It’s funny, I love chili and I love mac and cheese, but I find ChiliMac to be somehow worse than the sum of it’s parts.

Inflation was on the rise before Trump left office. It continued under Biden for the first two years of his term, but he managed to get key legislation passed in that span of time that has measurably reduced inflation. It’s still not back down to what it was pre-pandemic, but we are leading almost every other western democracy in that metric. It really is incredible that people are giving Biden shit for the economy when he is actively fixing the problem, and it shows that the Democrats have a tremendous failure in their ability to do effective messaging.

If it doesn’t feel like inflation has been improved under Biden, that’s because the price you pay at the gas pump or the grocery store has more to do with what they chose to set their prices at than what the current rate of inflation is. The “vibe economy” is real, but they aren’t casting the blame for it at the right people. For once, government did it’s job. Who knows if the current trend will continue under Trump, but given that he set off the massive inflationary spending spree by injecting a ton of cash into a booming economy with stimulus checks, I imagine he’s not going to care much about the fundamentals of a healthy economy and will instead do whatever makes his donors happy.

Good. I hope he does it. Don’t let any of his yes-men or cronies tell him what a horrible idea it is. Let the whole fucking country burn.

Immigration is such a horseshit issue. Why are people dumb enough to fall for this shit?

Immigration will be “solved” come January, but not because Trump will actually do anything about it, but he’ll just say the problem is solved and then stop talking about it.

Too late for that.

Small acts of rebellion. Take extra long breaks. Automate parts of my job and then don’t tell anybody that I did it. Break some shit on purpose and act like it was an accident. Steal as much stuff that isn’t nailed down as possible. The list would go on, but I’d honestly have no idea what I would actually do in that situation.

I’m certainly not giving it 100% at whatever job I’m working at. I would say form a union, but that’s hard to do when you are working for 56 hour workweeks plus commute, not including overtime. That’s assuming the 7 day workweek remains 8 hour shifts rather than moving down to something like 6 hour shifts with an unpaid lunch break.

More wine, Your Grace?

On that note, Melchior would make for a metal af middle name.

I’d like to believe that the only reason 2020 got so ratfucked in the first place was that Trump was intentionally not putting the screws on anybody to do their jobs.

A second Jan 6th won’t happen, at least not this year. A MAGA mob will show up at the capitol and be met by a fully prepared and well armed national guard, because Biden is the commander in chief and he’s going to take threats like that seriously.

If the house declines to elect a speaker, Biden could in theory put pressure on them to pick one. The constitutional crisis can swing both directions - yes the Republicans will likely try to avoid certification, but then Biden could threaten to not step down unless the certification happens, or hand over the reigns to VP Harris anyway by resigning. I don’t see it working in their favor to try something like not certifying or not electing a speaker, because they don’t have the luxury of Trump in the white house to look the other way at their bad behavior.

At my company, they used to be a lot more tolerant of it, but we had exactly one person complain about excessive use of coarse language and then HR cracked the whip. They still don’t really care that much about using swear words when just interacting in person with other people, as long as it’s not bothering anybody else, but they heavily police our work chat to make sure that all of our messages are above the board in terms of professional conduct. Which makes sense, I can’t really argue against the logic that the work chat should be a professional setting where you can communicate your thoughts and feelings without having to resort to using profanity. Sometimes people have to be reminded to not use profane language, but they never call anybody out specifically, they just send out “reminder” messages whenever they see it and usually the person who is responsible knows not to keep it up or else there will be a more direct reprimand.

It would be hard for me to not sometimes utter “fuck” under my breath while I’m at work, but if my bosses were concerned about it, I would just start channeling that into more work-appropriate language.

This emoji has two meanings:

1. the “original” meaning is based on the “shaka sign” from Hawai’ian culture. It’s often paired with the phrase “hang loose”, which generally just means to relax, have a good time, etc.

2. When mobile telephones first started to become mainstream, they would have an antenna that extended up and out of the phone chassis a speaker and a receiver that you would speak directly into, so people picked up this gesture that mimicked the shape of a cell phone. Pressing it against your cheek with the pinky finger in front of your mouth and the thumb covering the opening of your ear would be accompanied by saying or mouthing “call me” was pretty universally understood and was one way to communicate the desire to speak on the phone from a distance where you could still visually see someone but shouting was ineffective or impractical.

edit: some people have clarified that the gesture predates cell phones, which makes sense.

If you get hot oil on your hand, glove or no, you’re gonna have a bad time.

