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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • That works out to an annual salary of about $62,500 for a full-time employee and my intuition is that the marginal value of the lowest-paid hotel employees to their employers is a lot less than that, but the nice thing about this being a local law is that LA can experiment on itself and the rest of the country can watch and learn. If this works well, other cities can do the same thing and if this doesn’t then the harm is relatively limited.

    (I noticed that the law only applies to hotels with over sixty rooms. I already stay exclusively in Airbnbs when I travel because that’s cheaper. Is LA also one of those cities making it difficult to run an Airbnb or is this going to make large hotels even less competitive in that regard?)



  • All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

    I admit that I’m not sure how to interpret this in a way that includes freed slaves, people born in the Confederacy during the Civil War, but not everyone else born on US territory, but the implication of having two separate clauses is still that a person may be born in the United States but not subject to the jurisdiction thereof. I think that the Trump administration’s arguments seem like a stretch, but so is asserting that the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” clause means nothing.






  • There is a very good reason for the super rich to support the rule of law: it secures their own wealth and power. Even if they may want to be aristocrats in a highly stratified society like, for example, 19th century Britain rather than a modern democratic welfare state, they don’t stand to benefit from the transition to a modern autocracy. 19th century Britain was very much a nation of laws where the government would protect the lives and property of the super rich whereas modern autocrats quickly co-opt them into personal lenders whose well-being is entirely at the mercy of the autocrat.

    Thus, while some super rich individuals currently support populist autocracy either due to idiosyncratic personal beliefs or short-term political expediency, transitioning to it is not in the best interest of the super rich as a class. Rule of law isn’t the same thing as democracy but I don’t see a global movement towards rule of law without democracy - the two are in the present day apparently inextricable.

    (China seemed like it could become a powerful example of rule of law without democracy, but Xi’s consolidation of power seems to have returned it to the standard autocratic track.)





  • The fact that the stereotype exists (and both the man and the woman presumably know that it does) makes me perceive the comment in the OP as mocking or patronizing. The man’s intent could be to offend or perhaps to imply “I’m glad you don’t actually expect treatment like this,” but even that would offend many women. I don’t understand why you or the woman in the OP think it was said in good faith, because it’s something I would say myself only if I wanted to hurt the feelings of the woman I was speaking to so much that I was willing to sound sexist.