I'm not sure if there's a more sophisticated way of doing this. But just looking at revenue vs net income for 2024 suggests McDonald's operates at about a ~33% margin.
You’re jumping to the conclusion that there’s another reason they’d arbitrarily leave out such a segment. It’s either because there aren’t enough to merit an entry, or there’s some conspiracy afoot to make this obviously racist enforcement appear racist.
The ACA was literally dreamed up by The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank. This idea that it was some partisan thing Democrats forced on the country is hilarious. It was always a bending-over-backwards compromise solution to maintain the for-profit system.
There’s a reason that, after 15 years freaking out about it, Republicans still have no plan for replacing it. Virtually any change, outside of more socialization, will make health outcomes worse.
There's always been a plan to replace it with the only economically viable plan that can reduce the cost of healthcare. The same plan Dr. Ben Carson has been talking about for years.
It's the only solution proposed by anyone from either party that would work.
Yes. Along party lines. Why do you think every Republican voted against the conservative think-tank produced healthcare bill? I certainly have my theory...
Yes. Carson introduced that "plan" in 2015, right? Why do you reckon Republicans have not pushed it forward once in over the past 10 years despite twice controlling all parts of the federal government? Because it's D.O.A. flawed.
It does what basically every other non-starter contemporary Republican health insurance idea does: willfully misunderstands how health insurance works to appeal to rich healthy folks whose costs will be reduced at the expense of the poor sick saps who inevitably will die as a result. It's a straightforwardly eugenicist plan that would make Ebenezer Scrooge blush.
Controlling is not the same as filibuster proof majority (as we just saw with the shutdown), which is what it would take to do this.
Why did every Republican vote against it? Because it was terrible legislation that nobody even got to read before voting on it. As Pelosi famously said, "You have to pass the bill to find out what's in it."
And the reason that you didn't get single payer is because you didn't have support for single payer among Democrats, who did hold a filibuster proof majority.
This idea that the ACA, Obama's signature legislation is some how a conservative push is not based in reality. It's a talking point to give it the appearance of bipartisan legislation, which it is not.
The Heritage Foundation influences were from a 1989 proposal that talked about the an individual mandate and health insurance exchanges. The Heritage Foundation itself has gone as far as to totally disavow any association to the ACA.
Ben Carson has been talking about a variety of half baked plans for years. He has gone back and forth over and over on who is funding the health savings accounts, what he plans to do with medicare and medicaid, etc. None of these ever-shifting plans have ever been able to answer all of the questions, which is why they are ever shifting.
“No gerrymandering”. Wut? The Senate is the most egregious example of anti-democratic systems in any country you could reasonably call democratic. It’s far worse than the worst examples of gerrymandering.
I get what you are saying, but I think gerrymandering is a specific thing -- voters being chosen rather than being the ones to choose. You pick the state you want to live in, and the boundaries are not going to change. But at least every 10 years the congressional district you live in may change without you having any say. So it is definitely worse though I think the lopsided representation due to the senate is pretty shitty too.
> voters being chosen rather than being the ones to choose
With the Missouri Compromise, when territories were admitted, their voters were being chosen for political reasons. Territories were admitted two by two, slave holding and free to maintain a status quo. This falls under your definition of gerrymandering.
There is no justification for this gerrymandering. There's nothing so great about Wyoming such that it should have such an outsized influence on the body politic while possessing the GDP of a mid-sized county.
I won’t go to bat for anything near a full equivocation in contemporary politics, but it’s worth remembering antivax was heavily left-coded prior to Covid. I don’t think approximately anyone has actually good epistemology - just biases that fluctuate in how much they affect the real world. Left wing academics and outlets carrying water for people like Pol Pot in the late 20th century because they liked the idea of communism was a particularly bad one.
Even before COVID things were shifting - the antivax part of the left at that time were mostly only sort of aesthetically on the left. I think this Twitter exchange sums up my feelings about that counterargument: https://i.imgur.com/gNXJ6Wl.jpeg
Also, I think it's important to separate "left of center" and "leftist". Liberals and leftists are very different. "Progressive left-liberals" are fans of democracy and freedom and don't like bigotry and authoritarianism and Trump. "Leftists" are often fans of Lenin and Stalin and Pol Pot and killing groups of people who aren't ideologically aligned and instating one-party dictatorships and violently suppressing dissent. In leftist parlance, "leftist" = "Marxist" while "liberal" = "capitalist belonging to the moderate wing of fascism". In the US, politics is best described as not two but four factions: leftists, liberals, rightists, and neo-Nazis. Often neo-Nazis will form coalitions with the rightists to help achieve major goals; historically leftists would form coalitions with the liberals, but this seems to be occurring less and less.
Although leftists will insist the notion is absurd and anti-intellectual, horseshoe theory contains a lot of truth in it.
By left-wing politicians, basically none (while right-wing conspiracy theories are now promoted by tons of right-wing politicians). Among non-politicians: while right-wingers are far more likely to believe in conspiracy theories and the nature of the conspiracy theories they believe are far less tethered to reality on average, conspiracism is still a serious issue on the left.
It's like 50x less of an issue but I deal with so many left-wing conspiracies on a daily basis. I think the right is much worse than the left (on this topic and in general) but quite a lot of the left, or at least the populist left/populist far-left is, to me, its own particular sort of exhaustingly insufferability. I am proudly a left-liberal and not a centrist and never won't be, but I am still at a point where I can no longer tolerate a big sub-faction of the left. (Though I can't tolerate basically any of the right, minus a bit of the anti-Trump center-right.) I am going to lose my mind when I see vast numbers of leftists demand people not vote for the Democratic party presidential candidate in 2028.
Ah yes. Pardoning folks who were imprisoned for possession of marijuana is exactly the same--worse even, because "autopen"--as pardoning folks who were imprisoned for insurrection / political violence in support of the guy doing the pardoning. Very smart take.
18 were charged with seditious conspiracy. Over 500 were charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement officers. And many more were still awaiting trial, including Daniel Ball, who was accused of throwing explosives at police officers, were also pardoned by Trump. Many of these pardoned individuals have gone on to commit further felonies, including Daniel Ball, who was just arrested for plotting to murder Hakeem Jeffries.
But again, you seem to be missing the point: a president pardoning people who support him is very different than pardoning ordinary people who were imprisoned for crimes that are no longer crimes.
Biden issued several blanket pardons for any crimes that people may have committed for a period of a decade. That doesn't strike me as particularly discerning.
Bit like suggesting the controversy over bombing boats in the Caribbean is dumb because the U.S. has bombed ships before. The way it's happening is completely unprecedented and absurd.
Of course murder is worse. I didn't suggest otherwise. I was responding to the claim that "the White House controversy is dumb" because the building has been modified before. Flagrantly violating the law while blowing a half a billion dollars in transparent bribes on a vanity project while the government is shutdown is beyond outrageous. It's not "dumb" that it's a controversy. It would, in any other administration, be a slam-dunk impeachable offense.
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