> The elephant in the room

People may or may not find it interesting to research the history of this phrase and what it replaced.

Is "800 pound gorilla" the competing phrase? May I ask what you found noteworthy about this?

> If they were only allowed to offer one type of ticket at one price, it would mostly benefit richer passengers while pricing the poorest passengers out of air travel.

I'm sold, how do we put this in the Constitution?

You just triggered my PTSD. Worked in a gas station in college and changing over the till was a PITA -- I had to account for every cent, could be written up over 50 cents (too much or too little) and it was always this crazy dance to change over when we were busy since it messed with the counts.

Sorry! :-)

I know: It is just hell! There is a gas station near my location, which closes the door from 23.45 to 24.00 for just doing this and handing over to the group.

It's funny. I have lurked or followed the gas station anecdote of yours but from the other side.

After school I've worked at a gas station as well and we did not need to close because the shift swap was the same as over the day.

You exert your cashier(?) and the next one inserts the new. And you count in the office and take the time you need.

Half an hour incl. Some other minor takes was part of the shift. Simple as that.

Same as it ever was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Separating in flight is a very tricky problem that requires massive amounts of testing and can go very wrong.

They had fuel drop tanks made of paper in WW2.

Cool drones can test and validate the solution without risking a pilot!

> Plus the Solo cups are transported over a great distance as well, between the fuel and packaging it could easily triple their carbon costs.

As opposed to ceramic mugs that just materialize in your house? Not sure about you, but I don't have a dilithium powered transporter in my kitchen.

My mug only had to be transported to my house once. With disposable cups that's a recurring expense. Unless you have a dilithium powered replicator.

I have a handful of mugs that I've had for decades at this point, a couple even from my parents kitchen that they used some 30 years and probably before then.

And then there's thrift store mugs - sure they were almost certainly trucked to _somewhere_ a long time ago.

They're typically stored as "tokenized" values. The tokenized version shares the type and the last 4 digits (so that you can share it with the customer to help them identify the card). You buy this capability from vendors and IIRC there's like 3 or 4 common vendors in the marketplace.

"sucks" was originally a homophobic pejorative. Languages evolve, sometimes very rapidly.

Not really. The term is a shortened version of "sucks eggs", which is originally from Shakespeare and used to describe an odious creature or habit (a weasel in Shakespeare's case).

Have been considering a used M1 but I'm concerned that I'm going to get flash storage that's been thrashed to within an inch of it's life by someone running it as a poorly configured inference host.

There are sooo sooo many students and normal people using these devices or corporate laptops never seen inferencing or anything like this, its so hard to trash the storage of them, i wouldn't worry about it.

I'm praying Framework becomes more affordable after the ram price inflation is over. Because I never want to buy another computer with non replaceable storage again.

We do not know that prices are coming back down. Perhaps they will just sit while inflation slowly makes them seem normal.

Where's a reliable place to buy a used Mac? I'm afraid of ending up with a broken unit.

Last week I purchased a MacBook Pro M1 Max from www.macsales.com, which is owned by Other World Computer, a maker of Mac peripherals. My computer comes with a 1-year warranty. It was my first time purchasing from them.

At this point, I would wait for reviews on the latest Mac’s just released.

Once again, I'm begging you, with tears in my eyes to learn the difference between statutory and effective tax rates. Do I disagree that there were headline rates of 70%? No. Did anyone pay those rates on any meaningful amount of their income? Also no.

Again I beg you to wipe the tears from your eyes and look at the data. Wealth inequality was significantly lower from 1940 to 1980, the gap between CEO and worker pays was orders of magnitude lower.

Taxe rates demonstrably reduced wealthy estates over time

We are now at levels of disparity greater than the guilded age. Consumers are about to run out of credit at which point there will be a Great Depression level contraction.

No, your parent is correct.

In addition to the pragmatic point about how nobody actually paid those rates, there is an ideological mismatch as well:

Those very high marginal tax rates were not enacted to address inequality or any of the typical social goals that we think of when we advocate for higher marginal tax rates. Rather, they were imposed to combat war profiteering during the WW2 period:

"The crisis of World War II led Congress to pass four excess profits statutes between 1940 and 1943. The 1940 rates ranged from 25 to 50 percent and the 1941 ones from 35 to 60 percent. In 1942, a flat rate of 90 percent was adopted, with a postwar refund of 10 percent; in 1943 the rate was increased to 95 percent, with a 10 percent refund."[1]

Can you argue for a very high marginal tax rate as a means of wealth distribution and furthering progressive policy ? Yes, of course you can.

Have we ever had one ? Not really.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_profits_tax#United_Stat...

Just because people didn’t pay the top rate doesn’t mean they didn’t pay substantially higher percentages than today.