Not sure, but I think the $60/hour is the all-in cost- wage, benefits, retirement contribution, etc.

It varies, a lot, by area- county, city, school, water district, etc., but it can be between 1.5% and 3% here in Texas.

Some people aren’t paid hourly.

It depends on the state you’re in and the terms of the contract. I’m in Texas, where we generally accept that people are free to enter into contracts, even bad contracts, so when said contract says you will pay for 12 months, regardless of how much you use it, it’s generally held up.

In many locales this is why there are signs pointing out surveillance video is being taken...and a lot has to do with expectation of privacy. Video taken on a public street, no problem. Video taken inside somewhere the subjects expected to be in private, problematic.

The leaker was likely invited to an event with the understanding it was secret. He breached that understanding. Therefore, he’s an asshole.

I theory it sounds great, except for A. Once you get to Dallas-Austin-Houston, how do you get around without your car; and B. Where does the land for the rails come from?

The Net Negative Federal transfers argument for Texas includes salaries paid by the federal government to people in Texas- frankly, mostly, soldiers. It also includes Federal expenditures in the state on federal activities, again, mostly military. Those shouldn’t be included in the calculation.

Articles like this ignore the reality that, for a large swath of America, services like Amtrak are useless and money spent poorly. I live in Texas- nobody uses Amtrak. Nobody. But we pay taxes that go to support this train system we see literally no actual benefit from. Which is the problem we face as the country…

The ladder frame helps, but notice that the body panels are solid from the door, through the bedside, to the rear. Without the buttresses you’d have enough flex, at the transition point between cab and bed, to at least crack the paint, if not the metal, itself. The bed takes the place of the cab in, say, the Checker…

Just throwing this out there, but if you take a look at the breakdown of all of those 60% approval rating polls, they oversample Liberals/Democrats and undersample Conservatives/Republicans. Adjusted for that and his approval is closer to 50%.

For example- the latest CNN poll shows approval at 60%, but 32% described…

In fact, the median home price in SA is $210K. If you have two teachers in a household you’d have a household income north of $100K.

As to why even autonomous, or autonomous-lite, cars should, in the end, accept driver input, even when their sensors tell them not to- in my hometown a local multi-millionaire was kidnapped by a prison escapee who put a gun on him and him drive around in his car, the kidnappee ultimately drove his car head-on into a…

A. It doesn’t have to only be a case of the driver “intentionally” wrecking his car into his own house- there are literally 10s of 1000s of examples of drivers inadvertently hitting the accelerator when they meant to hit the brake.

B. In the end, most people want to, ultimately, have control over their vehicle. The…

I work in San Antonio, Texas- the 7th largest city in the country, with just about everything you could want in terms of food, entertainment, job opportunities, etc. I live 30 minutes or so from downtown, just outside city limits, in a nice neighborhood with an average home price of probably $300K, which gets you…

The mere fact that a busload of people have so much money doesn’t mean it was taken from the rest of the world’s population. Wealth is not zero sum- there’s not a finite amount of money in the world, the accumulation of so much by so few reducing the remaining amount for the rest of the world. Most of these…

Shocked, shocked I tell you that a government-affiliated organization in Chicago is corrupt.

Also, I thought Democratic Party-run cities were supposed to be utopias of tolerance and bright shining examples to those shitholes run by Republicans.

He’s a pragmatist. He recognizes that behind every effective carrot, in international negotiations, there must be a big stick- so he’ll support rebuilding our military to the point where it can, legitimately, sustain the fight against a Russia, China, North Korea and when international diplomacy fails, he’ll support…

Kushner isn’t being appointed to an outward policy position requiring him to demonstrate his qualifications in projecting policy positions. He’s being appointed a position of advising the President in an unspecified, internal role. And he’s actually probably not going to be paid for it.

So your updated story is that, like all political appointees (rather than more permanent, civil service employees), the political appointees for this agency have submitted their contingent resignations (we’ll resign if you don’t want us to stay), and are awaiting a response from the new presidential administration.…