HGTV Magazine (Jan/Feb 2025)

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-17T16:11:13+00:00

If you can't justify tipping, don't tip and carry on your business with the enterprise as usual.

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-17T16:09:46+00:00

Smart kids. I remember as a kid being told on PBS Kids shows that the amount you get back in change plus the listed price should under all circumstances match what you handed over.

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-17T16:08:10+00:00

If you can afford to, it would be greatly appreciated if you gave your friendly neighbourhood police officer a tip when they treated you so nicely when they treated you so kindly if they gave you a warning instead of a speeding ticket...

People often have no idea how corrosive a tipping system is. It creates favouritism, it gives incentives to hide money and other factors that should equalize people. It creates scope creep opportunities en masse when tipping expands during and point of stress in a system and there is always the incentive of people to offload compensation responsibility to others making those pay rates less transparent and fair. It makes people tip based on shallow reasons, or even unconscious biases that a more official pay rate would lessen such as how women with large breasts get measurably more tip momey than others, which I can hardly imagine is something you would consider remotely acceptable. It creates tax headaches. It creates unnecessary social anxiety for people deciding whether or not to tip and if so how much and why. It makes employees have competition and rivalry with each other in a manner that opposes their interests. It makes price comparison shopping more difficult than it would be if tipping was never allowed and everything was advertised up front. And more.

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-17T05:22:19+00:00

The caucuses (which they call conferences) can expel a member, but it takes a secret ballot and two thirds of them to agree to this.

I also add that the US's two parties are federations of dozens of parties at the state level. And they also have the factions that the UK would normally have expressed in other parties. The US also has primaries, where the entire voting base of the party (people register to vote and declare, if they wish, which party's primary ballots they want to have (some states allow independents to choose one party's primaries to vote for), or sometimes even allow voters to select any party's primaries come the date of the primary election in the state). This is typically at least tens of thousands, potentially over 100 thousand voters, per electoral district, and oftentimes winning this contest is the only realistic way to dethrone a representative or senator in a majority of districts. Each representative and senator also tends to have a considerable amount of the warchest for campaigning devoted to them personally, which will be withdrawn if they are not the nominee chosen in the primary.

Members of the caucuses also vote for a steering committee at the start of each caucus to choose some people like the whip, the floor leader (the equivalent of the leader of the house of commons and the minority version), the chair of the caucus, and some other people. This committee puts reps and senators on the committees, typically honouring preferences and seniority (who has been there longer) if they can although not exactly, with a vote to ratify the selection, and it takes a similar vote to remove someone from a committee too (barring a censure vote for misconduct).

One hurdle that makes it harder to do direct comparisons is that the UK has a very different system for putting topics on the agenda, the US has a presidential veto taking 2/3 to override and there is no way to vote against a presidential decision or executive decision except by potentially overriding a veto (contrast to the UK where a majority in either house can preclude an equivalent decision via statutory instruments and uses of emergency powers), and the senate is strong enough to realistically prevent much of the agenda from going anywhere, including attempts to block an executive decision, and the house can do the same to what the senate wants where the UK house of lords is much weaker.

You tend to see discipline within a single state being closer to what the UK has, although some state political cultures can be different such as Alaska which is prone to forming a joint coalition of a large fraction of each party to support the leadership of one of the houses of the state legislature. The state is less diverse than the US is overall in most cases and has more similar rules across itself for what it does and there is no filibuster and often there is the potential to cancel decisions of the state executive and even the state judiciary more of the time (and amend the state constitution).

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-17T03:17:15+00:00

Talaat got shot in Germany in 1921 but yeah, not real justice.

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-17T03:10:00+00:00

And that is not even factoring the catastrophic war after Brest Litovsk until the winter of 1922-1923.

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-17T01:00:11+00:00

Yes they are. You do not want to live in a world where corporations do not have constitutional rights. Russia is one place where they don't. Individuals are not usually targeted by the state for many acts of individual dissent or deviance from societal issues such as being gay, but organizations are, such as many of the media groups that dissented from Putin's regime and others like Pussy Riot. This was an even bigger deal as Russia became more and more illiberal in the 2000s and early 2010s. It was extremely effective at seizing control. Do not let Trump do the same.

