ricecake

No, the supreme Court ruled that the individual who is the president has immunity for actions taken in a presidential capacity. Absolute immunity for exercising presidential powers, and and presumptive for actions taken as the president, pending the prosecutions ability to argue that holding the individual personally liable couldn't possibly infringe of their exercise of constitutional powers, and they have to make that case without referring to intent.

The specific case was about when trump, as president, contacted Governors and law enforcement to try to convince them to overturn the election for him. Under their ruling, since he was acting as the president, they decided you can't consider his intent. So the prosecution would need to argue that there's no possible infringement on constitutional power if the president can be prosecuted for discussing an election, election security, and election interference with Governors and law enforcement.

It's also worth noting that, economically, it's not surprising that the country with the most people would have the largest economy.

There's nothing fundamentally different between the people of the US and China beyond the conditions they're born in. Insofar as innovation is a product of economics, educational investment, opportunity for innovation and a random chance it happens, and economic strength is a product of innovation and raw work output, it follows that more people leads to more work output, and eventually to a larger, more innovative economy.

A disorganized China and some key innovation breakthroughs by the west last century gave a significant headstart, and some of Maos more unwise choices slowed their catch-up, but it's not surprising that an organized country with five times the US population would surpass us in economics and innovation, to say nothing of being competitive.

Please let's try to keep generative AI from claiming the entire word "AI".
Current generative AI is good at and built for mimicking patterns with boundary conditions.
This means it does a decent job of imitating authoritative knowledge, but it's just mimicking it.
People are hyped for it because it looks knowledgeable, it's relatively simple to make, and a lot of what we do is text based so it's easy to apply.

There are a lot of other types of AI, the majority even, that work significantly better, take a small fraction of the computing power and provide helpful and meaningful results. They just don't look like anything other than complex math, which is all any of them are in the end.

There was a time when I was a student that I spent a lot of time near a particular coffee shop, and more than you would typically expect for just studying and the like, since it turned into the place where my friend group basically hung out most of the time.
In any case, it was a decently high traffic area and since I was there a lot I found two wallets and a cellphone over the time I was there a lot.

One wallet had an emergency contact I was able to call, think it was their mother, and that I'd be at the coffee shop for a bit. They brought me cookies, and I was thrilled.
Next person just had their phone number, and they acted like I was a creep for saying I had their wallet and would like to give it back to them, so I told them I was leaving it with the cashier and left it at that and was a bit sad, since being told off for trying to be nice is a bummer.
Cellphone was the worst. I called their most recent number and told them what was up (this was clearly before ubiquitous lock screens). Owner called me back in the same number and threatened to call the cops on me so I hung up, powered off the phone and put it back where I found it. Felt sad.

Given how it seems like everyone has lost their minds now, I'm not sure I would risk letting someone know I found their stuff. I'd still try to return it because that's the right thing to do, but I'm not sure if I'd be willing to use my own phone number or anything.
If people will shoot you for using their driveway to turn around I can only imagine what they'd do for a bus pass, student ID and a loyalty punch card for a bakery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pancakes

Seems very relevant. Found it while trying to find the etymology of "flapjack", since I thought about it and that's not a normal word.

I also found out that some countries have a pancake day, where they eat pancakes. Seems to be a different method of celebrating what we call Mardi gras or Fat Tuesday, depending on your proximity to France/Louisiana. We often have something like a donut.
Seems the intent is the same: eat all your animal fat before lent so it doesn't go to waste.

Your cooking looks delicious! I would call it a crepe, but whatever it's called I would eat it. :)

How is it even legal to have explicitly preferential pay for people not in a union? Is there a limit to that, or can companies just say, "Anyone who joins a union will be paid minimum wage."

What I'm saying is that if they can set "$0.50 above union rates" as the company policy for everyone, they can also set "$5 above union rates" as the company policy for everyone and then cut union rates by $5.

That's you. That's what we're talking about: why they can't "set "$5 above union rates" as the company policy for everyone and then cut union rates by $5".

You were told it's because of the unions contract that they can't cut union rates, and paying people not to join is a violation of labor law.
You then replied about how that wouldn't work because everyone left the union so they don't have bargaining power.
And yeah, if the union has no power they probably don't have a good contract, but that's aside from the point of "a unions contract prevents their pay from being cut on a whim".

I'm treating it like a weird add-on to the discussion because it is. They can't cut pay because of their contract, unless their contract doesn't stop that, in which case they can.

... What?

Your screenshot has the founder saying it's reparable. It also has him telling someone with unreasonable expectations that they would be disappointed.

If you literally take his comment out of context you can construe it as him saying they didn't consider repairability or lifetime. But why wouldn't you look at the context that's right there?

There's a limit to how much they can pay the ununionized workers before it becomes clear they're trying to interfere with the workers rights to free organization. In the image, it's quite likely that the extra 50¢ is union dues, or could be explained as related to costs.

Literally the first reply I sent you.

If you don't know the basics of labor law and how companies are ostensibly prohibited from preventing organization, you really don't have a lot of room to get upset when people think you don't know stuff.

That... is literally the thing being discussed here.

No, it's a nonsequitur you brought up out of nowhere. You asked why the company doesn't just pay the union less, and when people told you replied assuming that everyone knew that all the workers left the union.

And you won't, or can't, respond to my point. It doesn't matter that it's a nonsequitur, you're still obligated to respond to it premptively, you fool.

Yes, if everyone leaves the union it doesn't have power. Fucking duh. It doesn't work that way because it's illegal to pay people to not be in the union, since it infringes on people's rights to collective bargaining. Which I politely said in my first reply to you when I just thought you were ignorant, rather than obstinate and rude as well.

You just started randomly attacking me for no reason

Crystal more. You're the one who kicked off being angry when you found out I thought you were just genuinely ignorant, as opposed to properly stupid.

You also didn't take into account every person in the state being in the Union, and the company only employing union workers, and the one non-union person, the CEO, was so afraid of loosing business at his company that only makes pro-union T-shirts that he wept openly at the thought of not capitulating to the unions every demand.

Clearly a bird has eaten most of your frontal cortex and you've confused the concept of negotiations with women's freestyle swimming.

At this point I'm fairly certain you're just trolling, since you asked a dumb question, responded to answers with nonsense scenarios and indignation, and then responded to clarification as though your scenario were a given.

Because referring to changing pay rates for union workers as a policy change pretty heavily implies it's not a negotiation, and "why wouldn't the company just get the union to agree to a significant pay cut" is an even more asinine point. They obviously would have if the could have. The assumption that you didn't know unions negotiated contracts seemed more charitable than thinking you didn't know how bargaining worked.

Most of the downvotes I got (so far) came before I added that part.

Okay.