54% topping out at a 6th grade reading level.

I’ve seen this stat floated a thousand times, from the same single source.

I’ve yet to have anyone lay out what 8th grade reading level statement 54% of the population can’t understand.

it’s still top tier on eduction

It’s not.

Harvard is a business school instrumental in networking between wealthy families.

The education they provide can be found at any state school.

Harvard isn’t where the smart people go to become smarter. It’s where the rich kids go to network and socially reproduce their capitalist values system.

The decision by the Pentagon is a political realignment. No doubt they’ll start recruiting more heavily from Texas, Florida, Stanford and the Trump aligned tech sector.

Things are most assuredly changing.

Gorsuch voted to overturn Roe which was a fairly epic disrespect for court precedent.

Gorsuch had a long history on the bench as anti-choice. He overturned a 50 year old precedent, not one he’d just co-signed last year.

But I no longer put anything past this SCOTUS.

There’s more to the judiciary than just issuing rulings on a whim. They need the lower courts to line up behind them. And conflicting decisions at the highest level ultimately allow lower courts to rule at their own whim rather than according to a supreme precedent.

Imagine the SCOTUS ruling against California and sending it back down to a liberal California appellate court, only for the lower court to disregard the SCOTUS California ruling by referencing the Texas SCOTUS ruling. Or for the lower court or the state to feign confusion and refuse to follow the SC decision. Or do what so many other states have done and hastily engineer a new map that’s just different enough to force a new case. Without some kind of bright line distinction between the two decisions, they could just do that and send it back up to SCOTUS in a case that wouldn’t resolve before the next election.

As ACB said “we’re not just a bunch of hacks in here.”

If you’ve got to say shit like that out loud…

But she’s not wrong. These aren’t celebrity hacks who came in on the reality TV circuit, they’re legal street fighters who know how the system works in practice. If they do rule against California, it’ll be curious to see how they try to thread the needle. And how the California legislature - which still has plenty of time to submit revised (but still gerrymandered) maps - chooses to respond.

760,000 constituents per district in 2025. That’s compared to 213,000 when the number of US House seats was fixed at 435 back in 1920. Don’t even get me started on the US Senate. Two people representing 50M. Fucking bananas way to run a “representative” democracy.

The Republican justices have already signaled that they probably won’t strike down California’s maps

In fairness to the Court’s Republicans, they did suggest in their LULAC opinion that the Texas and California gerrymanders are mirror images of each other. The majority opinion in that case begins with the observation that after Texas drew its new map, “California responded with its own map for the stated purpose of counteracting what Texas had done.” Justice Samuel Alito, a Republican, also wrote a separate opinion stating that it is “indisputable” that “the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.”

The thing about the SCOTUS is that they’re not total dummies. Roberts and Gorsuch, at least, seem to know the long game and aren’t interested in playing full-on Calvinball with the tool of court precedent. They aren’t going to gamble on an entrenched multi-generational procedurally generated conservative majority just to save a few California GOP House Reps who are likely washed in a D+10 mid year election anyway.

They’ll uphold the right of states to gerrymander and allow Republicans to turn the ratchet in another reactionary backwash election, once Dems fumble the bag in '28/'30. Because the important thing is undermining the function of democracy long term.

I mean, I played with people who would just scrawl the name of the card over the top of another card in sharpie. Some of them even had a real copy of a card (bricked up in some two inch thick display case), but others would just be - like - “This is a card I wish I had” and we’d have fun playing because it’s fun to be across the table from someone with Power Nine tech.

Talking budget decks and then quoting a budget format is misleading

The standard budget deck right now is 500$ (Izzet Lessons)

You can build Black/Red Blight Goblins for $21 or a Mono-Blue Towns deck for $20. Both play competitively.

Vivi cauldron led to a one deck standard and cost about 1000$

That’s because Vivi Ornitier runs $100/ea and Agatha’s Soul Cauldron runs another $130/ea. Don’t build a deck where a single card is going to run you three figures. Problem solved.

It’s why formats like Pioneer are basically dead and standard is nearly on life support at local most LGS.

