Eh, a quick Google search said that Tesla wasn’t profitable for 17 years and survived due to government subsidies and investor funding. After that they’ve been making ~$15 billion per year and sold around 1.3 million cars worldwide per year.

In contrast Toyota sold 10.3 million vehicles and made $61 billion in profit.

As with their 17 years of unprofitable business they are currently more proportionally profitable, but a big portion of that is Musk fanboys and limited supply. If they actually started selling more cars they probably wouldn’t be as proportionally profitable.

Additionally, Tesla is supposedly becoming less profitable due to several factors including not making a new model in 10 years, reports that they fraudulently marketed features (being sneaky with how range is calculated so that the true range is way less than advertised), and Elon’s antics hurting sales. Elon’s antics are a big deal, some people who wanted Teslas before don’t want them anymore because they don’t want to be associated with him (like flying a Gadsden Flag in the mid 2000s vs now).

Elon’s antics don’t stop there, he’s also hurt the investor’s opinion as well. A big reason Tesla’s stock was so high is because people were buying them and not selling them. This caused their price to stay super high, but when Elon bought Twitter he sold a ton of stock. The price was at an all time high over $400 per share, his selling cratered it to ~$115, and is currently around $165. Investors don’t like it when the owner of a company single handedly tanks their investment so the owner can make a bad investment, even more so when the writing on the wall says he’ll sell even more of the stock to fund the bad investment.

Absolutely agree

I agree with the sentiment that we shouldn’t be praising people’s deaths, but I want to point out the cold part

Texas Hill Country loosely covers an area around Fredricksburg Texas with San Antonio and Austin being just on the outskirts. Looking back at the weather reports, and not knowing the exact location, the temperature on 2/10 was a low of 45-65 degrees F. Considering the lows typically come in in the late hours of the night the more realistic temperature was somewhere between 50-75 degrees F.

Also, you can see the picture of the ranch in the article which also says it’s a 900 acre ranch. 900 acres is only 1.4 sq miles. It’s one thing to say a 4 min drive at 35 mph vs walking, but realistically it’s a lot slower speed and thus a lot shorter walk.

That’s still going to be a second residence, it may not be a $2500/month residence, but it’s not going to be free.

I think you’re confused by my original reply, I wasn’t saying it should be free or that they could just drive from their primary residence. I was saying that using the cost of DC housing as a reason for higher pay doesn’t make sense when they don’t have to live in DC itself. It’s perfectly reasonable that they may have to have a place outside of DC and commute in.

So, while there isn’t a rule that says specifically “congresspeople may not sleep in their offices”, there are all kinds of rules about what constitutes housing in DC that are not met by congressional offices:

Part of the issue is that you’re applying normal rules to an abnormal group. Traditionally I would agree with you that people shouldn’t sleep in their work offices, but this is hardly the weirdest thing that is normal in Congress. Also it doesn’t really matter if it meets the fire code or DCs building standards, Federal law has priority over local law. Even the DC Fire Code specifically says that it does not apply to any building or premises owned by the US Government.

Heck, there are a ton of special laws which Congress has passed which only apply to Congress, including prohibiting DC local government from charging property tax or income tax on Congressmen. There are even laws regarding allowances that Congressmen get which essentially says that there are quantifiable benefits of the job which cannot be counted as income for taxes.

The only rule that matters is whether Congress has specifically blocked it.

EDIT: I just double checked and the DOB link you sent says at the very top

“The Department of Buildings (DOB) is mandated to ensure public health, safety, and welfare by enforcing property maintenance codes on all residential and non-residential structures in the District of Columbia, excluding federal government buildings.”

They’re not allowed to do that though. Most of them get away with it, but it’s against the rules.

Do you have a source on that, because when I googled it the only thing to come up was Jackie Speier recommending banning it in 2020. There is even a recent Business Insider which talks about Mike Johnson doing it and makes no reference to it being against any rules.

https://www.businessinsider.com/speaker-mike-johnson-sleep-in-his-capitol-hill-office-2023-11

Here is a 2015 NPR article that says there are no rules against it https://www.npr.org/2015/12/26/458207661/meet-the-lawmakers-who-sleep-shower-work-all-on-capitol-hill

From California?

How about Arlington or Alexandria?

I am not fundamentally against giving Congress a pay raise, their last pay raise was in 2009 and it’s probably time to give them a cost of living adjustment. I’m not opposed to giving Congress a pay raise to encourage a wider range or people to run in the hope that we can have better Congressmen. There are Congressmen who come from already expensive areas where $174,000 isn’t a lot (such as AOC) and so they may need more pay. Washington is an expensive place and so are the surrounding areas, there is an argument that they need high pay to run their house in their home state and pay for expenses in DC.

The problem I have is with the argument that paying Congress more would either help eliminate corruption or that Congressmen can make more money working somewhere else.

The first paragraph of arguments is a real discussion and should be solved. Patrick McHenry doesn’t fit that criteria. $174k is a very good wage in his district and a quick search of some public records shows he has owned multiple properties and even owns a separate lake property as well.

So if living very comfortably, almost lavishly in comparison to the people in his district, isn’t enough then what is? What is the lifestyle expectation for a Congressman? I personally don’t think a Congressional job should be about making people wealthy. If this isn’t enough then nothing would be.

