I had never heard of the Babylon Bee and I just took a look at it. Are you saying you think The Onion is the very political one, or did I misread your sentence?
When a company says "cost of living" they mean their own, not their employees. So-called COLA adjustments are for Cost of Hiring, or Cost of Employee Retention.
The distinction is that it is calculated based on minimizing unwanted attrition due to wage competition elsewhere, and has nothing to do with how much rent or milk prices may have increased.
Maybe they did. Do you suppose they got scammed on eBay - which they "perfectly" remember buying it from - or from the Red Cross, which they have an invoice for?
I'm sure it's not the best language learning tool around, but it has taught me enough of three different languages to visit a foreign country, ask for directions, order things, etc, with a number of conversations never falling back into English. And all for the price of free.
Wasn't one of their initial monetization ideas that crowdsourced translations - from amateurs, not even paid contractors - would outperform AI translation? The translation thing never came close to panning out, from what I can tell.
Back in the day you used to be able to see a mini discussion thread about any exercise. The comments in these threads - from unpaid users - were frequently much more helpful than the official teaching notes. But they got rid of those a while back, too. At the time people suggested it was because they wanted to push people into some sort of paid tutoring offering that they'd announced. But I don't see any hint of that around. Now I'd guess it's because the questions are no longer hand crafted by people, and are now autogenerated by AI, leading to an inability to have discussions about specific questions.
In fact, every medical insurance provider I've had for years has tried to push me onto their in-house pharmaceutical delivery service. Traditional pharmacies have been getting squeezed for a long time.
They keep opening new branches around here.
They are glorified ATM lobbies with minimal staff who will often direct you to use an ATM for anything that an ATM can do.
But they do keep opening them. I sometimes wonder if it's just a complicated real estate investment play.
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if more runners do die from cancer. Because they're not falling victim to all the other things that are improved by cardio fitness, etc.
This regulation is saying that if you did build an autonomous Russian roulette revolver, there's no requirement to outfit it with a pistol grip and a trigger.
If there is a fully driverless (not driving itself with a human still in it) truck - as companies tell us is their goal - it does not increase or decrease safety to have or not have a seat and a steering wheel in it.
The argument here is that building an autonomous Russian roulette revolver is a stupid thing to do, which is orthogonal.
So over 800k people over the age of 50 have died from covid in the US.
Are you saying that it's "dishonest" to estimate that at least 1% of them are grandparents involved in childcare? By napkin math this more than works out; I'll also hint that if you spend even a minute researching, the stats on how many of these people are likely to be grandparents, and how many grandparents are child carers, are readily findable. If you care to engage in an honest discussion.
There are only a few pieces in that set that don't appear in hundreds of other sets:
The baseplate is custom and the most egregious example of what you are talking about, of course.
The slope at the front with the swirl on it is also custom.
There's a round tile with a snowflake on it, that appears in two other sets.
The giant snowflake on top, about two dozen other winter-themed sets.
The slide also appears in only a couple of dozen pieces, but this basically all pieces that include a playground or similar. The slide is functional for play so it can't be trivially made of smaller pieces without compromising that.
There also an ornamental swirly translucent smoke-like piece that only appears in a handful of sets, again, all winter themed.
That's it, the rest of the pieces in the kit appear in literally hundreds of other sets.