Lots of politicians are cowards. A few candidates confronted Biden and were completely destroyed in the primary.

It’s incredibly selfish to hurt the overall party goals (climate change, healthcare, increasing taxes on the wealthy) just to help your personal career.

How were they planning to get to Canada from Sri Lanka in a fishing boat?

Compare this to the only current alternative. Do people think that trump is ever subject to unapproved questions? Fox and others only throw softballs. He didn’t even answer the questions in the debate. Biden did and I learned more about his policies.

Current news media acts like it values facts and reasoned discourse, but it really likes ratings and advertising. I don’t care what the “editorial staff” has to say anymore. They’re not fair-minded independent journalists; they’re literally paid by advertisers. They might as well put product logos all over the WSJ and the NY Times.

Use this tax calculator; it includes FICA, state taxes, and local taxes:

https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes

No one is paying 40% total tax rate unless they are single, make $350,000+, and live in a high tax area (NYC, San Francisco). If you are married, you have to make at least $800,000 to pay 40% overall.

How are they taking out education loans in someone else’s name? Sounds like fraud.

They’re not that different. Democrats and Republicans are just coalitions that are already formed. The actual party organizations in different states are run very differently, with different priorities. The Democratic Party in MA is not the same as the Democratic Party in Texas.

we’ve never had two more unpopular candidates running against each other

Have you ever heard Al Gore speak? It’s like listening to paint dry. He was the original boring Hillary before she was even a Senator. George W was widely considered an idiot, but that was partly an act.

John Kerry in 2004 was similarly boring. I had forgotten who ran in that election until I looked it up. Obama was an outlier in being “exciting”. Trump’s insanity is not the norm for a presidential candidate. It’s usually idiocy from the Republicans and boredom from the Democrats.

Being drafted onto LeBron James’s team without being that good is a great deal. He has a congenital heart defect and 10 teams wanted him to work out for them. Do the math.

Nuh uh

But that’s just a guess. It’s not necessarily true. You’re just saying “simulations might be possible, therefore they are definitely possible, therefore we are likely in a simulation”.

That’s not logically sound. You can replace “simulation” with “God” and prove the existence of God similarly. It’s just a guess.

It’s not that. Anti-Trump media makes a buttload of money wringing their hands and saying how bad he is. He drives ratings.

People stopped listening to him after he screwed up COVID. Plus everyone was tired of his antics after 4 years.

Fuck the media. This is your future here. Don’t vote for Biden. Vote for better Supreme Court Justices, better laws, better executive orders, and less corruption.

Did you forget the first and biggest one?

All those athletic scholarships are paid for by the sports teams. It’s free money for the university. And the football team funds all the other sports, so a lot of football money goes to the university as tuition for an out-of-state soccer player or something.

Plus who do you think the sports teams pay rent and facilities fees to? The university who owns their facilities. The teams are non-profit so football has little incentive to save money.

True. I believe the celibacy thing is to prevent bishops from accruing wealth and leaving it to their sons. The church wanted the money. Similar to how Henry the 8th created the Anglican Church to get a divorce, plus all the church properties and tithes.

As usual, religious conflicts are based on earthly concerns.

An Ivy League education is an expensive luxury product for the parents. That way they can brag to their peers about their children. It’s well known that the main benefit of an Ivy education is networking. That’s because of the connections that the parents have, not because the education is better.

With the exception of maybe Princeton or Columbia, top research isn’t coming out of Ivy League schools. And the good research they do have is because they pay the top people more. They don’t have smarter students, they just have more resources.

MIT isn’t an Ivy. Cal Tech isn’t an Ivy. Stanford isn’t. UC Berkeley and University of Michigan definitely aren’t.

It depends on the school.

Most fans don’t realize that not only do athletic departments pay the university market rate for the tuition, room and board of its student athletes, but also the upcharge for out-of-state students.

At nearly one-third of the schools I polled back in 2012 for my book, the university took a specified percentage of each donation made to the athletic department.

At many universities I polled, the university and athletic department split licensing revenue 50/50. So, even if the sweatshirt sold in the bookstore is specifically branded for the football program, that money is divided between the university and athletics.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristidosh/2017/06/12/the-biggest-misconceptions-about-the-finances-of-college-sports/

Also, it looks like the “Central Valley” in CA extends uphill to the top of the Sierras and Lake Tahoe. Plus “Socal” is as far north as Carmel.

No. Carmel is the Central Coast. You might as well add that to the Central Valley and add some new group for the Sierra Nevada mountains that includes northern CA above Sacramento. The north coast is culturally and geographically similar to the Sierras. “Socal” doesn’t extend farther north than Santa Barbara.

A real solution is to require every single employee in the company to review these videos equally. If the Executive Leadership Team experiences this once, the issue will be fixed. Probably by banning repeat problem users.

These cars were banned from CA roads because they had too many safety issues. That’s why they’re in AZ. One company didn’t address the issue so the CA DMV threatened to pull their registration completely.

https://www.npr.org/2023/10/24/1208287502/california-orders-cruise-driverless-cars-off-the-roads-because-of-safety-concern

Why else do you think Google is testing this thousands of miles from their headquarters?

That’s only because they don’t drive that fast, and they just dump most problems to a human driver. If a self-driving car stopped in the middle of an intersection and a human driver hit it, the blame would legally fall on the human despite the fact that the self-driving car caused the issue.

That’s not unique to one writer. That’s almost all literature from the time period, unless it had a black author. You would have to read books by W.E.B. DuBois, or maybe Huckleberry Finn, for good portrayals of black people in literature.