I work for myself now and late June early July is the slow season. I have 2 days of work to do in the next 6 weeks.

I have the very important task of getting my fishing boat out today.

Hmmmm… Maybe I should supplement my income with the pikeminnow bounty.

https://www.pikeminnow.org/

In 2025 it would be anything above 3.6 million. It’s a ton of money but here’s a list of a few people that hit it.

https://aflcio.org/paywatch/highest-paid-ceos

Now if they added in a progressive tax rate for corporate taxes as well… Say anything over 500 million in net profit is taxed at a 90+% rate. That would solve all sorts of issues. Suddenly investors of all these mega corps would be pushing hard to divide up the companies into smaller entities.

Wealth tax in the modern age could be an inheritance tax. Anything over the median life earnings of individuals could be taxed at 100%. So median earnings in my area is $65K * 45 years (20-65k) = $2.93 million.

Taxes can go either way. It depends on how they were written.

The tax code after the Great Depression allowed for massive expansion of public projects in the U.S. It was 63% for the top earners. During WW2 the top tax bracket was at 94%.

When the boomers were all born the tax bracket was above 70% for the top earners. This high tax bracket is what fueled the creation of a large middle class, public infrastructure, schools, research, space exploration, and the massive military buildup and wars. It also acted as an effective anti-minopoly/oligarchy system because the tax system discouraged it.

Then in the 80’s Reagan slashed the taxes for the top earners down to 28%. its never gotten above 40% since then. Most high earning companies have so many exeptions today that the real tax rate is often 0%.

Because of it the infrastructure built during the 50’s-70’s is degrading and falling apart. Public services are declining and the middle class is shrinking as people become more impoverished.

The last time I had a landline was 16 years ago when my wife briefly had a home office. Her employer required the landline as part of the home office setup (they paid for it).

We got spammed by robocallers every 5-10 minutes all day long and half the night. It was so bad that my wife never knew when a work call was coming in and had to let every call go to voicemail.

We didn’t unplug the phone just turned the answering machine to silent. We still got calls on a supposedly disconnected number.

Plagues are constantly happening as pathogens & pest continuously mutate. It’s a constant risk to ourselves and everything we eat.

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Now I want to see human population density compared to birthrate 25 years later for regions with a current sub-replacement birthrate.

“Losing the social skills required to mate” sounds like many people I know.

Barrels were reused until they could no longer be repaired or salvaged. Cooper’s had steady guaranteed work for their skills.

Consumption was mostly at the public houses/taverns for the lower/middle classes.

Well your going to wish you weren’t so curious with this one. Source of this information: several museum visits around 30 years ago after a pint or three, so the info might be warped.

Gin is a double-distilled 40% or higher spirit flavored with juniper + other flavors.

The source of the alcohol was any carbohydrate or starch source. Whatever was cheapest. It was mostly wheat and barley at the time but just about anything else cheap could be used like rye, turnips, etc. For the cheapest rotgut the ingredients was stuff considered unfit for animal feed (rodent feces, insect damage, molds, water damage, etc).

Since their ingredients were highly questionable, their input cost was minimal. Heating was from coal. They also started making larger batches which further reduced down the cost.

Logistics - Canals at this time period was the most important logistic. One donkey pulling a barge could move as much as 50 wagons. Tons of goods were transported cheaply and efficiently on the barges. The gin was shipped in casks/barrels like beer/ale. Bottles were very expensive and reserved for the elite.

Public sanitation consisted of a gutter on the side of the road. The entire city smelled like the open sewer it was.

The gin was not served in bottles. It was served like beer or ale into cups/mugs/communal tankards etc … mostly earthenware, leather or wood.

I had a idea of how to stop them but my wife wouldn’t let me.

Respond with a picture of a coyote, bobcat, mountain lion, great horned owl or other predator with the caption, “Thank you for dinner, it was delicious.”

The U.S. bulletproof model was proposed for school children. Sadly, Republicans successfully fought against it, because it “Would give the kids an unfair advantage over the school shooters.”

Have you run into a Teancum?

For those that are not up on your mormonisms, it’s pronounced:

Tea-an-cum

An it’s a boy’s name.

Most smaller cars are designed for 150lbs * 5 people plus a little cargo. So around 800-1000lbs.

Four 300lb people = 1,200lbs. The suspension on that little car was fucked.

The F150 is rated between 1800-2300lbs depending on the model. They can even squeeze in a 5th person into that setup.

I used to spend several thousand every year buying books. Usually from small independent bookstore. I was also always in the library checking out books but the local libraries collection was very small and limited.

