Yeah, I get that. To be honest she’s probably the only Trumper in the world I have any sympathy for or can understand at all. My uncle can get fucked, but my buddy’s mom, the backstory makes a little sense. They came over from the Soviet Union when my friend was 3, and she LOATHES communism. They started from nothing here, I think they may have had like $200 or something that family gave them to scrape by at first. They worked their way up, got some luck, and made a great live for themselves.
She’s been a housewife for most, if not all of her life. Given her views of communism, and given the Republicans’ stronger stance on US-Russia issues over the years, she was conservative. Given that she was a housewife who followed the news closely, she had Fox News on a lot starting 20 years ago or whatever when it launched. The other stuff she watches/reads is basically health news/content that sells homeopathic stuff. She started out as very into natural remedies like food-related, and ended up buying snake oil, basically. So she’s clearly susceptible to bullshit/propaganda.
One thing leads to another, and here we are. I’ve met her a couple of times, both pre Trump, and she had none of the signs of being a deplorable. She cares about other people, she’s kind, she’s got a good heart… So I found this turn of events, her supporting Trump, to be shocking. I think it’s just a genuine fear of communism and being brainwashed for years by the Fox News propaganda. I’m even more shocked she hasn’t bailed yet, but she may just be in too deep.
Anyway, interesting anecdote because I have a strong distaste for everyone else I know who supports Trump. At this point I can’t generate sympathy for anyone else who does, the best I can come up with is a derisive smirk with an eyeroll as I shake my head, but I feel for her a little bit.
But you do have to appreciate the irony. Fled the Soviet Union to come to USA#1 and ended up supporting Putin’s Bitch.
If she can do three weeks, I feel like that would be a pretty decent window but there is always going to be some element of risk. Her risk obviously goes down in quarantine and even being with you all. Your baby is one that’s hard because I want to believe kids rarely get very sick from this, I think we still do not know everything, but again as a calculated risk not huge (not my five month old though so lol me)
Putting mother and child aside it seems like it comes down to you and your wife and your concern for yourself and each other of getting sick. You two seem to be the most at risk in this equation.
If there was not a wife in the picture I would probably be okay with the risk to myself. I know you said your wife is uncomfortable and I would totally understand and respect that. I would not force her into it if she could not get more comfortable.
All that being sad I am pontificating from a place free of those emotional attachments so it is easy for me to claim what I would do. Acknowledging that I still think I would see if I could make it happen, being as cautious as possible and if the wife can not get comfortable with it then not do it.
Saw a headline that Disney World and the NBA are targeting a return in July.
We should have a pretty definitive result from Mother’s Day by then. Sure all this reopening and mingling and lessening restrictions and being less cautious might not make things worse, but I would not bet on it. All I can hope is it is evident enough by then that we have a bigger problem.
Personally I would love to be wrong and have the virus magically die out as we go into the summer and not come raging back in the fall but it is pretty hard to get my brain to buy into that.
The thing I keep thinking is that if summer is our best chance to get numbers down it is a major mistake not to do it. Things are only going to get tougher with kids in school, more people back at the office, etc.
Even a situation where we have 10k cases and 500 deaths a day in August still bodes very poorly for the fall and I think that is pretty optimistic on where our numbers will be in 3 months.
It is tough. The data says the baby should be the safest, but I would find it a very difficult decision to risk my child. That being said I am well aware of the grandmother - grandchild bond. I have seen some extraordinary ones, so the decision is tough.
Your mom obviously does not want her grandchild to get sick, so what does she say if you bring this concern up to her?
Interesting, depending on your hairstyle it’s easy enough to do yourself. Although I’m a little surprised you wouldn’t find it worth shelling out to get a proper haircut, assuming in your line of work you want your appearance to be crisp all the time. But, if you’re not doing a fade at all on the sides and using a consistent and short length up top, it’s easy enough.
FWIW my first one went a lot better than my second. There’s definitely some variance. Also, you did it wrong waiting this long! The pro move was to do it early so if you really messed up you had weeks of lockdown to let it grow back.