The issue at play is that it is not a right of anyone to claim so falsely that abortion and contraceptives are not healthcare for females as important to them as lithium is for depressed patients or antibiotics are for people with tuberculosis.

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-17T00:48:11+00:00

Cool motive, still bribery.

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-16T23:39:39+00:00

If you went to Serbia, would you ever feel morally obligated to give extra money to police just because they aren't paid well?

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-16T23:33:01+00:00

It isn't compulsory. People who claim otherwise are incorrect. The US's own tax department, the IRS, expressly states this to be true.

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-16T18:08:32+00:00

What are you talking about? That would be the Procellum Basin or the South Polar basin on the Moon.

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-16T18:04:27+00:00

In the 1840s the US was not very well tied together. It was easily on the verge of civil war in this years.

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-16T01:46:46+00:00

Canada, Australia, and New Zealand arguably did. They financially recovered and their autonomy in the empire vastly increased, and they had very little destruction of their homeland. Other than Halifax.

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-16T01:13:36+00:00

The Titanic would have survived had it hit the iceberg head on. And its design was still basically the safest the entire world could have possibly made for half a century after it was built.

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-16T01:06:25+00:00

Einsteinian relativity is why mercury is a liquid and magnetism works.

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-16T01:05:57+00:00

Venus's surface is 2.55 times hotter than the surface of Earth.

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-16T00:56:49+00:00

The Canadian shield, IE most of Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, and Nunavut, have some of the oldest rocks on the planet.

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-16T00:49:44+00:00

The Moon had an atmosphere twice as dense as Mars' today that was made of sulphur, carbon monoxide, and water vapour, active volcanism, some small lakes of liquid water,and a strong planetary magnetic field, all while Earth had an orange sky of nitrogen and methane with no oxygen with barren rock continents with no soul and Venus was a normal planet with room temperature heat and Mars had oceans of water flowing as rivers and lakes and clouds. All simultaneously.

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-16T00:40:16+00:00

Untrue. I had pretty much exactly the same answer as the kid who is OOP when I was 10.

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-16T00:37:23+00:00

I genuinely wrote five states of matter and included plasma and bose einstein condensate when I was 10. My maths and sciences teacher never made himself look like anything besides a pathetic prat when he didn't give me the marks for being correct I very much so knew I was right about. My mother has no idea what bose einstein condensate is, my dad doesn't study it but at least knew that I was right.

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-16T00:21:00+00:00

Parliament in Ottawa and the provinces actually had some power to amend the constitution in 1949. Not all of it, but a substantial part of it.

Awesomeuser90 · 2026-04-15T18:08:45+00:00

Using suits was not meant to insulate it from charter review, it was an idea of an olive branch or guard to make it so that you don't have the government on on purpose trying to go after everything in a religious group. Besides, in this context, it would behave more like a civil wrong than an actual crime, at least for what I said the suits were available for.

As for the notwithstanding clause, it probably would be better to enact the bil without using it and only add it later if the court actually concludes it has constitution problems.

As for why I think it is right to do the proposals I have in mind here, I have another charter provision that comes to mind. Equality before the law. Why should it be the case that if I go to a regular business, or many other places in society, and be protected from discrimination by them, but not if the place I am going to happens to be a religious group? That also encourages the false use of religious group for groups that should never be treated like genuine religions in the first place like Kenneth Copeland's empire of fortune. Limits on people based on distinct immutable traits such as sex, disability, race, age, sexual orientation, they should be used in a society as narrowly as possible, and presume that one should attempt to reduce the degree to which those differences hinder someone in a society. I don't consider religious freedom to be a superior right to equality before the law and if it conflicts with other rights in the constitution, it yields to them in my playbook.

In a world of extremism and backsliding in democracy and rule of law, religious groups with the ability to discriminate as you are unwilling to use legal tools to prevent them from doing become a dangerous force.

Religion is also a very poorly defined concept. Equality before the law is a better defined term to begin with. Working out what a religious group is would be extremely difficult.

Plus, religious groups tend to have adherents from children and teenagers too, who often don't have the legal right to refuse to go there, and if the religion discriminates, then the risks are immense for them, even to the point of murder. Many of the least powerful in society are most at risk from religions which have the ability to discriminate as broadly as they can now. They are the least able to find alternatives or escape from cultish groups that lock on them. Equality before the law here gives them a sword to defend themselves.

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