Next I got one of the early generation kindles keyboard when I was traveling all the time before I had a smart phone. I of course found all the free books and downloaded several thousand of those. Amazon made almost nothing off of me for that one. I still hit the library regularly for books I could not get for free or stuff for my kids.

Then my local library started offering digital books via Libby and Hoopla. I have pretty much completely stopped using kindle completely in favor of those two apps. I vote every chance I get for the library to get more funding as its back to being my go-to place. I physically have only gone to the library once in the past 5 years however.

Honestly, I would rather see a massive extension of library services than more private bookstores.

People have genetically different ability to detect flavors. Some people lack the receptors to detect the bitter rindlike taste in todays seedless watermelons.

Close but not quite. 3N plants are sterile. This is because the odd number of chormosomes cannot line up during meiosis and form gametes.

They use diploid pollen 2N pollen to trigger fruit formation but the resulting fruit is parthenocarpic. The white pips and even the occasional colored hard seed coat does not contain an viable embryo.

Crossing of plants with different numbered chormosomes can create fertile offspring if the resulting ploidy is even. For example crossing wheat (6N) with cereal rye (2N) creates Triticale (4N). The Triticale is fertile.

The story of seedless watermelons.

Originally developed by a scientist in Japan pre-WWII, the technology was picked up by watermelon breeding programs at universities in the South-East U.S. Over the next 30 years the university programs worked to develop the technology. Progress was very slow as it takes 15 generations to create a new female line.

Unfortunately for everyone the universities decided to use their tasteless, bland, long distance shipping types to create these females. The most famous of which is Charleston grey.

Finally in the mid-70’s the universities released the female inbreds to private companies to create seedless watermelons. The private companies crossed tasty, elongated allsweet and crimsons sweet types as a diplod male with the bland grey females. What resulted was the bland seedless types with large white pips and bland flavor. After all 2/3rd of the genetics came from those terrible females.

For the next 25 years all of the seedless watermelons used the same terrible female lines with slightly improved male lines.

Then a breeder from originally from China decided to create new females. He used small seeded varieties from China and Thailand with deep red color and much thinner rinds.

The resulting seedless watermelons had dark red color, tiny little pips, and a slightly bitter flavor. You see the breeder from China failed to recognize the different flavor profiles in the gene pools. Asian watermelons often have bitter flavors that are completely acceptable in those markets but not in European ones.

And thus we are stuck with bland or bitter shitty seedless watermelons at the store.

There was once a brave lady who attempted to buck the trend. She bred the most flavorful delicious seedless watermelon ever seen on the planet. It was almost honey sweet with strong aromatics and not a hint of bitterness. It was crisp and juicy without a hint of mealyness. It was large elongated and looked just like the good old seeded ones. Alas the market rejected them because “they look like seeded types”. She retired early with a big FU to them all.

A C-section will run you $60K easy. With the 80:20 insurance thats $12K owed by the parents. . With the federal out of pocket maximum being $9,450 for the mother. The baby also has a $9,450 out of pocket maximum. So the family will likely owe at least $12k before leaving the hospital

$5K handout is seriously ignorant. It will cost a hell of a lot more to reverse the trend

In order to increase the birthrate above replacement level here are a few things that need to happen.

1. Free universal healthcare including dental.

2. Rent control for all apartments locked to single income minimum wage.

3. Ban on investment properties for single family homes. If the house is classified as single family, you can’t rent it out. It must be sold.

4. Free childcare.

5. Free education from pre-K to Graduate levels.

6. Open immigration policies for countries with higher birthrates.

7. Increase minimum wage to make it a livable wage.

8. To pay for it all - Increase corporate taxes to 95% for more than $100million income. Increase personal taxes to 95% for more than 1 million in income.

I had like $9.22 remaining credit from some international calls back in 2002 I was going to use…eventually.

I drove over 7K miles last month. I would much rather see traffic enforcement cameras than police cars sitting on the side of the road.

Traffic cameras attempt to document actual behavior with real evidence in an impartial manner.

Most cops are dumb, undertrained, and overpayed parasites on society who have violent and agressive behaviors. Then they sit on the side of the road being bored out of their minds all day. When an accident does occur they mostly stand around directing traffic while the paramedics, firefighters, and wreckers do all the work. Hell the most useful thing I have seen them do is remove debris from the road with a broom and dustpan.

City I lived in had a serious issue with people running red lights at a few intersections. Many fatal accidents and pedestrian injuries happened because of it. They put in a red light light cameras on the worst intersection. The first month it generated over $350K in fines at $125 each. Around 2,800 drivers ran that intersection. Within 3 months the number of tickets dropped to under 20 per month. The number of accidents dropped respectively as well.