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Captainant

Burnt Ends
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Posts posted by Captainant

  1. 2 hours ago, StassneyHorn said:

    I’m on IPhone and CR seems to keep reloading every topic maybe halfway through the page on its own and a second or third if it is so long to scroll. Don’t know if it’s all the gifs, memes or twitter loads.

    What did your iPhone fall out of a coconut tree?

    • Haha 2
  2. Just now, Brisketexan said:

    Again...I thought we were in the nest, in the trust tree?  Are we not?  Because all of this judgment is making me a tad uncomfortable.

    Also, the other vibe I'm getting from Vance is that he should totally post on Surly.  He'd fit right in.

    I hope you didn't get a shaming vibe from me - it's ok to be a weird little freak! Just don't be a fascist because you're ashamed of yourself. Ya know, along the lines of grindr going down in Milwaukee during the RNC while the republicans are trying to undo Obergefell 

    • Hook 'Em 1
  3. 4 minutes ago, Mikey4 said:

    Which, of course, dovetails with the Fourteenth Amendment -- states cannot deprive a person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. The converse is that a state CAN take away a person's rights as punishment for a criminal conviction.

    Which circles back around to the disparity in policing and law enforcement, and shit like the war on drugs being designed to break up families and put people into for profit prisons. Among many other schemes to keep prisons nice and full so their shareholders can get the returns they are entitled to

    • Hook 'Em 1
  4. 5 minutes ago, fattyflattie said:

    I’m speaking about their primary retirement accounts, not some secondary or tertiary play account.  Maxing out your 401 with any semblance of a match works wonders after 15-20 years.  It’s not some crazy formula for the elite - quite the contrary.  

    Genuinely, most of the adults I knew growing up did not make enough to max their 401k. I know my household didn't growing up. Do you think the median American worker bringing home $45k/yr is able to contribute max to their 401k?

     

    Yeah no shit, the best way to make money is to have money. The problem tends to be starting that process of building when the majority of America is fighting to keep heads above water

    • Hook 'Em 1
  5. 6 hours ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

    Doomlet is also a Fartnite junkie. 

    I have instructed him and his buddies to destroy all Cybertrucks on site, but I think that they are just as glitchy in the game as in reality, and that they've recently been yanked from the game. 

    https://hard-drive.net/hd/cybertruck-already-recalled-in-fortnite/

    Screenshot_20240725_124550_Bluesky.thumb.jpg.dffef12f811d6ca0c2eee88651ced3dd.jpg

    There's also a funny thing where the windshield is a weak spot on cars in the game, so it had an EXTRA LARGE weak spot with the mega windshield lol

    • Haha 1
  6. 4 hours ago, bolverk said:

    Necro bump.

    Looong investigative piece by the AP. It raises the real question, "Is prison labor essentially slave labor?" We all know that it exists, but I personally didn't know the extent as a consumer.

    Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands

    image.thumb.png.7dc062d10523d1faa36bd694bca6072d.png

    ANGOLA, La. (AP) — A hidden path to America’s dinner tables begins here, at an unlikely source – a former Southern slave plantation that is now the country’s largest maximum-security prison.

    Unmarked trucks packed with prison-raised cattle roll out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where men are sentenced to hard labor and forced to work, for pennies an hour or sometimes nothing at all. After rumbling down a country road to an auction house, the cows are bought by a local rancher and then followed by The Associated Press another 600 miles to a Texas slaughterhouse that feeds into the supply chains of giants like McDonald’s, Walmart and Cargill.

    Intricate, invisible webs, just like this one, link some of the world’s largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by U.S. prisoners nationwide, according to a sweeping two-year AP investigation into prison labor that tied hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural products to goods sold on the open market.

    They are among America’s most vulnerable laborers. If they refuse to work, some can jeopardize their chances of parole or face punishment like being sent to solitary confinement. They also are often excluded from protections guaranteed to almost all other full-time workers, even when they are seriously injured or killed on the job.

    The goods these prisoners produce wind up in the supply chains of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens, from Frosted Flakes cereal and Ball Park hot dogs to Gold Medal flour, Coca-Cola and Riceland rice. They are on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi and Whole Foods. And some goods are exported, including to countries that have had products blocked from entering the U.S. for using forced or prison labor.

    Many of the companies buying directly from prisons are violating their own policies against the use of such labor. But it’s completely legal, dating back largely to the need for labor to help rebuild the South’s shattered economy after the Civil War. Enshrined in the Constitution by the 13th Amendment, slavery and involuntary servitude are banned – except as punishment for a crime.

    That clause is currently being challenged on the federal level, and efforts to remove similar language from state constitutions are expected to reach the ballot in about a dozen states this year.

    Some prisoners work on the same plantation soil where slaves harvested cotton, tobacco and sugarcane more than 150 years ago, with some present-day images looking eerily similar to the past. In Louisiana, which has one of the country’s highest incarceration rates, men working on the “farm line” still stoop over crops stretching far into the distance.

    cont'd:

    https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e

    No shit, there was a big ass documentary a while back titled "13th" about how prisoners are used as slave labor in the US to drive profits for the private prisons and for the mega corps getting extremely cheap labor.

  7. 4 minutes ago, fattyflattie said:

    Your view is not owning 10’s of thousands of whatever share makes you poor?  This is going to be a surprise to millions of Americans with 7 figure portfolios who don’t have a single allocation of “10’s of thousands of shares”.   