Well, that and the online scene cutting into the physical game’s player base, sure.

Ah, my mistake. They didn’t even do collector numbers until Exodus. God damn, that’s crazy in hindsight. Makes counterfeiting almost trivial.

People might have access to the best cards without spending copious amounts of money to middlemen!

I mean, you joke, but this isn’t an unreasonable critique. A big component of the MTG popularity boom was the regular distribution chain, necessitating a huge constellation of second-hand collectors and traders. Overproducing deck-specific cards that flood the market destroys the baseload of people buying cards from the retailer.

Hasbro is effectively eating its own seed corn. It’s fucking over the people who will buy a thousand boxes of crap looking for half a dozen copies of the card that sells secondhand for a profitable margin.

It’s very dangerous to the game if people can be good at it without it being rich!

Outside a few niche vintage and legacy tournaments, you can be very good at the game without needing to own the highest end cards. Plenty of people run pauper decks that can outperform the high end decks when played with a working knowledge of what those high end decks try to do (ie, The Meta). Mono-green elves and mono-red goblins have dominated the game space practically since its inception. You’ll rarely find a release year where you struggle to build one of these decks for less than $50. And that’s assuming you and a few friends don’t draft regularly and luck into the right cards, then trade among yourselves to build a winning board.

What Hasbro is doing is more akin to the Louvre coming out with identical print copies of high end auctioned paintings. I’d say the bigger complaint isn’t that they’re doing this so much as that they’re getting in on a game third-party forgers have been playing for decades.

You can go online and find an Unlimited series duplicate Mox Emerald for maybe $20. And it’ll pass muster at any game table in America that doesn’t have a professional on staff to check its print number.

Hey look at that: about 70% of the Cuban voters in Florida votes for this.

You have a population that is fully drowning in the worst kind of right-wing propaganda. Hell, look up Operation Peter Pan. Children kidnapped from Cuba who were brought to US indoctrination camps and turned into the next generation of frothing Castro-hating anti-communists. Entire cottage industries of right-wing press to keep Floridians ever vigilante against the slightest whiff of socialism. CIA-backed human trafficking intended to shuttle young girls and loads of drugs between Havana and Miami. Billionaires minted from the flood of military industrial spending, state surveillance, blockading, and torture black sites.

To say “Cubans voted for this” you have to believe the Cuban is just some dumb chud living in a vacuum. The Miami Cuban isn’t an organic consequence of Floridian culture. A Miami Cuban is a manufactured good. Its the closest thing we have to full on brainwashing. Just systematically programmed from birth to be the reactionary vanguard. South Florida is America’s Israel. It is a product and a consequence of decades of international policies.

Round here we gotta cure fer callin anodder man feadderless, hehehe…

Plato: “Everything is a shadowy echo of its perfected nature. Even gender.”

Ken Paxton: “Any teacher caught mentioning that last bit is fired.”

This is just a genre of porno.

We’ve had a lot of them. I’m not sure how you could make it to 40 without enduring a particularly foul one.

I do think a lot of the 19th century presidents get a pass simply because they were nearly universally awful. Like, how do you rank Cleveland against Johnson or Tyler or Buchanan when it’s just a race to the bottom?

Nixon was an absolute monster as a human being, but he was at least reasonably competent and politically savvy. Trump’s much more in line with that earlier era of presidents - the most popular klansman or charismatic stooge of industry, but with no redeeming virtues as an actual bureaucrat.

Wish that were true. But wealthy sex pests with outsized political influence are hitting record levels

I will say that this reads like a real Bush Era classico sychophant. You really get the sense his tongue is up in there. It’s cringe, but it’s not phoned in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor

As often as not they were chasing Americans’ empty promises (and occasionally achieving the impossible as a result).

The hydrogen bomb, the probe into Venus, the Mirr Space Station… all launched in response to American campaigns.

But the USSR of the 60s/70s was a wildly different place from post collapse Nationalist Russia. They scraped much of their R&D infrastructure for parts under Yeltsin.