DonkeyCigars

The scanners mean that I only pay for gas using an Amex and mandate the same for my wife. Problem solved.

Subscribed.

Agreed. But running on a platform that is not realistic but emotionally feels good to people seems to be the non-centrist approach.

What's the logic there? Curious because I don't think I've seen the inside of a gas station except for bathroom breaks on road trips.

Does anyone go inside to pay for gas anymore?

I thought that might be the case, which is why I think if you reduce or make property tax nominal, we need to increase an existing tax (sales/consumption tax) or levy new taxes that don't exist today to counterbalance. I'm assuming Huffines is just trying to sell the pipe dream of abolishing property taxes to incite the passions of people without being practical and a realistic option.

Just to humor a policy discussion-- what are the implications of dropping property taxes and making them much lower like other states (or dropping them altogether, which seems to be Huffines red-meat campaign promise, but likely impossible?)? I ask because on the surface, that seems like a great thing for people who pay (and gripe) about property taxes in Texas and wish to pay less (or as low as legally possible). Other states seem to have low property taxes, but they have a state tax (boo). Could we do away with premium property taxes and increase the sales tax maybe? If this sort of discussion is out of place on this particular thread and this is more for jockeying on who's going to be who in the zoo, then please disregard.

Lurch probably better and more elegantly stated my opinion. I guess my first instinct was to trash it when really it was meh/fine, not horrible. Basically just more of the same sans Beard After Dark.

I don't remember if Lullaby was good or not. I read it when I was a dumb child in my 20's.

This Huffines thing is the best thing that could happen for MM or Beto, if Huffines goes all in on 3rd party candidacy.

This episode sucked. Not funny and the part that was interesting emotionally got hijacked and bisected with Rebecca's cribbing about her dad. Nobody cares about her mom and her relationship and her dad's philandering. At this point I'm rooting for Jaime to come in like a wrecking ball and nuke the status quo with Roy/Keeley and Rupert to reveal his big bad plan which should have been revealed in episodes 2 or 3 already. Also the Rick rolling, both times, was so stupid and cringe at how try hard that fail was. I get that every week the writers are trying to glom on to some popular or cultural movement in time and make it a motif, but this one wasn't even close to the target of funny or well executed.

Tucker improved to 16-for-16 in his NFL career on field goals in the final minute of regulation… with a record breaking 66 yarder. 🤷‍♂️🤣

surrender cobras already? lol

My fourth team (went to grad school there for a semester) /csb

I could tell watching his mannerisms that the moment would be too big for him

Don’t know about going 2-10, but they are about to lose to their version of Tech in about a minute and a half. And that’s some quality humor.

We live in a 50/50 world.

Sorry you got so defensive; just curious the rationale and thinking behind it. Obviously you don't have to justify your purchases to other people on the internet, but starting from an assumption that you are generally responsible with your money and not foolish with your money no matter how rich you are, I assumed there was some good reasoning that I wasn't seeing.

Why did you guys opt for the iPhone 13? I'm ready for a new phone but the 13 was the Meh-est new product release in years. It should really be an iPhone 12s, I heard reviewers and pundits say. It's like buying the last year of an older body style vehicle, at a premium, instead of just waiting a few months for the big upgrade. I get it if your phone was on the brink of death or something or you are upgrading an iPhone 8 or something, but to go from an 11 Pro to the 13? I'm not seeing the value there, which is why I am asking.