I 100% agree, if you’d take a bribe at $174k as a civil servant then you’d take a bribe at any price point. Raising pay doesn’t stop corruption, at best it just raises the price a bit. Trump was supposedly selling pardons for $2 million, he issued 143 pardons (let’s say he was only paid on 10% of those). That’s $28 million in bribes.

If we have to match the bribes to stop corruption then $28 million times 535 members of Congress is $15 billion.

One problem is that they’re legally required to have two residences, one in their district, and another one in DC

They are not required to have a residence in DC, many members of Congress sleep in their offices to save money. There’s nothing saying they couldn’t commute to work.

Also, the House only meets for 4-5 hours, approximately 160 days a year, and they regularly skip sessions.

I’m sure there’s another rule requiring them to have an actual residence in DC as well, not just a PO Box, for example.

This is not true, they don’t have to have a residence in DC. Also, the House only is in session about 4-5 hours per day, ~160 days a year and they aren’t actually required to show up (they might not get reelected if they are skipping but voters rarely actually care)

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/report-cards/2022/house/missed-votes

With that kind of schedule I’d fucking commute or like many congressmen, I’d sleep in my office.

I think that federal wages should be supplemented by state pay to account for high cost of living states and counties.

$175k may not be a high wage in areas of California, but in most parts of the country it’s enough to outright buy a house and live very very well.

California has a cost of living problem

17 does not equal droves

Nah, even if they did their NATO % contribution the amount would be pitifully small. When you look at most of the articles that talk about “10 Best Places to Live” it’s mostly super small population, low immigration, countries with virtually no military.

Most NATO countries are between 1-2.5% of their GDP, but that’s only ~$300 billion. The US does ~3.5% which amounts to ~$811 billion.

The other NATO countries wouldn’t just need to meet their NATO 2%, they’d need to more than triple it. Even just for the US to come down to 2% would cause a ~$348 billion decrease (more than the rest of NATO combined).

If I were a European country free riding in NATO the last thing I’d be pushing is the US to reduce military spending.

If you’re on desktop and open several videos at once (such as getting home from work/school and opening all the new videos on your subscriptions tab) you really don’t notice.

What I do notice are the ads at the beginning, quarters, middle, and end of a video

I have Windows 10, so things may be different for 11 or whatever version you’re on, but can’t you just uninstall OneDrive without specifically closing it? I feel like that’s what I did when it was default installed.

Weird, you’d think that Google would give them more options than that and allow them to tailor their ads to their audience. I guess this is how google puts forth the minimum effort for the maximum profit. Thanks for the insight.

Oh I totally agree. I guess the rest of my comment was about how they’re trying to make it an age thing and it’s the worst marketing for him.

I’d really like for the Democrats to stop trying to make Biden appear young. Yeah, I would like a younger president, yeah I like that Biden can ride a bike or go for a walk, but these don’t make him look younger to me and I didn’t vote for him because I thought he was younger and super fit.

I wish the Biden team would lean into the memes, I feel like that’s when he’s been most popular. Appropriating the Let’s go Brandon memes, appropriating the “I did that stickers/meme,” leaning into the Dark/Dank Brandon memes, and back when he was VP leaning into the Uncle Joe vibe.

Fucking embrace that the dude is old and make him America’s great grandpa. Have him walk out onto a Mr. Rogers lookalike set in a red cardigan to talk about policy. Have him do a fireside address with a blanket and a coffee. Have him throw on the sunglasses and crack the goofy smile before going to get ice cream with a podcaster.

Hell, get the people who made this video to help on Biden’s public image.

https://youtu.be/OIDEGN4Js40?si=mHhctXdgoCi1RMgR

I’d really like to know what the level of input creators have over the ads that appear in their videos is. It feels like some videos are just whatever Google throws out there while some videos seem to have no ads and finally some seem to have very limited ads.

Is there some sort of dial that the creator has behind the scenes that determines how shitty the ads for their video are?

Ads on YouTube used to not be so bad, a 5 second ad that was so unintrusive that I’d just let it play, a 15 second with a 3 second skip, and it also didn’t feel like the same quantity of ads.

Before an ad would roll at the beginning of the video and I’d likely quickly skip it. If the video was fairly long there might be an extra ad in the middle. Sometimes the creator might also have an embedded ad, but I generally don’t mind those.

Now it’s a double 15 second ad at the beginning, only the first one is skippable. Then there is another double ad every 15 minutes, plus the embedded creator ad, and if you make it to the end of the video there is an end of video double ad before it auto plays to the start of the next video and next set of double ads.

Make the ads short and unintrusive or make them long, skippable, but rare. I hate having to constantly tab out to go click the skip button every few minutes.

When the YouTube ad blocker ban started I was on chrome with uBlock and it seemed to be refreshing the block even with uBlock. I thought to myself, “Hey let’s try it with the ads, I’ll whitelist YouTube and support the content creators.” After about 3 days I said fuck it, dropped Chrome and updated uBlock again; I haven’t seen an ad since.

Big thing that helps is switching off of Chrome. I’ve been seeing a lot of people say that we should stop using Chrome and I just hadn’t gotten around to it. Once the YouTube adblocker started picking up Ublock Origin even after clearing the cache I hard switched to Fire Fox and installed Ublock Origin.

I have not cleared my cache once and I haven’t seen a single ad.

It might be a case of present morals/ethics being applied to the past, but it’s kinda fucked up. It’s literally justifying murder and terrorism. Fighting against strike breaking companies is certainly a admirable, but doesn’t justify killing people.