out of the first briefing and twirled her finger by her ear unless she’s either 1. Crazy as these dudes are or 2. Saw and heard things that gave her pause?
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Jul 26, 2023 22:13
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selec posted:Learn your Kojima! You don’t keep it secret; you flood the channel with disinformation, and punish insiders for deviation. Two of the things the whistleblowers are calling out specifically, in fact. None of that means aliens. There is literally nothing to point to aliens. It's just a belief, as unscientific as the Ark theme park.
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Jul 26, 2023 22:16
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This thread is obviously rife with government plants trying to distract us with endless unfounded arguments about the unknowable
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Jul 26, 2023 22:19
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brugroffil posted:They should stop raising rates imo It’s not been working(as well as it used to). Taxing the rich would work.
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Jul 26, 2023 22:21
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Jesus III posted:None of that means aliens. There is literally nothing to point to aliens. It's just a belief, as unscientific as the Ark theme park. I agree, it could be paradimensional time travelers or dinosaurs that live inside the hollow earth. These guys who arguably should know says it’s non-human intelligence, I think. But it could be a lot of things. What I find most interesting is that they keep getting sent up the chain and treated like normal dudes with a genuine claim, handled with bureaucratic decency if you will, while saying it’s aliens. It’s like seeing a hippo in one of the chairs at the hairdresser when you walk in! There’s so many steps before the hippo was in the chair, how has this happened? A lot of otherwise seemingly-normal people had to hear “we’re gonna give the hippo a makeover” and have that explained to them and eventually gone “well I don’t like it but you make a solid case” before that moment. That poo poo makes me curious as hell! I have never hosed with Art Bell or UFO sites or whatever, what’s got me here is the bureaucratic angle, because that’s where they’re getting their legitimacy from. Everybody who should (according to many of the posts I’m responding to) know better is acting like they don’t know better, or that they do in fact know better after having listened to these dudes. It’s a genuinely weird situation that I think is worth more consideration than “these kooks sound like other kooks” especially when you consider the strategies we know our own government has engaged in w/r/t disinformation! Why are the official organs of the state treating this as credible when there’s no non-embarrassing outcome from the choice to do so? That’s a real mystery, and I am enjoying the hell out of it.
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Jul 26, 2023 22:24
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Bar Ran Dun posted:It’s not been working(as well as it used to). Taxing the rich would work.  Can we keep our solutions limited to thinks that actually have a chance of happening, like aliens or intra-dimensional travel?
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Jul 26, 2023 22:29
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selec posted:Bud there are a ton of videos and pics of crafts out there, many of which are fake. I also think you’re putting an enormous amount of faith in journalistic outlets that have acted as mouthpieces for the government, and censored stories at the informal request of powerful people many times throughout their checkered pasts. The telling thing is that the stories of aliens and their spacecraft change over time, and consistently reflect both popular science fiction just prior to the sighting (public knowledge) and experimental aircraft being tested at the time ( often classified at the time but clearly documented later.) The kind of coverups that would be needed go way beyond exploiting public trust in journalists. That part isn't not limited to alien stuff either. I wasn't aware until relatively recently that the chupacabra cryptid only goes back to 1995, and originated in an incident where someone literally described the monster from Species, which she had just seen.
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Jul 26, 2023 22:31
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Gyges posted:I was more pissed when I posted earlier, since I just realized that everyone with less than 10 years was essentially going to be making the same, pt. They did that last contract too, and I was a newish hire then and I realized it was bullshit. Basically the contracts tend to screw over the medium term guys, and the old timers get pissed that they aren't as far above a new hire as they were. the last contract we had was the nail in the coffin for Hoffa's control over the union, and is literally the reason he got ousted in favor of Sean O'Brian. I have personal experience with Sean and he's a legit dude, super passionate about the workers, so that's why I've been optimistic about this contract. I never thought we would get EVERYTHING in this one, but honestly compared to the last contract which explicitly hosed people like me over the hardest, I can't imagine this one being any worse, and from the cliffs notes it looks great. but yeah, still waiting on the full thing. Eason the Fifth posted:Are UPS hubs still gross as gently caress, and do you still end your shift as a loader or unloader coughing up black poo poo? I only worked there for a couple of years back in the early 2000s, but Jesus what a health-wrecking, back-ruining job, and that was even before online ordering really took off. poo poo like the fans though, those are still caked in so much filth from literal decades of buildup that hitting them with anything causes them to cough a huge often opaque cloud of dust made up of extremely fine grain cardboard dust, vaporized bugs and metal, exhaust fumes soaked into the dust, etc. I got covered in it once and it gave me a fever for 3 days, and trying to wipe it off just made it smear because it was oily. poo poo is nasty. Ghost Leviathan posted:I feel like this is absolutely one of those cases where the union is basically forcing their employer to actually get their poo poo together before the whole organisation collapses from neglect and tight-fisted incompetence. the thing I'm most interested to find out, long term, is what happens with management. supervisors already got benefits slashed and pay cuts, and with this new contract new hire part timers will be making money approaching that of part time supervisors. supervisors have zero job security and can be forced to come in to work during dangerous conditions(storms, blizzards, etc) or power outages and such. most supervisors I know are even more miserable than the average hourly. there's a few that have gone full apathy and have straight up said they will respond to things like "work during the strike" with "no, go ahead and fire me, I won't do it" so management morale is in the pits. with them also often being made to do union labor anyways, and get grieved and chastised by higher-ups for it, stress levels are high for them as well. I feel like things are reaching a breaking point with lower-end management, to be frank. a few long-time supervisors I know are either literally quitting soon or debating switching careers, there's a serious "brain drain" in the management sector(though it's not necessarily a highly skilled position), and they're getting to the point where it's almost a skeleton crew. I've not heard of them getting anything in response to this new contract, so it should be interesting to see what happens, they'd probably need to get significant raises, better benefits, etc to make it worthwhile to go management than stay union at this point, why sacrifice the job security and benefits for near-parity pay and little else?
