Traditionally, people shifted to the republican over 40. You’re entering peak earning years. You then start to realize how much you pay in taxes, and how little you get for it. Not everyone is in the billionaire class. 

Oh wow, I loved Los Espookys and Problemista but had no idea Torres has a new show coming this soon. What a pleasant surprise. His style of humor matches my own to a T.

Plenty of place you can live and not have that high of a mortgage and make that kind of money. I wouldn’t qualify as an individual or maybe just qualify, but since my wife makes less we are well under the joint AGI and have a mortgage that is under $2k. Even if we moved to a bigger house our mortgage wouldn’t be…

For me it depends what the goal is.  If the goal is to sell more EV’s in general then yes.  Something like 6% of the U.S. population have a combined household income of $300k+ which out of a population of 342 million is 20.52 million people.  It also doesn’t help that those are kind of the target market for people who…

It’s 2024, there are plenty of high paying jobs where you can live where you damned well please. I have one of them, for going on 18 years now.

I’d argue that being a dick has always been his thing. His humor has relied on sarcasm and a general dismissiveness toward other people’s feelings for a very long time. It just used to be on stage, directed at a straw man breaking the unwritten rules of society, so we tended to agree with him. There was more to it,…

I don’t know: the rock group Modern Baseball formed in 2011; maybe *they* wrote AFfC and DwD!

Ah ha! Someone that actually understands what the word ‘annoying’ means. Good grief some people are thick.

Eh, if you and your spouse are making $300,000+, I don’t think that’s an “annoyingly low” phase out. Tax breaks shouldn’t be for the wealthy. Making $300,000 or more per year puts you in the top 5% of higher percentile for American families. 

For those of us that cannot get the tax credit on our EVs - sure it is. I ordered my Rivian in 2021 assuming a tax credit, received it in 2023. In the interim the tax law changed so I could no longer get the tax credit. That’s annoying.

Convergent evolutionary theory postulates that exigent environmental circumstances tends to lead to similar solutions. It’s part of the reason the crab has evolved in so many different environments on the planet. It’s simply the logical solution to the environment. As a result, it’s not improbable to expect other…

Interesting! Is there anything to corroborate that beyond one of the people behind the pen name having been GRRM’s assistant? I find it hard to believe Feast and (especially) Dragons would be the result of collaboration with a ghostwriter, considering how shaggy, plotless, and in need of editorial oversight they are…

More seriously than my other post, is that the formula both has solid reasoning behind it, and is also fairly speculative. How could it be any other way?

If we are truly alone in the universe, that means we are truly the most valuable things in the universe. How special and unique all of us that are alive and capable of thought and consciousness truly are. I find that kinda re assuring that in all the universe, nature, god, what ever decided or just happen to mix the…

That’s what the Greys WANT us to think, as they abduct us for our precious bodily fluids.

I’ve gone from “eh, just let him cook” to “dude, just crap it out on the page and get it in print” to “his heart’s not in it, and that’s fine” to “just hire a frigging cowriter/ghostwriter, dude.” If there’s anything to take away from AFfC and ADwD is that the story’s become too ungainly, so I don’t envy his position,…

I hear that about a lot of stadium shows. I’ve only been to two (Pink Floyd, U2, at the Superdome in New Orleans), but they sounded okay.

Can’t believe it took me this long to say it but: what a hack. First and foremost, adaptation is inherently an act of change; changing the medium of the story doesn’t just involve changing the shape of a story, it demands it. You’re a lot more likely to dash yourself against the rocks hewing too faithfully to the…

If you ask me what the biggest threat our collective cultural output is - don’t worry, it’s not an ethnic group or anything like - it’s the tech companies curating our cultural output.

He was the keynote speaker for a work fundraiser I attended a while back. He was a train wreck. Ranting about civics semi-coherently, losing trains of thought. The general conclusion was that he was on some pretty serious meds. Sometimes when you’re in a general state of decline your brain gets stuck too. Doesn’t help…