I’ve noticed in most cases on Kitchen Nightmares that either the food is good but one or two problem employees bring the entire restaurant down, or the food sucks ass but the service staff are generally sympathetic and will not mince words about the bad quality. In almost every case, management is in denial despite asking for help.

I wonder if they stage it that way on purpose, because I can’t imagine getting lucky enough to have Gordon fucking Ramsay come to save my failing restaurant and having my ego stand in the way at the moment of truth.

I feel like I’m good friends with The Picard Maneuver, Flying Squid, and Kolanaki, just because they’re in all the same threads I am.

I don’t even consciously interact with specific people on Lemmy, but sometimes I just happen to be paying attention to the usernames and I do the Leo pointing meme like “Hey, I recognize that guy!”

Unfortunately, a lot of smart people are under his spell too. I had to listen to the CEO of a medium sized company wax poetic about how he’s a super genius and the greatest boon to human ingenuity in a century, desperately trying to hold my tongue as I rolled my eyes into the back of my skull.

I think he’s an okay businessman. That’s about as much praise as I’m willing to afford him. He’s definitely charismatic enough to convince a room full of investors that the ideas he’s pitching are worthwhile. Part of that is that his passion for these projects are genuine, and when you put somebody in a room with a passionate guy, the enthusiasm tends to rub off on them just a little.

Most of his investments that garnered him his wealth are just him being at the right place at the right time. Getting in on PayPal when Ecommerce was in it’s infancy and partnering with Ebay to take advantage of shopaholics who just couldn’t help themselves. Buying his way into Tesla right when EVs were primed to take off and pushing hard for an economy class variant that could be mass produced rapidly (in an already-made factory that Toyota closed down, no less!). Founding SpaceX and pouring a shit ton of his own money into rocket and aeronautics R&D right around the time the U.S. Government was looking for cheap contractors to take over the space program. I think the only project he miscalculated on was buying Twitter for way too much money when social media was really starting to stagnate.

His politics are fucking weird, though. Him being a Trump nutter is really not helping his “I’m a genius” image. I find his personality to be pretty repugnant. I already didn’t like him because back in the early days of Tesla he pushed all the management to essentially become slavedrivers for the line workers. I live in California near the plant and I had friends who worked there in production that got nearly worked to death, extreme overtime and weekend shifts, few breaks, the only saving grace was the above average pay that kind of kept them trapped in that hell of a job for way too long. Then the whole Thai soccer team incident happened and I was so over him. Haven’t heard anything about him since that has made me feel like he deserves to be the richest cunt in the fucking universe.

T H U N D E R    C R O S S    S P L I T    A T T A C K ! ! !

Which is bizarre, because shrinkage due to theft at all major retail chains is at historic lows, but they keep complaining that they can’t make any money due to rampant shoplifting. Then you look at their profits for each fiscal year and wonder what their deal is if losses due to shoplifting have never been lower and profits have never been higher?

It’s an easy scapegoat to justify closing low performing stores. It essentially shifts the blame onto the community, rather than the greedy suits.

I suppose he could dismiss them, but considering he just had two recent attempts on his life, that would probably be unwise to say the least.

The minimum sentence is a hefty fine, but the judge in that very trial already determined that fines do not discourage Trump’s behavior, given the contempt punishment that he ignored, so I don’t think it’s going to be a slap on the wrist for him unless the judge truly is a hypocrite or a coward.

That being said, even if he gets prison for each of his felony counts, he can serve them all concurrently, a maximum of 3 years per count. So he could theoretically be out of prison right before the next election cycle with a year left to campaign for 2028, that is assuming he truly is sentenced immediately after the election in November and it’s not just pushed back indefinitely due to recount horseshit or Trump crazies doing another insurrection.

But there are other trials that are far more likely to result in additional prison time, the most important two being the classified documents case and the Jan 6th case. I have faith that the justice system will eventually follow through with punishing Trump, but the system is set up to slow-walk the rich and powerful to accountability.

USSS won’t just let him get on a plane and fly off to Russia. His security is their top priority, so allowing him to secrete himself somewhere without first verifying his itinerary and securing both the mode of transportation and the destination, would be unthinkable. That means they are reporting all of his movements to local law enforcement. Can’t exactly flee the country in secret when every cop in the state will know his exact position and have eyes on him at all times. If the courts think he is a flight risk, someone involved in the process will know what he’s trying to do and prevent him from going anywhere where it will be hard to get him back again.