Also, I think one reason a lot of people don’t do it is due to the stigma if people find out. I plan on going back, but I will probably clean up a bit in between haircuts myself from now on. I used to just shave the back of my neck with a razor around where the hair is supposed to stop. Now I may use the clippers and a guard and clean up around the ears and on the sides a bit. Until I fuck it all up one time lol…
Yeah you let one fly over your head there jman, he was joking. But it’s interesting because while I tend to agree with “we don’t mind money getting taken out of our paychecks for the greater social good,” the progressives running here in PA are proposing something that is pissing me off: a 3% wealth tax to fund expanded UI, expanded Medicaid and stimulus payments. They say it’ll raise 2.2 billion and that’ll fund those things.
Why do I oppose that? Sounds pretty good on the surface… Well it’s an income tax on “income generated from wealth.” Still sounds good, but how do they define that? I was assuming just like cap gains and inheritance, stuff like that. But all income in a business counts. So anyone self-employed falls under that, and there’s no income threshold. So someone making $30K a year in the gig economy is paying the extra 3%, while someone in a regular job making $150K is not. Bonkers. Someone who has a business that started out of wealth (say a landlord, or someone who had to have a lot of capital to open their business) pays the same amount as someone whose entire business is selling their skills by going out on their own instead of working for the man. Why should a web designer who started a business with a net worth of < $100K pay the same wealth tax on that income as a landlord who used $1M to put a down payment on an apartment building?
I told the person texting me for the campaign that I had no problem paying it myself, but there’s no way I can support doing that to people trying to work their way up starting a business or in the gig economy. Also it should be progressive. I should pay it, sure. Maybe I should even pay 5% or something. But someone making $1M a year or $5M a year or $10M a year, especially passively, they should pay a higher percentage.
The other thing is $2.2bn doesn’t come close to covering what they suggested. It only comes to like $141 per person. This is a big problem for me: don’t lie to me. So what are we going to need to make that tax, 30%? Now I’ve got a problem paying it, because I’ll be paying in the neighborhood of 50-60% between federal and local. Some might say good problem to have, but my issue is paying that and NOT having single payer, NOT having good school systems for everyone, etc, etc… Half of it’s going to corporate bailouts and forever wars, and half is going to unemployment expansion and Medicaid expansion? Also keep in mind that when someone self-employed adds up their taxes, they pay the entire 15.3% payroll tax for Social Security and Medicare, so add another ~7.5% to their tax rate (it’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s close enough). So even someone making $80K a year is paying about 17% federal income tax based on their tax brackets (I ballparked it, it’ll be close) + 7.5% payroll tax = 24.5%. To pay that much percentage-wise with a regular job, you’d have to be pulling down around $250K a year.
Anyway, that huge tax rate (if state taxe rates have to get up to 15-40%) is where the rubber meets the road: if/when blue states start raising their taxes significantly to make it through this and provide good social programs through it, people are going to be livid at what they pay to the federal government too. Smart people making a lot of money in blue states are going to be okay with paying for some things and not others, and at the end of the day, I think most smart people in blue states are going to be sick of paying for what they’re paying for at the federal level.
Tax me whatever you need to in order to give everyone good healthcare, make sure every single child in this country (note I didn’t say citizen) gets a world class education, make sure nobody starves, etc, etc. All I ask for is a progressive tax code that most think is fair and that most of my money is going to good stuff, not bombs and corporate bailouts. I want to pay more percentage-wise than the people making $30-50K a year, and less than the people making $1M+ a year. As-is, I can (angrily) live with paying what I pay and having it go to corporate bailouts. There are ways to mitigate that (buy stocks) and there’s still enough wiggle room to grow your wealth and build up a nest egg… But double it, and we’re going to lose any semblance of a middle class. If you double it and everyone in business or self-employed is paying a flat rate, you’re just going to crush the little guys and give the entire market share to the billionaires who can withstand it. It’s horribly regressive, and this idea being put out there by numerous state senate candidates is a not-so-friendly reminder that just like there are morons on the right who have made it to Congress despite being high on their own supply of bullshit, we have plenty on the left running for office who are basically just shoving talking points out there without understanding how to craft good policy.
Anyway, I guess that’s a derail for this thread even though it’s starting from a pandemic-related place, I guess if people want to discuss this stuff let me know and I’ll start a new thread or you can PM me and discuss there, so as not to derail too much farther.
I have to admit, the psychological effect of everyone else (besides this forum) not caring about corona is starting to weigh on me - especially figuring out what I am going to be doing with my daughter next school year (assuming we are business as usual). I am wondering how it will effect her long term - “Home schooled kids are freaks”
I’m really starting to wonder if we are the crazy ones here (although my wife is also refusing to send her to school next year).
A good dealer can get out 35 hands per hour at least. I’ve seen dealers get out 30 in a half, but obviously they ran good to avoid too much tanking, and at some point 30 in a half means lots didn’t go to a flop so smaller tips.
Also they have dead spreads and breaks, so probably 4-6 hours of dealing per 8 hour shift. Some get full min wage, some get a tipped employees wage, some get like $15/hr from the house.
Call it $4/hr from the house, that’s $32 per shift. 5 hours dealing * 35 hands * $2 = $350. 382/8 = $47.75/hr.
There are dealers who average way more than $2 per hand IMO, and some who couldn’t get 35 hands an hour out or average over $1 per hand if their life depended on it.
Many more can’t keep their name off that EO sheet. :)
Middle America is like if Chernobyl happened but for some reason the outside world had absolutely no interest in it and it went raging uncontrolled for 60 years.
A lot of people besides us take it seriously, it’s just that we don’t rush here to post links to people sheltering in place or wearing masks, we post links to flubros and Karens.
Imagine using “we all want to get our fair share” in a sentence about how you want to curb stop the competition so they have to go out of business. I think most, not all, but like 90-95% of billionaires are fundamentally broken. Like they are sociopathic in a way that is very bad for them. I mean, if you’re 50 years old and expect to live to 90, and you want to live on $1M a year, you need at most 40 million dollars stashed away. (Less because you can generate income with it passively.) So like anyone over 50 with over 40 million could just retire and fucking live it up on $1M a year. Oh, want to leave a nice amount for your kids? OK, cool, call it $50M total, throw that extra $10M in the markets and let it grow for them.
And those are like ridiculously high numbers. If I have like $2-3M when I’m 40 I’d probably start thinking about retiring. I could live on $60K a year for 50 years without even having any of the money in the market. My goal is to get my IRAs I can’t touch til I’m 59.5 on pace to cover me from 59.5 to 90 or whatever, own a home outright, then get enough to go from X to 59.5 years old without running out, then fucking enjoy life as much as I can and “retire.” So that number is actually quite a bit less than $3M.
For me, I enjoy poker, so “retire” might still mean playing 4-6 times a month, going to the WSOP, etc… But the point remains… Everyone has some number they could happily live on the rest of their lives, and billionaires make no sense.
That sounds like the bullshit my friend’s father and uncle are spewing. Many on the right think that the chances of catching the virus are calculated by: total positive tests/total population. Fucking morons.
Yeah but the GOP routinely gets its ass kicked there, Joaquin Castro represents a big chunk of it. It seems like the Dems usually win there by beating the Libertarians and Greens, because a Republican hasn’t even run since 2012. So it makes sense that the local GOP would be an extraordinary clusterfuck.
Very possible/likely outcome: the stock market trims a tidy little 20-30% off again, and they pass a new version of the CARES Act, which caps the benefits at 80% of what you were making before you got laid off and gives another round of corporate stimulus/bailouts, while running for another 2-3 months. Then we see where we’re at and do it again. The GOP is probably smart enough to do it piecemeal like that, knowing they can trim the normal folks’ assistance each time and get another round of corporate handouts while they’re at it.
Of course all of that while blaming the Democratic governors… Although they’re going to have a tough time finding Democrats to blame for like Alabama’s outbreak, for example. Oops, just kidding, Montgomery, AL, has its first black mayor in history. The GOP will have a field day with that one.