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Jul 26, 2023 22:34
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Welp, if he is legit, then the world is a much crazier place than I previously believed: The only thing separating this guy from “my uncle working at Nintendo” is that it’s less specific. (“I know someone at Nintendo who vaguely told me about this, don’t ask me more, I can’t reveal that.) yronic heroism fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Jul 26, 2023 |
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Jul 26, 2023 22:38
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Rainbows were UFOs for a long long time. Theres a reason they started calling these things UAPs. And the name change wasn't meant to tickle your conspiracist amygdala. Plenty of American conspiricists amygdalas are already ringing like a bell independent of reality.
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Jul 26, 2023 22:40
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selec posted:hidebound rules-followers losing their minds and becoming kooks too, all the way down, I'm afraid this seems like the more likely conclusion to draw from this entire episode, as scary as it might be. An era of extremely low trust in any and all institutions seems to be the perfect environment for the proliferation of wacky beliefs among rank-and-file government officials. Hell, the name-dropping of Havana Syndrome should be causing alarm bells to ring for any observer.
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Jul 26, 2023 22:44
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I personally like the idea that aliens are just sending UFOs here and they're constantly either crashing or getting shot down. Like there's an Alien Space Program out there being run by Alien Musk with Alien Harriers flown by Alien Harrison Ford just constantly exploding, crashing, etc. because they've never encountered such a bizarre atmosphere with weird elements like oxygen and nitrogen and argon in their (interdimensional) space travels. Or maybe they're mostly getting shot down. None in the galaxy shall stand against the power of the F35!
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Jul 26, 2023 22:45
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koolkal posted:I personally like the idea that aliens are just sending UFOs here and they're constantly either crashing or getting shot down. Like there's an Alien Space Program out there being run by Alien Musk with Alien Harriers flown by Alien Harrison Ford just constantly exploding, crashing, etc. because they've never encountered such a bizarre atmosphere with weird elements like oxygen and nitrogen and argon in their (interdimensional) space travels. Or maybe they're mostly getting shot down. None in the galaxy shall stand against the power of the F35! So every UFO is basically each transdimensional alien race's equivalent of the Titan Sub incident... That kinda checks out.
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Jul 26, 2023 22:54
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Orthanc6 posted:So every UFO is basically each transdimensional alien race's equivalent of the Titan Sub incident... Ah so the UFO crews aren't alien scientists theyre actually alien billionaire idiots
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Jul 26, 2023 22:59
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Wapo: A quarter of Americans see Trump as moderate or liberal Just a fun goofy look at how checked out people are.  Dems in January 2021: I don't like his overthrowing the government policy, but I do like his lynching Mike Pence policy....
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Jul 26, 2023 22:59
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OctaMurk posted:Ah so the UFO crews aren't alien scientists theyre actually alien billionaire idiots Ah, so the Predator series  Kalli posted:Wapo: A quarter of Americans see Trump as moderate or liberal I said it before but there are going to be so, so many "I don't like Trump but this trial is too political" NYT opeds 
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Jul 26, 2023 23:12
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Consider me educated today learning from NPR that Phoenix, AZ, which is currently being slow roasted alive, is supposedly the FIFTH largest city in the country (?) I guess that many people have moved there for some reason? I would have guessed NYC, SF, LA, Chicago, Miami, Dallas, Philadelphia, Houston, Boston, Seattle, Denver or even Minnesota and DC before I got to Phoenix. Also surprised to learn that Jacksonville, FL is #11, given that their football team is considered a "small market". Here's the list if anyone gives a poo poo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population TheDeadlyShoe posted:They don't shy away from using dead people as political bludgeons. Makes it easier to put whatever words in their mouths you want. Vince Foster & Vilerat just off the top of my head... Pat Tillman. BiggerBoat fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Jul 26, 2023 |
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Jul 26, 2023 23:39
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