In this case, the franchisees (small business owners) are saying the big business (McDonalds, which makes its money off of real estate and franchise fees) is going to be fine but they (the people that make money from owning a restaurant) are in trouble.

For many of them, it's true; they didn't consider whether they could open this business if they had to pay a living wage. Unfortunately, that's not our problem, but it won't be a problem for McDonalds either.

So teeeeechnically, a salad is a dish composed of mixed ingredients. You could make the argument that you mix any two set of chopped ingredients and bingo bongo, it's a salad.

However, I like to think that dishes' ingredients aren't a taxonomic thing, they're a probabilistic thing. In other words, there's no such thing as "not salad" or "salad", only shades of saladness.

• Serve it cold? Ok it's saladier

• It's made up of chopped ingredients? Saladier still

• Those ingredients are mostly vegetables? Getting pretty saladish

• They're mixed together? Even more salad like

• They've got some sort of dressing mixed in? Now it's very likely a salad!

... and so on. To me, your SO'a dish has a pretty high Salad Probability^tm

Capitalism isn't the "best system we've got", though... it isn't even the system we are all using right now.

We've never operated in anything like a "purely" capitalist economy, and the socialist policies most western countries have put in place are wildly popular and few people would want to live without them.

Countries that intelligently choose when and where and what things should be operated on a capitalist basis, have better outcomes.

Healthcare? Not something anyone should make money off of. Basic housing, food, water, power... these should be immune to market forces.

At the same time, capitalism drives fantastic technological and social innovation within its swimlane. We just have to pre-define what things people should be able to make money doing.

In my 20s, I always pointed out that the empirical evidence shows that, as people get older, their political positions generally just... become harder-line versions of the positions they held in their 20s.

As time has passed, that's born out. I'm still a leftie, just a franker and more ticked off one.

I hate this term ... giving your kids money to help them start out on their own isn't nepotism, it's parenting.

Nepotism is when you violate a responsibility you have to a third party (e.g., your employer) to act impartially in their interests, in order to benefit your family.

Is the idea that parents should donate their money equally to everyone's kids? This makes no sense.

This is a NATO proxy war in that NATO, an organization created to provide European countries protection from Russia's territorial ambitions, is providing assistance to a European country to help protect them from Russia's territorial ambitions.

I can't get over the circular logic of thinking Russia is justified in its invasion of another country by the fact that the other country wanted to be better prepared to defend against Russia invading it.

"I need to beat up my neighbor for trying to take a self defense class, because if he takes the class I won't be able to beat him up."

Dude, it only comes up if you're trying to beat up your neighbor. just don't do that.

Science and religion are two entirely separate things. Treating religion like science is bad, but treating science like religion is worse.

You cannot "believe in" science; it is not intended to tell you how to live a moral life or provide meaning to your existence, etc. If you try and make it do that, you are not being scientific, you're being dogmatic.

These concepts aren't related to each other, and shouldn't be compared.

Thanks, now I have clinical depression

You're confusing cause and effect, mostly.

If you've:

• Met a bunch of people that don't look like you or live like you

• Have a high paying job that requires a good education

• Encountered a ton of new concepts and ideas frequently

You're more likely to be a liberal. These things also tend to occur at much greater frequencies in cities.

Hey, to be fair at the time the Exodus story was synthesized, it was a henotheistic religion, monotheism didn't show up for another couple hundred years!

So at the time, nobody thought of Yahweh as all knowing or all powerful, just possessed of "god-like" knowledge and power, and clearly tougher than the Egyptian gods (which were assumdd to be real, but you just weren't supposed to worship them) because he was able to kill all them Egyptian babies.

The blood-over-the-door was basically proof you were a paid-up subscriber to the Yahweh sacrifice plan. "Ah sweet you sacrificed a lamb, no baby murder for you fam."

The tablet is written in proto cuneiform, the earliest format of real writing -- its basically got numbers, nouns and a limited list of verbs, but no grammatical elements... so we don't know that it was past tense, it's just a guess -- but a reasonable one:

• We know Kushim signed about a dozen other tablets listing various transactions, which were always either receiving, or disbursing grain. Proto debits and credits, if you will.

• The distribution of grain has a recipient and a purpose (e.g., to four different people to make beer), and usually does not have a time frame.

• The receipts have a time frame, and sometimes a source (sort of a "tax receipt").

The thought is that basically, when the grain came in it'd be tallied, then tablets would be added noting recipients and purpose until it had been disbursed.

It's also worth noting that clay tablets are challenging to date, and there's an (as far as I know, ongoing) debate about whether "kushim" was an individual, or an office (e.g., "grain wrangler").

Genuinely surprised Sherlock Holmes was rated that low, I really enjoyed it.