TheChurn

American hegemony was a conscious American policy choice. We didn’t want the Euros having an independent foreign policy, we wanted them reliant on American military protection. This was how the US kept those bits of its empire in line.

Notice how the only Western European country that even pays lip service to independent action is France, the one Western European country with a military capable of independent operation. And then we get “Freedom Fries” and all that shit whenever they don’t do whatever the current US admin wants.

The single biggest thing Trump fucked up for the US was pushing NATO countries to spend more on defence. This will drastically reduce US influence over the continent in the coming decades, speeding up America’s worsening diplomatic isolation.

That would give politicians another reason to raise the retirement age, in order to stay in power.

They send random gifts some times, usually a code to redeem something in a game I don’t play.

Some super reacts - animated emojis basically.

Other than that I really couldn’t tell you. I don’t think the subscription is worth what the subscription gives, but the alternative is the free product gets worse faster, and that would disrupt a lot of communities that I enjoy interacting with.

Thinking of Discord as a whole, I think it is worth the nitro price. Not in love with the trajectory though.

I mostly just pay for it because I’ve used it for ages and definitely get more value out of it than the subscription cost. I don’t think I use a single nitro feature.

Not in the middle of a fucking desert, on a military base, far away from any potential market.

Unless you are going to claim that the soldiers stole wheat to sell to locals, for local currency, that they can then use to… do what exactly?

Again, it doesn’t matter whether you find the argument about compelling.

If care cannot be provided profitably, it won’t be provided at all. That is reality. Somehow, the care must be paid for.

Those who need care are not better off if these facilities close.

The businesses are hardly profitable. For every dollar they get from housing a resident, they get just above half a penny of profit.

As I showed above, you can take the entire profit and put it into hiring more staff and it won’t actually make a difference. They either need to raise prices, cut costs elsewhere (maybe administration? I’m not familiar enough to know), or pay people less.

That’s what the numbers say.

We get it, you don’t like nursing homes.

You don’t seem to be engaging with the substance of the matter, so I’ll leave it here.

This would’ve been more believable if they left off the wheat. Oil I can imagine, but no fucking way are US troops stealing wheat of all things.

Do they think there is a mill at their base? What the fuck would they use it for? It has negative value.

And that is a valid opinion. Unfortunately what do you do with all these people if the homes close because they can’t afford staff?

The intent of the bill is to prevent neglect in nursing homes - that is a worthy and important goal. The mandate doesn’t actually help make that happen.

It doesn’t provide funding the care providers to increase staff, it doesn’t add incentives for individuals to get certified and help address the personnel shortage, it doesn’t put a cap on administrative costs for care facilities, it doesn’t actually DO anything to help solve the problem.

Good mandates also provide an avenue to meet them.

That is an insanely small margin, and directly contradicts your claim that they can staff properly.

Let’s take the entire profit for the industry and hire nurses. Let’s say reach nurse costs $80K ( $60K salary, $20K for taxes/insurance/other benefits).

That pays for 9600 more nurses. Which, given the nursing requirements in the bill (3.48 hours per day per resident), only covers staffing for 22K residents… a rounding error to the more than 1.2 million nursing home residents in the country.

There are ~15K nursing homes in the US, each of them getting 0.6 more nurses doesn’t help anything.

The $94/hr isn’t a salary, it’s the cost to the business. Employees generally cost a business 1.3-1.5X their salary - since insurance, payroll taxes, PTO, etc. all also need to be paid for.

Again this is not considering any other cost for the facility: utilities, food, other staff, medical equipment, maintenance, insurance, rent…

3.5 hours of nurse care per resident per day (from the bill).

Resident pays $120K per year to stay at the facility.

There are 365*3.5 hours in a year they need nursing care = 1277 hours of nursing care per year per client.

$120K per year / 1277 hours per year = $94/ hr maximum cost for each nurse - assuming there are no other expenses for the facility.

Must have mistyped to get $95, but that is the math.

$120K per year per resident isn’t that much revenue to cover 24 hour availability of care, food, lease, etc.

I’m not saying it is unworkable, but with the requirement for 3.5 hours of nurse care or resident per day, that means the maximum total cost of a Nurse is $95 per hour, or about $190K.

That really isn’t much - typically employees cost a business twice their base salary. So the nurses can be paid $100K per year while leaving almost $0 for any other expenses…

One nitpick, Jesus was almost certainly a real figure. There are many records indicating someone with that name was in the area at the time, and that they were executed by crucifixion.

The religious stuff, obviously no way to prove. But as a person, the historical consensus is they existed.

While Finland lost, the difficulty the Soviets encountered during their offensive was noted by the powers at the time. It was another factor convincing the Nazis that invading the Soviet Union wasn’t as terrible and idea as the balance of resources and forces would suggest.

Historians still debate whether the Soviets intended to conquer all of Finland at the onset of the war. While the eventual peace treaty left Finland ceding more territory than the initial Soviet ultimatum demanded, Finland retained its sovereignty, which was incredible given the disparity in military power and the existence of a puppet Finnish communist government.

Yeah, because modern skeletons have the marks of heavy manual labour on them…

Bro have you ever talked to anyone in the trades? They are all limping by 35.

Not everyone gets a do-nothing laptop job.

The law doesn’t matter, it doesn’t enforce itself.

The judges wanted it lowered for reasons, and so they lowered it.

The entire system is a lot more about people than most want to admit. The magic words on a page somewhere only exist to serve those in power, never to force them to do something they don’t want to do.

Victoria 3 was just boring - I say this as a huge fan of Victoria 2.

I played a few weeks after launch, and - for every one of the 4 countries I tried (Russia, Japan, Denmark, Spain), simply building all the things everywhere and ignoring money made everything trivial.

The economic simulation was super barebones, the entire thing could be bootstrapped just by building. An entire population of illiterate farmers would become master architects overnight and send GDP to the double digit billions in a few decades.

Yes, you can make the argument that a hyper-modern vehicle is a vastly more effective weapons system, so the disparity in cost is justified.

That isn’t what we are seeing in Ukraine - relatively modern NATO-standard tanks are being knocked out by old artillery, immobilized by old mines, and killed by cheap drones. Industrial warfare in the vein of WWI and WWII is clearly not dead yet.

This isn’t to say Russia would win a direct conventional war against the west, but we also can’t sit here smugly and claim it would be a steamroll like Gulf Storm given the observations from Ukraine.