Well, the 'listening to their constituents' thing certainly hasn't been going well lately... what with all the screaming matches, arrests, barely contained open revolts and what not.
They just kinda said those were all fake news and then stopped doing them.
I tried to type out 'megalomaniac' and unintentionally misspelled it as 'magalomaniac' in a comment i made somewhere yesterday.
Went back to my comment, noticed this, and then realized... no, wait, this is a good misspelling, and wrote an addendum.
I entirely support 'magalomaniac' and 'magalomania' as terms, lets get them in the DSM 6.
Aside for Psychologists
(And before a psych major or phd says 'DSM V is the last DSM edition!'... no, its not, otherwise the TR version of V wouldn't ... be a thing... arguably it is the DSM 6...)
I get that.
What... would actually make much more sense would be to index the minimum wage to some other, per state metric.
A fraction of median income, some formula that actually does a good job of estimating a minimum standard of living...
But, that will never happen, because ... well basically half of voters and half state legislatures fundamentally either do not understand how to, or believe in laying a foundational safety net layer for society.
The income and CoL disparities within the US are... basically as wild as the differences between EU member states, but our governance systems are... well, pretty much fundamentally broken at this point.
Well, I would, but:
gestures at leg and wrist in braces, cane, utter state of poverty, lack of public transit in a low CoL city I can qualify to rent at with SSDI as my only income
More than that would create private business deserts in poor areas, forcing the locals to exclusively patronize corporations. More of the population would need social program assistance to help pay for the increased cost of our domestic food supply.
... If we're talking about Arkansas... all of that has already happened.
You know Walmart is... from, and based in Arkansas, right?
20 ish % of the population is already below the poverty line... and the poverty line is basically 'lets assume you have no rent and are homeless and just want to be able to buy food'.
That means 20% of the state is already getting SSI, SNAP, TANF, etc.
...
The US Federal poverty line is about $35 dollars a day. about $13k a year.
If you converted that to a full time wage, thats about $6.75 an hour.
The US Federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.
50 cents of difference.
Hasn't changed since 2009.
From 2009 to 2025, if you go by CPI, a single 2009 dollar is worth about $1.50 2025 dollars, that is to say, prices have risen by 50% in 16 years.
...
Arkansas is literally an economic disaster zone.
41% of the state struggles with getting their basic needs met, multiple independent observers and international aid agencies have compared the level of poverty, lack of education, access to healthcare... to areas of the world recently devastated by wars.
You say the cost of living is 36-37k.
That must be for a single person.
As of Nov 24, the median individual income in Arkansas is $29,740.
That makes the median wage about $15.50 an hour.
The median individual income in Arkansas cannot afford the average cost of living for a single person.
Arkansas is already the state equivalent of a mentally unsound person being deemed incompitent to make their own decisions and be declared a ward of the state.
Bumping up the min wage would be more like doubling the care and support staff for the assisted living facility that is Arkansas, already massively dependent on Federal subsidies to the poor.... and the laughably tiny tax rates on giant megacorps that allow said megacorps to dominate its economy.
...
If you want to see what unchecked hypercapitalism looks like, you're looking at Arkansas.
Median one bed apartment rent, across the entire US, is $1550 as of Feb 2025.
Lets knock 20% of that off, to approximate a median studio apartment instead, give some leeway to poorer parts of the country.
(there are not as good or reliable general stats counted for studio apartments, but a studio being 20% less than a one bed is... hopefully a reasonable, napkin math aporoximation)
Ok, that's $1240.
Alright, now we use the 'rent should be 30% of your income' rule.
Thats $4135 a month, rounded up very slightly to the nearest 5.
Ok, 40 hours a week, roughly 4 weeks a month = 160 hours.
4135 / 160 = $25.85, again rounded up to the closet 5 cents for simplicity, so thats your actual minimum 'living wage'.
If you wanna say a studio should be 30% off a one bedroom?
Math works out to roughly $22.60
If you wanna say an actual one bedroom should be the standard, works out to about $32.60
Any way you look at this, $17 an hour is too low, that's still... you can't even afford a studio (as in, you cannot pass the rent to income threshold without a cosigner or double deposit or somethingnon your lease) you need roommates, you're still living with your parents.
Numbers 5:11 to 5:31 uh, fairly clearly explains that if a woman is suspected to be pregnant by 'not her husband', she is to undergo a ritual and drink a potion which will cause an abortion/miscarriage.
https://biblia.com/bible/esv/numbers/5/11-31
ESV uses a ... too literal translation to result into 'her thigh will fall away'...
https://biblia.com/bible/niv2011/numbers/5/11-31
But the NIV translators are capable of understanding context dependent modifiers and just directly uses 'miscarry'.
https://biblia.com/bible/nlt/numbers/5/11-31
NLT ends up with 'womb will shrivel/shrink'.
https://biblia.com/bible/nkjv/numbers/5/11-31
NKJ also goes for a very, word by word literal approach (what a surprise) and says 'thigh will rot'.
...
So yeah, there you go, anytime you run into a bible thumper who proclaims that the ten commandments are the basis of western civilization, show them that the old testament also very clearly and explicitly ... not just condones, but mandates abortion in certain circumstances.
If they then say that we are under the new covenant, throw this at them:
https://biblehub.com/matthew/5-18.htm
Matthew 5:18
Jesus, the man himself, says to follow the Law (ie, the old testament, or at the very least the first 5 books, the torah, which includes the entire book of numbers) exactly, precisely, to the letter, to the 'jot and tittle'.
... Oh but also the Bible is inerrant and never contradicts itself, which must mean the old and new covenant have perfect agreement and never contradict, and are therefore identical, right?
If I were to pronounce it outloud, I would say:
D. B. Zero.
Like D. B. Cooper, lol.
the... zer(o), 0 swap is... basically old school l33tsp34k... like uh... l00tb0x, pr0n, type of ... dialect? syntax?
... can't say I've ever had banana pudding.
Here's how you go to jail for debt:
Rack up a ton of credit card debt.
Don't pay it off, goes to collections.
If it's high enough, and you don't move to another state...
Collections sues you, you get a court summons in the mail.
You throw away the court summons along with all your overdue bill notices.
Congratulations, you now have an active arrest warrant, police will be at your location in... a few days to a few weeks, you go to jail, then likely prison for contempt of court, and when you get out, the debt collector won their judgement against you by default, any wages you try to get will be garnished, your credit score is absymal so you can't get an apartment basically anywhere.
... incredible.
Beans for you.
Yep.
It is mostly just revisiting older news from decades before that... as would be reasonable when a newcomer to politics now seems to stand a reasonable chance of becoming President, might want to do a more thorough journalistic background check on the guy.
Leftists critical of Trump, back then, before even his first term, were ... you know, kind of worried about Trump having Hitler in his nightstand table, very, very obviously seeing him as a role model and source of inspiration...
And then they said things like ... is Trump a Nazi? Is Trump a fascist? This stuff is ... quite concerning, along with his bombastic rhetoric and extremely nebulous and fluid 'policies', that all seem to converge on a return to past greatness, hypermasculinity, racism, sexism... all very much in line with ... a populist, which historically very often leads to fascism...
And then almost every one else in the country dismissed that as hyperbolic nonsense, and 'everything/one you don't like is fascist' was born.
... And now here we are, evidently in the bizzaro clownworld timeline, where Trump is 'the joker, baby' all the Republicans are his brainwashed cult of goons, the Democrats almost all as well sane-washed the shit out of Trump untill way after it was too late... and, as is also predictable broadly by history, the leftists, with few exceptions, fought each other over idpol, purity tests and tone policing, effectively negating any coherent opposition.