Wings evolve from legs though, generally speaking. This means that a four legged dragon with wings would have conceivably evolved from a six legged creature. You can get hand-wings or arm-wings, and we’re not entirely sure but think insect wings may have also evolved from legs or some other kind of similar structure.
But pretty much you can either have wings or legs/arms. You have to trade them in. That’s why the whole angel/demon thing doesn’t work either. The traditional harpies work but they’d be furry and not feathered. I haven’t worked out the wingspan for them but you could probably come up with a reasonable guess. They’d be more bat-people than bird-people, and I suspect that their chest areas would be less generously proportioned than is typically seen in the artwork. I’m not going more into the physics of that one though.
The US system is terrible for wait times based on appointments as well as ER visits in my experience. In cities like Albuquerque, you can wait months to see a specialist. Even in major cities, there can be enormous wait times and many GPs simply aren’t accepting new patients.
I have a very high end insurance plan, and I do not wait. My experience is very different from many of those in the Bay Area, and is very, very different from New Mexico and most of the US southeast.
The US retreated from global health leadership in 2016, along with most other global leadership. It is no small part of the reason why Covid developed as it did.
US ER wait times are already 10+ hours in many places, and if you’re not turfed immediately you can still wait hours after being admitted. I’ve never understood the wait time argument as being to the advantage of the US system.
Store clerks need to start following Moms for Liberty members around through the aisles asking “Can I help you with anything?” until they leave the store.
According to Trump’s legal defense, Biden could have Trump and the entire Republican Congress assassinated without any repercussions. He could assassinate anyone who would vote to impeach him, and assassinate anyone who would vote for someone who would impeach him, and still be legally in the clear, as I understand it.
Yeah, it disproportionately affects W2 workers making over 140k per year or so. Thats fine. That’s the way things are supposed to be.
It’s not hitting “W2 folks” to extend withholding beyond $140k. It’s doing the appropriate thing and not giving them a free ride. If you want to additionally hit up the people who are living off of the various ways you can monetize wealth, that’s fine too. I’m in favor of a wealth tax. I think that’s also fair. I think Warren proposed a 2% tax on holdings over $4M. I support that. That’s still different than SS withholding.
Let’s say you’re making a whopping $150k. That means that you’ll pay (and I am probably overestimating) a few hundred dollars a year into the SS fund. It’s not a noticeable amount, whether you live in a HCOL area or not. It’s a nice dinner, stretched out over 365 days worth of payments.
It’s a trivial amount of money for an individual, which when spread over the population of the country, can make the difference to the majority of the population. I’m very much down with that.
Yes. That is what I said. I think it’s not a valid justification.
By way of analogy, let’s say we move to a point of tuition-free public college, which I also support. My taxes which go to support those colleges would be far higher than those of most people, but my kids, were I to have any, would receive the exact same benefit from a financial standpoint as people whose taxes contributed far less to none.
My property taxes are somewhere around $25k per year. They go largely to support a public school system which, as a person without children, I receive zero direct benefit from. Should I get a lower property tax because I am a person without kids despite having a higher income and higher valued property? Or should I be taxed relative to my ability to support the community? Should a family that makes a quarter of what I do but have four kids pay more than me?
Just for those unaware - the social security pay-in is a percentage of your income, but the maximum amount of your income subject to social security withholding is capped at a fixed level that increases annually. The last time I looked, the cutoff was somewhere around $138k. So if your cumulative income for the year hits $138k in, say, June, you are no longer subject to SS withholding and your weekly paycheck goes up by a couple of hundred dollars or so as a result. Most people don’t hit this amount, but enough do that were the cap eliminated, it would increase solvency and possibly allow for an increase in payouts.
On the flip side, your payout from social security is proportional to what your pay in was. It’s still capped, and it’s not really enough to live on. Those who hit the cap typically have multiple other sources of savings for retirement and could easily contribute more to the national program.
So in theory you would have a much bigger problem with people who tailgate, exceed the speed limit, and fail to signal when changing lanes, or who fail to admit in people on lane merges, right? I’m pretty sure that, just at a raw numbers level, these kinds of things (along with the more obvious ones like texting while driving) cause far more traffic delays than the occasional protest.
Do you have a history of complaining about traffic violations in general, or is it just for people protesting for social justice?
Look, I know I’m slamming you and you don’t deserve it. I know it sounds like I’m attacking you personally, and that is not my intent. What I’m trying to draw attention to, however clumsily, is that this sort of narrative gets passed around very easily, even among the most well meaning of people. It’s regularly mentioned in the right wing media, and even in centrist media like the NYT. I’ve just worked on propaganda models for too long to not occasionally say something.
It’s an interesting argument. Does Israel not get to claim moral outrage if Palestinians bomb school buses because that’s just what happens in war? If there is no morality in war, Hamas did nothing wrong, correct? Rapes happen in war. Deaths of children happen in war. Could Iran use nerve gas against Tel Aviv and have it simply written off as “that’s what happens?”
Asking as someone who has fired and been fired upon at the request of my government.
First, fantastic job tracking down the actually relevant stats rather than the person above you who was trying to debunk.
Second - and this would only make your argument stronger and I’m not saying you needed to go this far - we would need to see if there has been an overall drop in crime rates. The tough on crime types love to tout numbers that reflect general trends as if they’re a justification or proof of the effectiveness of their policies. You need to demonstrate using proper statistical analysis to show that the falloff can accurately be attributed to a given policy.
So your numerator is 1. What’s your denominator? Let’s call it the number of street blocking protests in the last ten years.
In addition, the article doesn’t mention any ill effects coming from the delay, so we should probably be using a weighted function for this to see when it had an actual medical consequence.
I think they should be treated as harshly as police who harass and assault people - there should be an internal investigation by other protestors, and if suspicion is found they should be forced to go on leave from work with full pay until the investigation concludes they were only doing what they were trained to do.
Wings evolve from legs though, generally speaking. This means that a four legged dragon with wings would have conceivably evolved from a six legged creature. You can get hand-wings or arm-wings, and we’re not entirely sure but think insect wings may have also evolved from legs or some other kind of similar structure.
But pretty much you can either have wings or legs/arms. You have to trade them in. That’s why the whole angel/demon thing doesn’t work either. The traditional harpies work but they’d be furry and not feathered. I haven’t worked out the wingspan for them but you could probably come up with a reasonable guess. They’d be more bat-people than bird-people, and I suspect that their chest areas would be less generously proportioned than is typically seen in the artwork. I’m not going more into the physics of that one though.