It’s a sobering detail of our situation. In 2020, Trump really did receive more votes than any candidate in any previous election. That means a ton of people showed up to vote for him in 2020 that hadn’t in 2016.

He frames it weird (and it sounded weird when he said it) because otherwise it raises the obvious point that Biden also achieved that same record, plus an extra 7 million votes.

The same can be said for Ohio. Both of them used to be swing states, and potentially could be again, but are not currently.

You’re getting down voted because this entire thing is literally about the book he published.

Often there are contracts. Sometimes for a very long time, often multi-year. There are sometimes escape clauses (like a morality clause for a spokesperson), but these aren’t easy to invoke.

I suspect many of them are up for annual review/renewal, when they can be terminated without penalty. It might also just be an attempt to get better terms.

FWIW, here is the US, the ground wire is often completely exposed. As in, no colored jacket, just the bare copper throughout the entire run. Attached to ground at the breaker box, and attached to any grounding ports or metal boxes throughout the building.

Shrinkflation is smaller quantities and/or higher prices. This is actually tracked in a variety of places.

Changing to a cheaper recipe/supplier is very hard to put metrics on, and isn’t tracked anywhere that I know of

Uber’s insurance is pretty bad. Many get the additional coverage from their regular insurer anyway because of this. That coverage also (usually) applies to this situation as well.

How close are these surrounding towns? What’s the population, particularly for the demographics you would appeal to?

Often, it’s not worthwhile to bring your favorite culture to your home. Just go to the culture where it already exists. Often, these quiet, boring places are populated by people that WANT to live in a place that’s quiet and boring. It doesn’t make much sense for anyone to move there if they don’t.

It’s like those people who bought plane tickets to January 6th, thinking they would go there and violently overthrow the transfer of power and kill any congresspeople that stood in the way of it, and then they could go home and show up to work with Trump now in power and everything would go back to normal.

Do you remember when armed militants invaded the Malheur wildlife refuge in Oregon, setting up what was sure to be a long, violent standoff with police and military?

2 weeks in, they arrested one of them. He’d taken a stolen ranger truck to get supplies at Safeway.

You can’t reason people out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into

He (and the rest of 538, where he was at the time) were criticized at the time for giving Trump much better odds than most. They were still wrong, but less so than the rest.

Timing and pacing are inherently different when there’s a laugh track. You can’t just silence the laughter or cut the time range. In some cases, you have to rework the joke.

The audience usually attends for free (“for free tickets to the _____ show, call…”), but there’s still a lot of overhead. Not only do you need ushers, security, and so on, you need to be filming on a sound stage with a place for the audience.

On the flip side, laugh tracks are easily added in post.

To add to this, imagine the reverse. Can you imagine if they passed up better opportunities, just so that it could happen on a specific date on the calendar?

Sounds absurd, right?

“handle” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The signs are already there that all of these edge cases will just be programmed as “safely pull over and stop until conditions change or a human takes control”. Which isn’t a small task in itself, but it’s a lot easier than figuring out to continue (e.g.) on ice.

I think you’re approaching the wrong aspect. While that could be a scam where a man is impersonating a woman, there are plenty where it’s actually a woman running the scam. There are plenty of red flags here, and those don’t change.

The problem is that I’m sure your friend is aware of those red flags. He’s also choosing to ignore them. I suspect he doesn’t do well with women IRL, and this at least gives him hope.

Assuming that’s all true, this is way above the pay grade of random people on the Internet.

Economies of scale affects the costs to the manufacturer. Competition/demand affect the price to the consumer.

To extend this, consider your own safety throughout. Unless the police arrest them and they remain in custody, you have a potential serious threat. Avoid situations where you/others could be vulnerable, such as alone or at night. You may want to setup visible surveillance cameras, alter your routines, etc.

The police will be there after anything happens, but that may be too late for you.

https://www.aamc.org/news/press-releases/new-aamc-report-shows-continuing-projected-physician-shortage

As someone in IT, I can tell you that it is incredibly hard to fill most of our common sysadmin roles. We don’t even get applicants with the desired qualifications (SCCM, Azure, VMware, MS SQL, Power Shell, etc. Not in the same role, but these common skills). This is despite the fact that we’re competitive on pay, allow fully remote, and are a household name (fortune 100). I sincerely doubt that we’re alone on that.

As for your point about unemployed STEM grads, it’s entirely possible that they are in an area that has a surplus. But it’s also possible they are inexperienced (most employers want experience), or they don’t know how to connect with the employers looking for their skill set.

I’m not saying that I’m sold on the idea. Just that it’s not entirely clear what the impact would be, nor that it would be a net negative.

I’m not sure I agree with your last point. While skilled foreign labor (H1B or similar) certainly drives down wages, part of that is because of the restrictions on employment. If you need to be sponsored, it is very hard to get the prevailing local wage for your skills. Green cards open that up and allow proper competition.

The biggest argument is that foreign-born workers are willing to accept lower wages for the same work and the same conditions. This is exactly what happened during the days of “No Irish Need Apply”. The big difference here is that it would only apply to college graduates. But is it actually wrong to do? It’s similar to a bad union, where people feel entitled to the higher pay simply because they were here first.

While it would still be better to encourage and grow our own people to develop the skills needed, this is a much more complicated proposal. We have a distinct lack of skilled workers, and in a variety of types/areas. This could help with that need.

I fully agree on the rest though. Fuck Trump and everyone around him.