>you most likely stayed in the areas of DC that most tourists do.

Like the area that the trump mob was 'touring'?

#65
Spot. On.

They're co-opting the American flag.
They are trying to say the true patriots wave a desecrated American flag, along with the battle flag of the Confederate States Of America, who didn't want to be a part of the United States of America.

fk them.

I'm selling Thin Taupe Line flags if anyone is interested.
It's a symbol of solidarity among drywall installers.
The Sheetrock guys are the thin line separating society from looking at bare studs* and insulation.
Where We Patch One, We Patch All!

*Someone take this.

>The thin blue line is a 7 decade old symbol of unity of police.

Unity of Police?
Why so many people flying it who aren't police then?

Maybe it's been co-opted as a symbol for more than just 'Unity of Police'?

Is Fanone still a Trump supporter? I read that he was, going into the events of Jan 6.

Pencey recently publicly admitted he and Trump may never see the events of 1/6 "eye to eye" but he was proud of their accomplishments over 4 years.

Remember when Cheney shot that guy and the guy apologized for stopping Cheney's pellets with his body?

>>that the employees are in NY State and seem uninterested in unionizing.

I didn't have time to read this one but when there was a unionizing vote at a large Amazon facility in the South earlier this year (Alabama?), it sounded like Amazon did a pretty thorough job of internally messaging against unions to their employees. Convincing them it wasn't needed and would be a net loss to the worker.

I've been reading 'Collapse' by Jared Diamond.
Examines how civilizations collapse and vanish. Easter Islanders, Maya, some Native Americans in the Southwest.
Environmental catastrophe, whether from over farming, over population, poor planning, not realizing you prospered in an atypically wet period and now the drought-schitt is hitting the fan, is a basically what wiped out a lot of them.

I might quibble with the mason jars (the stock is technically ownership of a part of a company who's perceived value has potential to change)

but the other two points i agree with.

But, seeing how a potential elimination of the ss cap would amount to a fart in the wind when applied to the wealthiest man on the planet - and not because he has so much money he doesn't mind, but because it literally wouldn't generate a lot of tax revenue - goes back the point up thread that Eberly will probably agree with: the really rich people can play shell games with their compensation and hide it from something like a ss tax.

Wrinkle is that when you have 53 million shares of stock, you can take a comparatively low salary. Occasionally you'll see a CEO take a $1 salary.

So sitting on 180 billion worth of stock isn't doing anything as far as funding Soc Security.
And i believe if he sells a billion worth of stock - that is taxed under capital gains rules, but won't send anything to social security.

"Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) Chief Executive Jeff Bezos base salary for 2020 remained at $81,840, the same as 2019 and just a little more than double the median total compensation U.S. full-time employees of $37,930. In the ecommerce and cloud giant's 2020 proxy statement filed late Wednesday, Amazon disclosed that Bezos total 2020 compensation was $1,681,840, also the same as the year before, as he again received no stock awards and "all other compensation" remained at $1.60 million. For Bezos, all other compensation represents costs to the company for security arrangements for Bezos, which the company said it believed was "reasonable" in light of Bezos' "low salary." But despite the low salary, Bezos acknowledged in a letter to shareholders that he was "wealthy," as recent filings show he owned 53.21 million Amazon shares, representing 10.57% of the shares outstanding, and valued at $180.1 billion at current prices. The stock, which rose 1.6% in morning trading, has rallied 46.7% over the past 12 months while the S&P 500 has advanced 49.2%."

>> but they want to pretend they're good people because they only make adult brown people suffer, not their kids.

House near me. Trumper, has anti-abortion sign(s) in the yard, year-round, regardless of elections etc. Last year they put up a Black Lives Matter sign. Only it was modified to say 'Unborn Black Lives Matter'.

If all the chubs would just stand on one side of Florida, maybe it would...

>>But it would hit the guy making between $137 and $250K

Right, that's the spot.
But of course it all comes down to the phrase 'middle class' -- which gets used a lot of different ways.

Teacher making 48k a year? Middle class.
Higher up in a big corporation making 300k a year? Middle class

Nobody likes to claim they're 'upper class' or whatever the appropriate term is, i dunno, unless they're quite wealthy, then they absolutely do, discerning between wealthy and merely 'affluent' etc...

>"Of course the opposite is true. It would only hammer middle class folks."

How so?
If someone is making 70,000 a year, and the cap is increased from the current 137,700 to say, 250,000, how would that have a negative impact on the 70k worker?

>A trust fund baby, getting $50,000 in dividends from Johnson and Johnson, pays no federal taxes.
#15 | POSTED BY DANFORTH

Wouldn't that be taxed at 15% for qualified dividend income?

"Each year, the federal government sets a limit on the amount of earnings subject to Social Security tax. In 2021, the Social Security tax limit is $142,800, up from $137,700 in 2020. This is the largest increase in a decade and could mean a higher tax bill for some high earners. The maximum amount of Social Security tax an employee will pay in 2021 is $8,853.60"

Bill,
Did you know that Bezos has been absolutely fascinated by space since he was a boy?
He was born in '64 and grew up watching the Apollo program.
In his valedictorian speech graduating high school, he referred to space travel.

Now he's the richest man on the planet.

So put 2 and 2 together.

@#1 ... both in Uniform and OUT ...
I presume "OUT" does not, in this context, mean "a gay person who is out of the closet."
#2

He may live near The Village People, hard to say.

Whisky. We don't use an "e".
#35

I actually considered looking up who prefers which spelling, but...

#36
Laura, what you want to do is use it as a chaser after a full swig of warm, raw milk. It should kill some of the many pathogens you've just ingested.

From "High Fidelity" (2000)

Dick: I guess it looks as if you're reorganizing your records. What is this though? Chronological?
Rob: No ...
Dick: Not alphabetical ...
Rob: Nope ...
Dick: What?
Rob: Autobiographical.
Dick: No ------- way.

Bourbon is whiskey.
Jack Daniels is not bourbon (Tennessee whiskey, whatever that means)
Canadian whiskey is whiskey.
Scotch whiskey is whiskey.
Irish whiskey is whiskey.
Rye whiskey is whiskey, even if the 'Bye Bye Miss American Pie' song would lead you to believe one is not a subset of the other.

>I was like that song is not that old and then I was like oh, that's from like 25 years ago.

I can hear a song from the 80's through mid-90's and tell you the year, and i'm rarely off by more than one year.

Then i'll hear a more recent hit and think "hmm this song might be from 3 years ago..." and it's from 2009...

This is one of those topics where both sides* project things onto the other.
Non-hunters say hunters are in it for the kill thrill; hunters say the non-hunters are bed-wetters and hypocrites.
I don't hunt myself but it's been going on among a lot of life forms on this planet since the dawn of time. Some of them majestic birds of prey, some of them Kerrs Laht swilling ------.
Yeah, it gets used by some as a sort of dong-extender by some, but there's lots of hunters who care about animals and the environment and view it as much more humane than industrial meat production.

*fng hell i DumTaked it...

Good old IG Farben firing up the assembly lines again.

BASF: "We make the cyanide gas you buy better."