Fantastic new write-up centering around Joey B: -- It was too soon then to nominate him to a place on Mount Rushmore; it is too soon now to consign him to the ash heap of history. What we might be seeing, instead, is a bit of a return to normalcy in American politics—the kind of normalcy in which a President’s job-approval rating goes up or down depending on how people think he is actually doing. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were also considered by many to be failed Presidents early on in their tenures, and saw their parties each lose their first midterm elections as a result; both went on to be among the most popular two-term Presidents of the modern era. The warning lights are undoubtedly flashing red for Biden right now. His Gallup approval rating is down to forty-three per cent, a drop of six points in the past month—which saw a deadly surge of covid-19 in the U.S. and the chaotic American withdrawal from Afghanistan—and a thirteen-point decline since June. The Pew Research Center, in a poll released on Thursday, showed Biden at forty-four per cent, down eleven points from July. The failed-Presidency crowd sees this as the inevitable outcome of a leader who strayed from the promise of his campaign to oust Donald Trump—to return America to competent, sane governance—and instead embraced a politically impractical vision of a progressive utopia. Many liberals do not agree, of course. But it seems that the table stakes for the Biden Presidency—and the country—may finally have become too big this week, even for diehard Biden supporters. No wonder. Biden’s entire legislative agenda is tied up in a September snarl on Capitol Hill, as Democrats feud over how to proceed. In the meantime, the country is averaging more than two thousand deaths per day in a pandemic that Biden promised would be all but over this summer. An immigration crisis, with thousands of Haitian refugees at the southern U.S. border, has liberals furious at the Administration’s Storm Trooper-esque tactics and conservatives in full Trumpian build-the-wall mode. France is so angry at the United States, for stealing away a multibillion-dollar submarine deal with Australia, that it recalled its Ambassador, in a snit, for the first time ever. Oh, and the government may be forced to shut down after next Friday unless Congress passes a bill to stop it—a bill that Republicans vow to oppose. In October, the U.S. is set to run out of credit unless Congress raises the debt-ceiling limit, and Republicans vow to oppose that, too. The general feeling among Democrats these days: Is it time to panic yet? ... More notable, however, is that many in the current group of Biden critics at least nominally supported him, voted for him, and presumably wanted him to succeed; columnists such as Lewis and Stephens are not reflexive Biden-bashers but Never Trump Republicans who spent the past few years criticizing the G.O.P. for its embrace of Trump. And one important reason that Biden’s numbers have dropped so much over all is that independents are losing faith—independents whose votes in key states very likely gave Biden the White House. No doubt some of this is simply conservatives reverting to their ideological comfort zone. That, in and of itself, is an example of the post-Trump return to regular order that Biden had promised. In the absence of a ranting demagogue in the White House, it was probably never realistic to expect conservatives to be supportive of a transformative legislative package with the biggest price tag in modern political history. The warnings, however, are not just coming from budget hawks. Many of those who now fear Biden’s Presidency is on the line include Democrats who support his goals but fear that he will not deliver. The difficult truth is that, should Congress fail to pass Biden’s bills this fall, it would, in fact, be the kind of political blow that few new Presidents can recover from. Consider John Podesta’s letter to congressional Democrats this week, a cri de coeur from a senior adviser to the past two Democratic Presidents. In it, he urges them to figure out—now!—a compromise that would allow final passage of some version of both the trillion-dollar bipartisan infrastructure bill, which has already passed the Senate, and the $3.5-trillion budget-reconciliation bill. He wants progressives to get real about the price tag and moderates to give up on the idea of voting for the smaller infrastructure bill without going along with the bigger spending package, which will need the votes of essentially every Democratic member in both the House and the Senate to pass. The money quote, as cited by the Times: “You are either getting both bills or neither—and the prospect of neither is unconscionable. It would signal a complete and utter failure of our democratic duty, and a reckless abdication of our responsibility. It would define our generation’s history and show that, when our time came, we failed, both for Americans now and in the years to come.” ... Instead, Biden’s approach to the matter of the irreconcilable camps in his party is very similar to his approach to everything—a philosophy neatly summed up in his address to the U.N. General Assembly this week as “relentless diplomacy,” rather than “relentless war.” On Wednesday, Biden spent five hours with Democratic members of Congress, in various groupings, in search of an elusive deal, and will surely be working the phones right up until Monday’s deadline for the House vote on the infrastructure bill—and beyond. No one doubts that Biden is ready to talk this to death. But diplomacy, like war, is a tactic, not an end in itself. The Biden Presidency, on both the foreign and domestic fronts, remains a jumble of aspirations—and retains a haze of uncertainty about how to achieve them. Much of his political problem, it seems to me, is a vast gap between his articulated goals and what is politically possible. The U.S. is no longer a lone superpower unchallenged abroad; the Democratic Party is barely a majority party in the U.S. Congress. It’s a fifty-fifty Senate, and a fifty-fifty world. In a purely practical sense, the challenge for Biden is that he hasn’t got to the hard part yet. He can’t negotiate with China or the Republicans until he negotiates with his allies. France and the House progressives, ironically, are the obstacles of the week, not Xi Jinping and Mitch McConnell. @bad_teammate, will you comment on this last line in bold above?

We've dated ourselves as oldies to all these youngin's, haven't we?

are you talking about the mask aka chin diaper?

Sorry for the brain fart, forgot where I was, and by the time I edited you had already seen and quoted. I think your thesis is mostly wrong, which bodes ill for the realities of our GDP growth. I stated this above when I said, GDP and wage growth are not tightly coupled as they have been in the past. This means that that GDP is not growing in more fundamental or classical ways, to which you have alluded, but rather by flywheel (e.g. housing equity and stock market). This growth is not solid and stable, in other words, but flimsy. The real argument people like you should make, from where I stand, then is: GDP growth is bubbly/inflated "Real" GDP growth is better and safer for us all Historically real GDP growth is tightly coupled with wage growth If we pump up wage growth, we will see better GDP growth The problems there are mainly what Bevo said above about how that's much easier said than done, but also getting people (Americans? Shareholders/Investors? Government?) to buy-in that we are inflated and that the growth is a mirage.

I edited my post you quoted already; i saw i might have gotten a bit too triggered.

Timing and luck are underrated elements that are almost entirely outside of our control in life. So much so that it's irrational to rail against (and certainly irrational to take pride in, for you didn't do anything yourself). The royal you.