I assume a center beam supporting the platforms runs through all the platforms, obscured by the people.

That was the job of reader’s digest.

I think his point is that humans are meaningless little things made just to be in the image of “God” and should “get over themselves” since it’s all about God and not at all about humanity.

Seemingly, that somehow doesn’t apply to having him shut up and stop making it about himself.

Yeah, I came across some article he wrote. He basically said if he hates someone, they deserve it because god says so, and if anyone disagrees with him, they are making it about “them” and not Jesus.

He evidently (understandably) got blowback on Twitter back in the day, and wrote some word vomit that sums up to “No no, you don’t understand, what I said is not as bad as you think it is (it’s sooooo much worse)”

Notably, I don’t think folks would consider Christian teaching would not explicitly declare that you should hate (that part is usually just implied).

Generally what they say is that while you shouldn’t just yield and let “bad” people walk all over you and society, you shouldn’t “hate” them either.

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Yeah, glad to see the specific instance but after trying to search I see this seems to be a broader doctrine. That you would absolutely hate people who “deserve” to be hated, accordingly to the viewpoint of whoever is preaching regardless of whether that person’s situation actually affects anyone other than themselves.

It’s kind of like the evil twin of “be tolerant, except of intolerance”: “be tolerant only of intolerance”

But then you need to buy into the conspiracy theory that the earth is round

Which is like one of the few jobs they could do just fine. Spew a bunch of nonsense and pretend it’s insightful.

It’s worth a shot, but by and large the more reasonable conservatives are generally no where near those communities. Certainly the moderation of those communities are fanatic about Trump. The conservatives that you might have hoped to call Trump on his stuff have calculated that they can’t afford to challenge Trump even if they personally think he is in the wrong. The ones that have calculated otherwise have been pushed out of the conservative community.

Could keep all of them that don’t have annual fees, and spread out your purchasing. I have three cards, one that’s 2% off everything, and one that’s more off food, and another that’s more off online purchases. My aggregate credit limit is pretty high even if each one were a bit modest (they aren’t as modest as they used to be though)

You can always pay off your balance more often than monthly. When I first opened my first card, I paid it off every Friday, to make sure the small limits were available if I needed them (I had a credit limit of $1,000 back then). Now I pay them off every payday, still multiple times a month. If you need to carry a large balance across payment cycles, you’ll get stuck on a high interest rate treadmill you don’t want to be on anyway.

The credit limits increase with time. The $1,000 card I started with now has a $10,000 limit. Mostly the limits came automatically, but I did request an increase to be able to pay for a home repair in a single transaction. Now between the three cards I have a lot of limit.

A fair number of places where you might want to spend a lot of money in a single transaction won’t accept credit cards anyway over a threshold. Last time I bought a car after establishing the price I asked about just charging it to a credit card. They were willing to do it only for $2,000, so I had to cut a check for most of the car anyway.

Fortunately, no respect is due

Yeah, it does some tricks, some of them even useful, but the investment is not for the demonstrated capability or realistic extrapolation of that, it is for the sort of product like OpenAI is promising equivalent to a full time research assistant for 20k a month. Which is way more expensive than an actual research assistant, but that’s not stopping them from making the pitch.

They should, but anecdotes featuring a person you somehow know beyond the specific situation are more potent.

True, though if we are talking about tax bracket going over 30 percent, that would be at nearly 200k, so well above those thresholds too. Of course the numbers aren’t 28 and 33, but that is the closest threshold to the example.

If getting specific, there’s no 28 percent or 33 percent bracket, so these are all examples rather than real figures. I did make a comment using real numbers, same general magnitude but just more specific about the brackets.

But your tax bill doesn’t go up 5%.

Ok, let’s get this close to real numbers. The cited tax brackets don’t exist, so I’ll go with the 24% to 32%. So if your earnings are 1 dollar into the 32% tax bracket, you are going from AGI $191,950 to $191,951. Your tax bill at $191,950 would be:

$11,600 * 0.10 +
$35,550 * 0.12 +
$53,375 * 0.22 +
$91,425 * 0.24 
---------------------------------
$39,110.74

And your tax bill at $191,951 would be:

$11,600 * 0.10 +
$35,550 * 0.12 +
$53,375 * 0.22 +
$91,425 * 0.24 +
$1 * 0.32
--------------------------------------
$39,111.06

Your tax bill goes up by a whopping $0.32 or 0.01% by earning that extra dollar, meaning you still got to keep $0.68 of that dollar. When they say that dollar would cause their tax bill to go up a lot, that’s pretty much exclusively owing to the misconception that people assume their tax bill would have gone to $61,424, so in the misconception that dollar would have cost them $22,313.

The whole notion of “kicked up a tax bracket” is also a misleading thing. Only a piece of your income goes into the “new bracket”, all pay under the new bracket is taxed as they would have been used to.

This all boils down to a common misconception about ‘tax brackets’.

To simplify, pretend there’s a 28% tax bracket up to 100,000 dollars, and a 33% tax bracket when you hit 100k. The first 100k is always taxed at 28%, no matter what you make, and it’s only the incremental amount that gets taxed heavier. So here in this example, that would mean tax burden would be 28,000.33 instead of 28,000.28. These are not the exact brackets or percentages, but it’s at least showing the right magnitude of increase versus total amount.

However, many people are “afraid” of bumping a higher tax bracket. They think the tax bill would go from 28,000.28 to 33,000.33. That the tax bracket bumps up all your liability. I remember growing up people saying “I have to watch out and not hit the bigger tax bracket, if I’m close then I need a big raise to make it worth it, or else the raise is going to cost me more than it would make me”. This a big driver of antipathy toward democrat tax policies, a belief that mild success will punish them, despite it only increasing on the incremental amount.

Home console in 1980: