The more wealth inequality grows the less important 99% of the population is as consumers and the more important the 1% becomes.

Not as consumers, no. The 1% doesn’t consume more than the 90th percentile. They just park a higher percentage of their wealth in wealth-generating financial assets, which leech wealth from the rest of society.

We need a tax on all registered securities, (with exemption for the first $10 million owned by a natural person.) That tax should be paid not in cash, but in shares of the security: the IRS should slowly liquidate those shares over time, such that IRS sales never constitute more than 1% of total traded volume.

We further need the punitively-high top-tier tax rate we had for most of the 20th century. That tax rate pushed businesses to spend their excess income, turning it into other people’s paychecks. It discouraged the kind of wealth-hoarding investment that is stunting consumer spending.

Bang bang, shoot shoot.

Because the only thing worse than self driving is human driving.

This transfers money from the advertiser to the advertising agency, without creating a sale for the advertiser. This devalues the services of the agency.

Get out of my head!!!

Dump him right on the border.

The border runs right through the middle of 4 of the 5 Great Lakes…

Certainly. I agree completely.

The correspondent’s dinner isn’t the proper venue for that.

The correspondent’s dinner is, in part, a comedy roast of the president and his administration. The guests are overtly praising and honoring the roasted. They are laughing with the guest of honor, not at him.

We should absolutely ridicule Trump, Musk, and the rest, mercilessly. But none of them deserve the honor of a roast.

Based on his rhetoric toward Greenland and Canada, I think he definitely wants to annex something. A cartel-governed central/south american country makes a pretty tempting target for imperial conquest.

I heard that Trump jumped up and down and threw his juice box when JD explained he couldn’t pardon her.

For most of the past 110 years or so since DST was implemented, for 3/4 of the year, we have had solar noon occurring at 13:00 in the center of each time zone. You’re already living with it most of the time. We’ve established school schedules, work schedules, industrial schedules, laws (such as curfews, noise ordinances, parking enforcement) and all sorts of infrastructure on the idea that for 3/4 of the year, there will be one more hour of daylight after 12:00pm than there is before 12:00 pm.

Either approach we take, we are going to upend a wide variety of laws, rules, practices, and customs that have been established over the past century. Adopting legacy standard time is going to impact events over 3/4 of the year; adopting permanent DST is going to impact events over 1/4 of the year.

We should select the system that minimizes disruption. That system is DST.

Outdoor trades tend to start work around 7am, when noise ordinances are lifted, and knock off a couple hours after midday, to avoid the heat of summer. With midday at 11:30, summer sunrise was three hours before they could even start their work. All those cool morning hours, perfect for hard work, completely wasted, while workers suffer heat exhaustion in the afternoon.

Fortunately, we have only rarely used legacy time in summer in the past hundred years. We’ve built our legal and industrial infrastructure on the premise that solar noon will occur sometime between 12:30 and 13:30 local time for 8-9 months of the year.

Maintaining that historical expectation with permanent summer time will greatly reduce the transition to a “locked clock”.

Depends what you mean by “abnormal”.

It is not “normal” for solar noon to occur ante meridiem in some places, and post meridiem in others. Yet, legacy standard time requires this: the west end of the time zone experiences solar noon at 11:30 in the morning, or even earlier in some cases.

Improved time has the entire time zone experience midday in the PM.

We use improved time for 3/4 of the year; its hard to say that the more common time system is the “abnormal” one. The legacy time system might once have been considered a “standard”, but so were 8-track tapes at one point. (But that’s the wrong metaphor here… “Standard time” went out of fashion before reel-to-reel, before electrically-driven record players. The last time “standard time” was in common use was shortly before broadcast radio was developed. State-of-the-art audio playback was replacing hand-cranked record players with spring-loaded clockwork players. Suffice it to say, “Standard” time hasn’t been “standard” in more than a hundred years. )

We have evolved a superior alternative that has become the de facto standard in everything but name.

Legacy time was developed by the robber barons in the late 19th century, to support industry. Improved time is an adjustment to that standard to favor the needs of the worker for rest and recreation. We cannot allow modern oligarchs to keep us on this outdated legacy system.

You’re telling them to “change” their own working hours in a way that would eliminate the effects of the time change. You’re telling them to set their hours as if the time change didn’t occur.

You could just stop automatically changing their hours twice a year.

The clocks are fine for 9 months out of the year. All of the problems occur in the remaining three months, and only occur because we arbitrarily change everyone’s working hours with no good reason. Stop pushing everyone to a bullshit “winter” schedule for three months, when the normal summer schedule works just fine.

Who sees what is happening in the white house and wants to crack jokes?

For the next four years, the Correspondent’s Dinner should be a wake, and not an Irish one.

So, you’re saying that there might actually be some daylight left to do something after the work day / school day is over?

Noon should be as close to midday as possible but never before midday.

On standard time, on the west end of the time zones, midday occurs at or before 11:30 AM. That is ridiculous.

Imagine going to work and writing March 31st on documents all morning, and April 1st all afternoon.

You might remember that you have an appointment on the 5th. But, when you wake up on the 5th, you’ve already missed it.

I can accept that. So long as after we lock the clocks on standard time, my region is allowed to switch to the next time zone to the west.

I don’t think the “noon = midday” argument is complete. I think noon should be close to, but never before midday. Midday should never occur at 11:30 AM, like it currently does on the western ends of the zones.

If you are arguing for permanent standard time and you are on the eastern end of your time zone, you are making the same argument as someone advocating DST from the western end.

It also depends on your location within your particular time zone. You can’t have noon at the same time of day on both the eastern and western end of the zone.

We aren’t all having the same argument. Solar noon should, indeed, be close to chronological noon, but that will only ever be true in the center of the time zone.

On “standard time” on the western end of a time zone, solar noon is (ostensibly) 11:30 am, while on the eastern end, it’s 12:30. Under DST, those times shift to 12:30 and 13:30, respectively. In zones wider than 15 degrees, there can be more than an hour difference.

When the eastern end of the zone argues for permanent Standard Time, and the western end of the zone argues for permanent DST, both ends are arguing for the same preference.

“Midday” (solar noon) should indeed be close to noon, but midday should never be before 12:00pm.

The solution is to lock the clocks on one system or the other, and allow political subdivisions to move the line so their clocks work best for them.

Can’t. You have to be qualified to run for president in order to run as VP. He isn’t eligible to run again.

You can serve out less than two years of another president’s term, and still be eligible to be elected to two terms of your own. For example, Harris could have replaced Biden two years into his term, in which case she probably would have won in 2024, and remained eligible to run in 2028. You can be president up to (but not including) 10 years.