    My view is that the people who benefit as shareholders when companies steal from their employees are those that hold considerable numbers of shares, which is not the working class people were talking about. 

    Also, Americans with 7 figure portfolios are the far and away exception. Probably not in your circles, which is why you think it's normative 

    • Hook 'Em 2
  8. 52 minutes ago, fattyflattie said:

    What is keeping the employees from becoming shareholders? 

    Why don't the poor people just stop being poor and buy tens of thousands of shares like executives and the investor class does? Have they even HEARD of bootstraps??

    • Hook 'Em 3
  9. 1 hour ago, immamac said:

    Yeah I wasn't even saying he was wrong that it was an issue it's just not GDP = wage growth and that wage growth = more disparity that's not how the math maths. Both things are true. 

    Productivity is higher, which is good. 

    I think the real issue at hand is that productivity gains are not evenly distributed or enjoyed. Rather than the employees seeing a wage increase commiserate with their increase in productivity, we see the shareholders reap that benefit more often than not.

    • Hook 'Em 4
  10. 4 minutes ago, C-Man said:

    images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT7sHl2hGVIfSnlNv-V3jo

    Did any reports ever come out about where the firefighter was actually shot? The part that is really fascinating to me was the lack of any real panicked reaction from the crowd. If I knew bullets were being fired, my family and I would be "Peace, we're fucking outta here!" in a fraction of a second after the incident started. The fact that so many seemed to not know what was going on, despite there being multiple attendees struck with bullets -- one apparently dead upon impact -- is unbelievable to me. I would've thought the MAGAts behind Trump would've been looking and pointing to stage left where the people who were hit were standing but there's very little of that.

    Yeah man, the whole thing just continues to be weird and not quite fit together. Of course, trump wouldn't have it any other way - people will keep talking about this for a looooong time as long as there's all this uncertainty 

  11. 27 minutes ago, Blotto said:

    Seems risky

    image.jpeg.22163d25836efe2980d651b843930c2c.jpeg

    Also, I guess they're doing this  thing again here in Austin

    image.thumb.png.ce52cb8ef2dffcc2f380dcf4c0d57004.png

     

    For those that ultimately succumb to the cold murky depths of the Lake Travis lakebed, I say,  at least you died doing something important......providing hours if not days of lulz for the rest of us. Get fucked. 

    dude it's wild how excited the chuds get to put fascist flags on their boats - Port Oconnor was full of em on 4th of July weekend even with Beyrl coming

  12. 9 hours ago, Guadaloopy said:

    Waited until the roll out was complete before turning on D+ to binge it.  Knocked it out over the past couple of days. 
     

    By Star Wars standards, it is definitely below average.    That said, I always enjoy another peek into the Star Wars universe, especially if it tries to do something a bit different.   They get points for effort.   New worlds, new force users, new mythology, I’m here for it.  
     

    You’ve got to expect that a sprawling IP like Star Wars is going to have some sub-par entries.  Keep experimenting and trying new things and it will give us more gems, too.  
     

    We can’t have it both ways.  Can’t complain that TFA is a retread of ANH or “enough of the Skywalkers” and then turn around and bitch when a completely new story is put forward, even if it doesn’t 100% work.  
     

    Star Wars isn’t going anywhere, and I’m glad that we no longer have to wait over a decade between entries.  The faster pace is worth a less than stellar entry every once in a while.  

    My biggest complaint with Acolyte is that much like the sequel trilogy, it has very weak story telling. There's no "because of... therefore...." with the characters, and it's all "and then.... and then...." that's moving the plot forward. 

    Thankfully, it's not as contrived as a puzzle knife that's the solution to TWO macguffins in ROS, but the writers left so many threads unused and just dangling in Acolyte. 

    I agree with the spirit of your post though, I love seeing more aspects of Star Wars and am happy to take a few C-'s and D's if it means we get the highs of Andor and Bad Batch s3

    • Hook 'Em 1
  13. 2 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

    Actually, if you fire a gun with the intent to kill a particular person (person X), but miss and kill another person (person Y), you are absolutely guilty of murder.  Under the law of most states, "intent to kill" is the necessary element, NOT "intent to kill the specific person you killed."  Now, if you're just firing a gun recklessly, not aimed at anyone in particular/with no intent to actually shoot any person, then it's not murder.  So, we'll see what the facts of this case show, but if the shooter was trying to shoot person X and killed this coach instead, it's murder.

    Whatever the case, I for one am glad how easy and unburdened we are with things like CHL requirements so that the Everyman can be armed at all times.

    It's only ever solved problems

    • Hook 'Em 2
    • Rage+1 1
  14. 14 hours ago, Buzzrock said:

    I really appreciated when I got the alert to check in for my return flight from DFW to ATL today after my Sunday flight from ATL to DFW was canceled with no other options (so I couldn’t go). And then when I went to cancel it I was helpfully informed that there was no option for a refund. I entered a refund request (with about 10,000 other people I’m sure).

    I’m about as big a Delta fan as you’ll find, I’ll hit Diamond status this year, but that’s some bullshit.

    USDOT would agree with you that it's some bullshit

    https://www.npr.org/2024/07/23/nx-s1-5049792/deltas-airlines-delays-and-cancelations-prompt-dot-investigation

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