It probably would have been a wider field if it weren’t for Mills. Schumer pushed her into running, and since everyone knew the DNC would throw a lot of money behind his pick, no one wanted to get in after that. They couldn’t have expected the establishment candidate to flame out before the primary.

Restaurant margins are notoriously thin. The average restaurant makes around a 3% to 5% profit margin. There are very few restaurants in America that could just triple their staffing costs and not raise prices.

Yeah, this is unfortunately why tipping culture can’t be phased out by individual restaurateurs trying to create change. Consumers would rather pay $20 for a meal and tip $4 than pay $22 upfront and not tip. I imagine it’s the same psychological principle that makes people think paying $99.99 is significantly better than $100. The only solution is eliminating the tipped minimum wage all together so that everyone gets the same minimum wage (also, increase the minimum wage at least 200% while you’re at it).

That being said, it’s not just the customers. Whenever a state is about to eliminate the tipped wage, the National Restaurant Association (yes, another evil NRA) spends millions trying to kill it. It happened here in MA a few years ago; they convinced both servers and customers to vote down a referendum to eliminate the tipped minimum wage, even though both of those groups were just subsidizing the restaurant owners.

They didn’t intend for that contingent to actually drive, but they paved the path and all :shocked Pikachu: when he grabbed the wheel.

Yeah, more or less. I don’t think the Republican elites ever disagreed with the racist resentment politics they’d been peddling, but they intended them to be a means to enact tax breaks for the wealthy and wage wars. They never expected the base to elect someone who made racism the focus.

I still hold that he gets absolutely nowhere without Putin’s help.

Not sure I agree. Russian interference certainly helped, but the economic conditions in the country are ripe for fascism. He might have won without foriegn interference, and if he didn’t, we might be facing a more popular, more competent fascist right now.

I take your point, but Trump is the culmination of 40 years of austerity, wealth inequality, and dog whistling. To extend the visual metaphor, we first noticed the ship listing during Trump, but we’d been taking on water since Reagan.

Conciousness, what makes you, you, is not your brain functions.

This is an extremely debatable assertion that scientists and philosophers will still be debating long after you and I are dead, but empirically, the evidence is pointing towards, “No, your consciousness is just a byproduct of that lump of meat in your skull.” Phineas Gage, for example, discovered that a huge portion of what made him, him was actually his left-frontal lobe.

We could argue about conciousness, the soul, and the ship of theses for hours, and it would all still be opinion, but what is not opinion is this; your consciousness is being run on meat hardware, physical damage to or a chemical imbalance in that hardware will effect your consciousness, and it is constantly running processes, even when in sleep mode, until it is permanently shutdown. Based on that information, I would not let anyone disintegrate my brain, even if fhey reassembled it perfectly.

Never bought into the whole, “sleep is the same thing,” argument. There’s no period during which your brain functions cease during sleep. They slow during non-REM sleep, then reach near waking levels once you enter REM, but they never end. That’s not remotely like having your entire body disassembled at molecular level and rebuilt somewhere else. One is essentially like a computer that’s screen has gone idle while it performs background tasks. The other is like transferring all of your files to a new computer and then throwing the original into a woodchipper.

Read the room, Yahoo Scout.

If you’ve spent the last 8 months calling Platner supporters Nazi apologists, but you didn’t mention LaFlamme once, it’s time to admit that you just like internet fights. Platner is an extremely problematic candidate, but his platform proved that progressive-populism is more popular than centrism in purple states. Getting his voters to support a better progressive-populist in a state with rank-choice voting was not a heavy lift, provided you actually wanted to do that.

Yeah, being distrustful of Platner is one thing, but a lot of the Platner discourse is being generated by doomer leftists who can’t wait to tear someone down. You can basically tell who has genuine concerns about Platners history and who gets off on complaining by whether or not they mention Andrea LaFlamme.

That’s why I’ve had this random fruit box for 6 years.

lol Good job imagining smoothly flowing traffic. You must not live near a major city, because lane closures on highways always devolve into the exact scenario you’re attempting to ignore.

Buddy, I live in fucking Boston. They shut down a lane going into the Sumner every morning, and yeah, it’s slow, but it doesn’t get backed up unless some dipshit decides he doesn’t want to let anyone in.

I’ve been stop-and-go traffic probably literally hundreds of times and that’s EXACTLY how people merge: by blazing past the already stopped traffic and cram in right at the last second.

If someone is trying to merge into another lane while traveling 20 mph faster than the lane they’re merging into, sure, that’s unsafe. But doing that a mile before the lane ends is also unsafe. The problem you’re describing is just speeding.

The assholes rushing up to the end of a closed lane when traffic is already slow ARE NOT ZIPPER MERGING. They’re cutting in line.

This is what you fundamentally don’t understand about the situation; you two are not in the same line. You are in line to move forward. They are in line to enter your line. When traffic in the lane that’s closing is light, it might feel unfair they go in front of you, but that’s just how it works. The fastest way to resolve the situation is for everyone in the open lane to let one car from the closing lane go in front of them when the lane ends.

