All they gotta do is ban the Christian ones if they want to beat this. You can't have your cake and eat it, too, you jackbooted fascist bastards.

I doubt it.

Something appears to have gone very wrong with their supply chain or their fulfillment operation.

It shipped immediately, yesterday morning... from Phoenix, AZ. Nobody who has a nationwide distribution network, functioning as intended, especially for shelf-stable pet food, should have to send orders to here from freaking Arizona.

You're right, their customer service folks are awesome. I just don't see how they're awesome enough to stop a truck 3 time zones away and, what? Put my stuff on a plane to get it here maybe a day sooner?

Maybe just the shortages are getting worse. I can't imagine they don't still have a distro center in, say, New York or New Jersey that's a hell of a lot closer. So the fact that it didn't come from there tells me they didn't have any to send.

I'd been getting mine within 2 days.

My autoship date just hit (yesterday), and the delivery estimate is now... next Wednesday, a full 7 days out.

I'm now going to run out of food. Sigh. I guess we really aren't allowed to have nice things in America anymore. I only moved to Chewy because, if you autoship, the price increase was negligible, and stores kept leaving me hanging with empty shelves and price spikes.

If Chewy's going to leave me holding the (empty) bag... now what?

People are currently working 50+ on a 40-hour schedule, and paid as if they worked something like 25.

Best case, they set it to 32, we end up working 45 and get paid like we worked 20...

Until the minimum wage goes up, nothing's going to make much difference. And even then, until and unless the Exemption threshold is both raised AND actually enforced, salaried workers will still continue being effectively 24/7 on-call slaves at whatever rate the owners think is good enough.

It's an idea whose time has long come. Unfortunately, it's putting the cart before the horse. Perhaps that's why the Oligarchs allow it to be considered. They know they can adapt to it and end up squeezing workers even harder in the bargain, somehow.

Every day the FBI doesn't trawl the parking lot of one of those "Berks County Patriots" events and carefully monitor every single person going to them, is one day too many.

It just feels like the Klan left a tiny remnant of the Klan in place as a diversion, doing little, so that the real bigots could form a thousand other groups like this...

That exact Spencers is still there, though I don't think the clock is. I was just there the other week.

Berkshire isn't doing well; there's a lot of empty stores and a lot of stores closed during the week that are still full and must open for the weekend or something.

But it's doing better than Fairgrounds was before the end. At least there are stores and kiosks in the middle that sell something other than cell phone accessories. All the really fun stuff is gone, though, including the pet store and 2 out of 3 of the anchor stores. Boscov's is the only one left.

Unfortunately, those are both things the Republican Party has discussed doing since 2016. Fortunately, they don't seem to have the seats at any level needed to consider it since 2022.

What I was getting at is that they'll lie and bend any principle to grab more naked power. There's nothing you can point to and say "they won't do that" or "that goes against their platform / ideology", or even "that's nonsense / contradictory / hypocritical, because if it gets them more power, they absolutely will find a way to justify it.

Yes, but you have to consider the source. This is part of the same organization that has strongly hinted though their stacked SCOTUS that things like non-white, non-landowning people and women probably shouldn't vote, since it wasn't "original" to the U.S. Constitution.

They're fascist plutocrats who will justify literally anything to put their hands deeper in your pockets or strengthen their power over you. If they told me the sky was blue and I was to get free tacos for life, I'd wonder what they were hiding up there and assume the tacos were poisoned so they could sell me the antidote.

It's a lot like employee pay, actually.

You can guarantee poor performance by paying too little. But beyond a certain point, more pay does not create better performance.

When finding that inflection point is a matter of politics & ideology, you might as well give up and go drinking. And no, I do realize that it's NOT actually a matter of politics and ideology, that data can show where that point is. But nobody in charge is ever going to listen to that data, so...

The problem is, PA already has a too-high (or, at least, too regressive) income tax, and many municipalities have multiple layers (county, city, local, "occupational privilege", that sort of thing).

Get ready for them to shrug and triple your property taxes. "There's nothing else we can do, the money has to come from somewhere..."

Meanwhile, it goes to the charter school that also charges tuition you can't afford, even before paying your usurious property taxes.

