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[McTraveller]

Huh, CA now has an industry-specific minimum wage. Fast food at $20/hour.

What is most interesting to me is this is industry-specific, not the particular dollar amount.

[EuchreJack]

Huh, CA now has an industry-specific minimum wage. Fast food at $20/hour.

What is most interesting to me is this is industry-specific, not the particular dollar amount.

Oh, that's nothing. We've had that in New York for a couple years.

[Lord Shonus]

I think it's not the same department, but given how the regulators are failing to stop the MS+Activision merger, I don't have my hopes up.

Outright blocking it was probably never going to happen. ActiBlizz is big, but they're not dominant enough to be a genuine monopoly threat. Opposing it was pretty blatantly about getting deals to lessen the impact, such as the legally-binding "we won't monopolize Call Of Duty" agreements that MS has already inked with both Sony and Nintendo. From that perspective it has been a colossal success.

[da_nang]

The relic known as Senator Dianne Feinstein is dead at a most interesting time.

[McTraveller]

The question isn't Activision's size: it's Microsoft's.

It's unquestionably anticompetitive for Microsoft to buy a company like Activision.  Microsoft will also inevitably "tie" services to itself, forcing conversion of Blizzard accounts to Microsoft accounts, require accounts for things that arguably don't need it, rent-seeking (subscriptions) instead of purchases, etc.

The only way I would ever consider this not anticompetitive is if it resulted in the hallmark of a more competitive market: reduced profit margins. And something tells me we aren't going to see that.

[Folly]

Roughly 24 hours to the Government Shutdown.

I know we're all used to these things being unceremoniously resolved at the last minute more often than not. And that may yet happen. But as of this moment, it's looking pretty bleak.

[hector13]

I think there was mention of four different packages being voted on to avoid the shutdown, possibly in addition to the short-term one the Senate passed. Is there any information on what’s in those packages out there?

[Folly]

As far as I've seen, all of the proposed short-term spending options have already been voted down or rejected without a vote.

[wierd]

(Has succeeded in staying out of here for over a year now. Is bored at work. Girds for battle, and walks in)

The issue with the GOP, and its current "Fully self-inflicted political injuries" concerning the now almost-certain government shutdown, is that they all agree that reality is to be ignored, but then cannot agree on which alternative reality to embrace.

The result is that none of them can hammer out an even somewhat self-consistent roadmap toward consensus, cannot gain footing or traction on a spending bill, and entropy wins out.


It would be so much better of they just embraced actual reality, and worked accordingly and with the demands it makes of them, rather than trying to pretend and give deference to nonsensical things (Like Gaetz thinking that McCarthy hired people to bad-mouth him on social media, when his own moronic ass just being himself is more than sufficient to get half of Reddit and all of 4Chan to do it for free), because then maybe we would have a government that has money to pay its bills, instead of people screaming, name-calling, and acting like entitled karens in the capitol building, complaining about hoodies while essential services shut down.

Sadly, our nation has embraced the "Alternate reality!" trend whole-hog, and now we have stuff like QAnon, and a radically dysfunctional government.

Way to go us.  Hooray. /s

[Frumple]

Fucking lol; the house has passed a more or less clean 45 day CR in regards to funding -- and the yes vote had nearly two democrats for every republican. Something like 40% of the House majority just voted against their own bill, heh. The shitshow that's about to cook off is probably going to be kind of amazing.

[EuchreJack]

To clarify: It had ALL the Democrats except 1. One Democrat, Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois, voted no over a lack of Ukraine aid.

[hector13]

People can have opinions without having other people pay money for them, you know…

[Folly]

To clarify: It had ALL the Democrats except 1 (who was opposed to continuing aid to Ukraine, proving that the Russians don't solely have Republicans on their payroll).

The CR does not include aid for Ukraine, so it does not really make sense for anyone to object on that point.

Also the CR just passed in the Senate. Looks like we've bought ourselves 45 days.
Edit: CR did not pass yet, but they agreed to vote on it without objection, which is a pretty solid indicator that it will pass shortly.

[EuchreJack]

People can have opinions without having other people pay money for them, you know…

Yeah, but not politicians...

[hector13]

People can have opinions without having other people pay money for them, you know…

Yeah, but not politicians...

Depends on the politician.