They’re further increasing traffic density,

No they aren’t. Traffic density is increasing because the number of cars is remaining the same while the volume of road is reducing. Density is going to increase no matter what, but if you handle that increased density in an organized manner, like having all the cars merge at the same time (AKA a fucking zipper merge), you can reduce the slowdowns the increased density causes.

That is why rolling stops happen

Traffic waves (I assume thats what you mean, since rolling stops make no sense in this context) happen when someone experiences an unexpected traffic pattern and has to stop short, causing the person behind them to stop short, and so on. If you want to reduce traffic waves, the best thing you can do is behave as predictably as possible. Having everyone merge at a predictable time, (like, for example, at the end of a lane) is one of the best things you can do to prevent traffic waves.

people WILL slow down once density reaches a certain point, and cramming a closed lane full is INCREASING DENSITY.

Literally the opposite is true; the same number of cars spread over two lanes have a lower density than those cars spread over one lane. That’s what density means; a rock has a higher density than air because it has more matter crammed into the same volume. The density of the traffic will eventually increase no matter what when the second lane ends, you’re just advocating for that to happen sooner and in a more chaotic manner because you feel like you’re getting cut in line.

This isn’t rocket science, yet a lot of you fuckwits are clearly still playing with crayons.

Let ye who understands the concept of density cast the first stone.

I don’t know what to tell you, I’d literally never heard of," blocking the box," until you said it. Meanwhile, Gridlock is so ubiquitous and well understood that, as your quote points out, it’s a universal metaphor for a blockage or impass.

Also, if we just accept this vague use of gridlock, (I’ve never heard anyone is it for anything other than actual gridlock, but whatever) you realize that this quote explicitly states that some people use, “gridlock,” and, “traffic congestion,” interchangeably, meaning your claim thar, “gridlock,” means “stop and go traffic,” not, “contested traffic,” is flat out wrong, right?

No, that’s definitely gridlock, blocking the box is just another name for it.

If you’re talking about someone exiting their lane to enter a lane that’s about to close in order to get ahead, sure,.that’s kinda a dick move, but if you’re saying that someone should leave their lane early because the lane that’s ending isn’t very busy, no, that’s wrong. Even if the closing lane is going much faster, when that lane ends, the driver will have to slow down to match the speed of the other lane and wait to be let in. The driver behind him will catch up, and a zipper merge will develop. They’re not doing anything wrong, you just mad that they’re passing you.

Also, a lane can never be, “full,” just busy. You think they’re at fault because they’re trying to get into a lane that’ doesn’t have room for them, but actually you’re at fault because you’re not making room for them.

Depends. If traffic is light, they’re not going significantly faster than the speed of traffic in the other lane, or they’re going significantly slower than the car in front of them, yes, they’re an asshole. If traffic is relatively dense, they’re passing the right lane at a good speed, and they’re matching the speed of the car in front of them, no, everyone shouldn’t change lanes just because you think, “passing,” lane means, “drive as fast as I want regardless of traffic patterns,” lane.

Making everyone in front of you change lanes because you’ve decided the passing lane isn’t passing as fast as you’d like is just going to create slowdowns behind you as you continually cause other cars to change lanes. Also, no matter what, if you’re following someone that closely at highway speeds, you’re an asshole. Flash your high beams if you wanna pass.

I think you mean congestion. Gridlock is when cars attempt to cross an intersection during a green light even though there is too much traffic to pass completely, leaving them stranded mid-intersection when the light turns red, thereby blocking the perpendicular traffic from crossing the intersection when their light turns green (literally locking the grid).

Not really. The traffic has to squeeze through the same number of lanes at some point.

Yeah, and the most efficient way to do that is for everyone to zipper merge at the same point. You can’t just have everyone decide over the course of two miles when they think it’s appropriate to start a zipper merge; that’s not a zipper merge, that’s just changing lanes, and it creates unpredictable traffic patterns that lead to congestion. The end of the lane is obviously the best fixed point for everyone to merge because A) you utilize both lanes as long as possible for optimal efficiency and B) even the most oblivious dumb-ass knows they need to change lanes when they run out of lane.

Woah buddy you want to make a bet Donald trump won’t be president in 3 years?

Yeah, I expect him to be dead in less than 2. He is looking pretty rough these days. Vance may try to fuck with the peaceful transfer of power, but I doubt it. He clearly doesn’t have the charisma or balls to be the face of a fascist regime.

I also doubt Platner is a Nazi and I’d say that, even if it turns out his rhetoric is hollow and fake, you’re better off gambling on him than centrists like Mills or Collins. But a lot of people disagree, and they’re gonna be up Maine’s ass about it until the election. It’s just one of the drawbacks of having a competitive Senate race.

OK, but you understand why people aren’t just worried about their own senate race, right? Donald Trump won’t be president in 2 to 4 years, and limiting the damage he does to our democracy in the meantime depends on what voters in a handful of states decide to do. The Senate is significantly more powerful than the House, and most of us will never vote in competitive Senate race.

I get it; I’m pretty fucking sick of Platner discourse as well. But what Maine and Texas decide is going to effect all of us for the next 6 years, and more crucially, it will determine whether or not Trump controls half of congress for the remainder of his term. It’s not reasonable (or accurate) to tell people, “butt out, this doesn’t concern you.”