The only thing I love about chess.com is the ability to create custom variants, edit them, and unleash them into the wild. Been loving minihouse lately, such a cool variant.
Would love to see Lichess add bughouse, as its cousin Pychess recently debuted it and it seems to work fine. Chess.com has bughouse.
Israel will be fine. They have nuclear weapons if shit really starts to get bad. They'll tell you they don't (while smirking), but they do, and have for like 70 years.
If Israel uses nuclear weapons, that's the end of any shred of sympathy left for them in the world.
There would be massive political consequences for Israel. Sanctions, embargoes, no more ability to travel abroad, the end of any hope of any positive diplomatic relations with other countries, etc.
I'm not that optimistic, they're already accused of genocide in Gaza, rightfully so, and even the european countries that supposedly recognize the ICC in Hague don't arrest Netanyahu. US will of course back them up, as always.
A good analogy to this situation is the analogy of playing chess with a pigeon, who knocks over the pieces, takes a shit on the board, struts around for a moment, and flies away.
Except in this case, the pigeon has a ton of yes-men worshiping it, and praises each of its moves as genius. Except it hasn't made any chess moves, it's literally knocked over pieces and shit on the board, leaving the board and pieces in worse shape. Worse yet - there's a narrative being built by the pigeon's yes-men that the actions by the pigeon were indeed genius, and the situation is better....and people believe the yes-men.
> Never pay a bully, ever. They used that extortion money to build bunkers
Which bully are we talking about here? I'm guessing Donald Trump, who took millions in "donations" to demolish a 3rd of the white house to build a new bunker with a stupid ballroom on top (which will never get built, but the GOP will just shrug when asked where the money went).
>Their reasons for having higher wages are well-documented and they are equally self-serving.
The bottom line is that they are paying their employees much more than their competitors would. You're going to pass that off as "self-serving"?
Their biggest competitor is owned by a family whose combined net worth is half a trillion dollars that derives from founding a megacorporation worth a trillion dollars....yet for some reason can't find the money to pay their employees a living wage, so they instruct their employees to go on government assistance.
They have a different business model than their competitors.
> You're going to pass that off as "self-serving"?
Yes. Their model allows a few employees to serve many customers in a high-volume system. They have advocated for minimum wage laws increases in the past to deter competitors who have different models.
> yet for some reason can't find the money to pay their employees a living wage
I think the issue is a lot deeper than the article suggests.
The problem is, society is fucking broken. The middle class is being decimated. People are going to take their destinies into their own hands, as seen by the growth of daytrading and sports betting. With wages being destroyed, billionaires avoiding taxes, COL skyrocketing for the middle and lower classes, and jobs evaporating, who's going to fucking blame someone for trying to figure out how to use what they know (in this case, sports) to make money?
Plus, this generation has seen another class of gamblers (big banks) get bailout after bailout without any problem.
Sports betting is the symptom, not the root cause that needs to be addressed.
I just don't think that theory of causation works even if we assume the premise for the sake of argument. Both daytrading and sports betting are much larger now than in 2009, when I hope we can agree wages were destroyed and jobs were evaporating on a scale we can hardly imagine today.
Not sure he cares. He's literally got hundreds of billions of dollars to his name, and the corporation he founded is worth trillions.
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