Oh, there's gold all right. Check your tax bill, your paycheck, and your receipts. Minimum wage at functionally less than it was in the 1960s, and the garbage that works in that building every day make six figures out of my paycheck.

That makes me want to burn it, not appreciate its aesthetics. And I said "want to", Mr. FBI Analyst, thank you. I'm nowhere near Harrisburg and don't plan on going anytime soon.

It is. Oil is running $1k per fill up at this point.

1998 was more than a few years ago, really.

You remember the Clinton administration, I see.

What mental health resources? My aunt has such crippling anxiety she can barely get out of bed a couple times a week, and all she can get from both Medicare & Medicaid, while living in a care facility, is a Lexapro scrip, an hour with a social worker every 2 weeks, and a 5 minute checkup with a traveling psychiatrist every other month or so.

Everywhere you go, it's "We can't put you on the sliding scale if you have no proof of income; apply for Medicaid". Then when you're on Medicaid, "We're not accepting any new Medicaid patients at this time" - or ever, apparently. If you ever get to see the sliding scale, it bottoms out at $45 a session, and they want you to go 2x a week? A f***ing drinking habit is cheaper...

Oh, they mean suicide hotlines. Sure. Don't kill yourself, peon. Someone has to answer the phones and open the stores on Monday, after all, or people might get upset...

Seriously, though, nobody take this as against hotlines or talking people down from self-harm. That's a universal good. Don't accept a permanent solution to a temporary problem and all that. I just find the state of behavioral health services laughable.

Just an improbably high tech version of the Shortest Science Fiction Story Ever:

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door ...

So that's why my electric bill has gone up almost exactly $18 for no apparent reason for the last several months, with absolutely no changes on my end...

Put them all in prison. Betrayal of the public trust needs to be treated much more harshly unless we want to keep seeing it and paying for it.

If you think about it, Iran got the way it is today the exact same way we're seeing it happen here. That is, American "conservatives" (i.e. fascist plutocrats) in power messed around with the government for their own profit, until it broke badly enough that the local right-wing fringe got angry enough to take it from them by force.

You find tons and tons of these, admittedly covering pretty small neighborhoods only, around colleges & universities all over the country. It comes from both local residents not wanting "frat houses" of drunken college students whooping it up next door - and, more often than not, using the parking all up - and the schools going along with it so as to better leverage their high-profit-margin residence halls, making them more attractive since you either use them or live much further away, outside the ordinance.

I've never heard of one successfully applying to an entire town before, but they are absolutely on the books in some places.

Lotta serial killers, though not all, are like this as well. Dahmer was a classic example. He knew what he was doing, he was concerned about it, if not outright disgusted, but he knew it was wrong, was evil. But it ended up being a coping mechanism for his particular untreated mental illness, to which he became completely addicted. He knew he'd get caught eventually, but he couldn't stop.

Couldn't they come just a LITTLE further northeast? I wouldn't want to have to move to York...

I think you're all missing the upsides. No more PennDOT, for one. I'd be surprised if DE's tax structure was more regressive or unfair than ours, simply because that's such a high bar in the first place.

Their minimum wage is amost 50% higher than ours, an on track to be $15 by 2025 (not that this is in any way sufficient or remotely close to what it should be, but it's a hell of a lot closer than $7.25 and no plans to ever touch it again). This, naturally, raises all other wages in Delaware as well.

Local pride is one thing, but if I had the chance to live under a saner, fair-er, less-Republican state government, earn more and be taxed less (and have those taxes I do pay be used for something besides corruption once in a blue moon), I'd take it in a heartbeat.

More specifically, affordable access to clean water is going to become a problem, locally, in a lot of places. Affordable access to petroleum fuel is already an issue, globablly...

I have no idea why someone in Lancaster wouldn't understand "sunny side up" eggs. I could be there in less than an hour, and I've never heard anything else my whole life around here.

You don't want to go to the prison museum, anyway. The The Mütter Museum of Medical Oddities is MUCH better. Some special exhibits aside perhaps, even better than the Art Museum.

I guarantee you that (for today's middle-aged adults, kids of the 70s & 80s) the secondhand tobacco smoke will be a much bigger determining factor in our geriatric health.

That said, I was talking about behavior, which, AFAIK, isn't influenced by air pollution.