SirEDCaLot

For anyone not familiar- Katz Deli is a somewhat famous sandwich place in NYC. Their primary menu item is the pastrami on rye sandwich, and it's like $20-$30. They slice the pastrami right in front of you, still warm.

I've only had it once but it was worth it.

Absolutely 100% this. Or at the very least, have all schematics and software source code and other such things placed in escrow so if the company refuses to support them there is some kind of option. This goes double for anything implanted.

So you're left with departments full of clock punchers who don't have vision or leadership. If you want to kill your Golden Goose, that's a good way to do it. The remaining departments full of drone followers aren't going to be making you the exciting groundbreaking products that make you money.

Of course then again I personally see value in employees, maybe business leadership does not or thinks they are all generic replaceable.

No, but it will bring into question the process by which they were acquired to begin with. Somebody will ask, why did you spend x billion on real estate when it was obvious that remote work was the future? Or if they are locked into a long-term lease, eventually the question will come up why are we spending all this money for office space we aren't using? Shouldn't we have thought of this earlier? Not having workers in the office makes it obvious that real estate was a bad investment, and many of these companies are pretty heavily invested in real estate. Easier to screw the workers with what can be explained away as a management strategy than admit a wasted a whole bunch of money buying and building and renovating space you don't need.

That and executive ass covering, a way to avoid admitting to shareholders that they wasted their money on useless commercial real estate.

It's also shooting themselves in the foot. The first people to leave aren't going to be the clock punchers, it will be the best and brightest who can easily find other jobs.

Worst that could happen is that you get denied insurance coverage

If you end up getting a serious illness or cancer or something like that, you might reevaluate how big of a problem this is.

I agree.

I think the filibuster is vitally important as a last-ditch way to stop really bad laws. But there SHOULD be a high cost to using it. It SHOULD gum up the works. Because if it doesn't, then it becomes status quo that getting something through the Senate takes 60 votes instead of 50 because the losing party will always filibuster. That's not a good way to run things.

With respect sir (or madam), you are personifying the 'ivory tower elite' attitude that so many conservatives make fun of. 'I matter, others don't.

You think there's no culture in rural areas? That you need a giant festival to have culture?
That corner shop that has 100 transactions an hour... where do you think the bread they sell comes from? The flour? The avocadoes on the avocado toast? (sorry, I had to :P ) Sure as fuck doesn't come from the city. You can write the rest of the nation off as unimportant and then see how unimportant they are when your fridge is empty. They matter.

the idea that nowhere-utah is just as important as Queens is insane.

And the idea that Queens should be able to dictate policy that applies nationally including Nowhere, UT is just as insane.

Especially when that minority seems fixated on terrible ideas like climate change denial and xenophobia.

I'll give you that- most of the conservative platform these days is a bit on the batshit side.

But there's other parts that make sense. Take guns for example. A liberal in NYC has the 11th largest army in the world 3 digits away. Police response time is seconds or minutes. So 'nobody needs a gun' is a common urban liberal position.
Go out in rural areas, there might be two deputies for an entire county with police response time in the range of 30-120 minutes if at all. And that county may have 4-legged predators like bears, wolves, etc that can threaten humans. So that guy wants a GOOD gun to defend himself and his family, because if there is a problem nobody else is gonna arrive until it's too late.
The urban liberal doesn't consider the rural conservative POV, and they want to apply their position nationally. Should the rural conservative have no useful defense against that?

Guns are just an example, but that overall is why I think the electoral college has a place. House is based on population, Senate based on statehood, Presidency is in the middle with influences both from statehood and population. That's a good way to go.

And FWIW, I also support INCREASING the population representative in the House. The current cap of 437 has not served us well with the expanding US population, and there's now over 700k citizens per representative. That's far too many to get voices heard, and one rep covers far too many disparate people. And it also in the House increases influence of smaller states (to a minimum of 1/437th).
I believe the cap should be raised to a very large number, perhaps several thousand. It may no longer be possible to have the entire House convene in one building, but technology has solved that problem. If you have one representative for every say 10,000-25,000 citizens, it becomes much easier for a representative to truly represent their citizens in detail and gives a citizen much greater access to his or her representatives.

I am not trying to invalidate anyone's ideas.

But rural voters and urban voters have different needs. Neither is 'wrong'.

For example- the urban voter might have a lot of gangland gun violence, so they push for strong gun control.
The rural voter OTOH has a police response time of 20+ minutes or more, and real threats to life and property from four-legged predators so they want real useful guns to defend themselves.

Neither is wrong for pushing their particular needs. They just don't acknowledge the other exists.

Quite frankly if you're going to say urban people are 'normal people' and rural people are 'backward and insane', then I'm quite in favor of reducing your own influence (and I say that as a liberal voter and registered Democrat). Good government recognizes that one size doesn't fit all.

And what of the House? It's largely based on population. If the White House and the House of Representatives are both population heavy then the Senate is entirely outnumbered.

The point is supposed to be that the House is population based, the Senate is state based, and the Presidency is somewhere in the middle.

To give some background on this, the huge magnetic field in an MRI machine is created by a superconducting magnet. A magnetic coil submerged in liquid helium that keeps it ultra cold has virtually no resistance, so the electricity can keep going round and round and round like a racetrack without being bled off by resistance. This lets the machine maintain a very high magnetic field with very little power input.

An MRI technician can gradually ramp up or down the magnetic field power by slowly adding or removing current from the magnet. To retrieve the officer's rifle, they could have slowly ramped down the power with a magnetic power supply while the magnet stayed cold.

When the guy slams the emergency button that does what's called a quench. It adds resistance to the magnet, which starts turning that power into heat, and that heat boils off all the liquid helium and rapidly ramps the magnet down to zero. This should only be done if for example a patient is trapped in the machine by a metal object or similar emergency, because it damages the magnetic coil and also boils away the liquid helium, which itself is worth thousands of dollars.

LAPD (or more specifically, the California taxpayers) are in for a pricey repair bill.