How is it Thatcher’s fault? I’m genuinely curious.
I learned that Hong Kong is under British control because it’s a leasing contract that last 99 years (from 1898 to 1997). So when the time comes it’s nobody’s fault that Hong Kong went back to China. Because China at the time would never extent the contract or even except negotiations.
Hong Kong itself as well as the Kowloon peninsula were actual territories that belonged to the UK after they were ceded to them after the opium wars.
It’s only the “new teritories” which were several smaller islands surrounding Hong Kong island that were part of the 99 year lease.
Even if no effort was made to secure the new territories, we could have and should have defended Hong Kong and Kowloon as part of Britiain, as the people wanted to be either independent or remain British.
Thatcher rolled over and sold their futures to appease China.
I’d go in a different direction - requiring someone to sing your national anthem is wrong. It’s wrong when the U.S. do it, it’s wrong when Canada does, it’s wrong when China does it.
I find national pride hard to understand, but forced displays of national pride are really iffy.
Fair enough. I’m just saying that the fact that this is an article in the first place is because of “China bad,” not because it’s anything unique or special.
Do Principals count? How about Superintendents? State legislators who pass these pledge mandates? What about the school cop who comes to get you after the teacher writes you up? Or the cop in the ISS classroom who holds you until your parents pick you up? Or the school administrator who processes your expulsion?
Shit like this is why the kneeling protests in the states never bothered me. I’m proud to live in a country with freedom of expression. This kind of forced nationalism is a cancer
It’s not mandatory but yeah. Some dumb fuck teachers and administrators have tried to make it mandatory but the courts never agree with them. It’s a weird Cold War relic I wish would just go away.
No one is keeping track of how enthusiastically they do it or writing official reports on it or encouraging more of it. It's the interest the govt takes in it that makes it weird(er).
Not that long ago in my public school the most I could get away without detention was standing facing the flag and not speaking -and that was only because my homeroom teacher was fairly lax and I was the only objector.
Punishments for not participating were real and I can’t say the school wouldn’t have come up with a more formalized patriotism monitoring if more students rejected it as a movement. 🤷♂️
There are a lot of places in the US where ideas from the 1800s are still prevalent, because they’re so lacking in diversity that there is no one to point out the crimes.
Growing up in rural northern Michigan, I wasn’t allowed to take the class our drama teacher taught about making costumes because I was a boy. That same drama department, for a production of West Side Story, got spray tans for all the kids playing Puerto Rican characters. They’re still known as one of the best drama programs in the area.
To an extent, but you expect demands for hegemony from western imperialists.
In the Hong Kong case, it's the government - an agent of the people - which is just enforcing the desire of the people to praise the revolution. It's not that the kids can't sing softly. It's that if they sing softly it's because of the lingering influence of the colonizers. Therefore they need re-education until their minds are properly free.
A cool org like the Satanic Temple will ask that their own seven tenants be displayed as well.
This will cause the Christian right to lose their minds. Who could have ever seen this coming? They will say that it will corrupt the children. They will not let the tenants be posted. Raging mobs of Concerned Christian Parents will yell at their school boards.
Cue lawsuits from the Satanic Temple.
Suddenly and quietly, the lawmakers realize that they haven’t yet broken the courts completely and they’ll roll back the ten commandments requirement. From the side of their mouths, they’ll blame the evil, godless liberals for the downfall of the US. You see, it’d all be milk and honey if we didn’t ban Jesus (you probably haven’t heard of him, right?) from the children.
It’s the same song and dance every fucking time. Please donate to the Satanic Temple and/or the ACLU so they can continue to push back against this bullshit.
Lmao @ the Americans getting all uncomfortable trying to weasel out of this
Yeah bullshit it’s “not mandatory,” how can you have such a basic denial of reality?
Totally optional, that’s why every time some kid understands and abstains, the teachers and other students bully them mercilessly, give them detention, suspension, expulsion, and it makes national news whenever someone actually tries.
I bet joining the NSDAP was fucking optional too, don’t try to deny your christofascism that everyone just accepts because somehow it’s better when America does it
Idk, I didn’t stand for the pledge and they didn’t disappear me into a white van or exile me to Cuba 🤷
Maybe, and stop me if I’m going too far here, maybe you weren’t aware it isn’t forced. That’s fine because now you’ve been handed a personal account of the opposite to be true, I’m sure you will reassess you stance 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Even having an anthem, being bullied into putting your hand over your heart, making children onesie allegiance, is all indoctrination to nationalism. It’s horrible.
I embarrassed the COO of a large organization once in front of approximately half of that organization’s management. Managed to get away with it. So yes, I can say with some certainty that being able to stand up and freely express yourself is character building and, frankly, fucking awesome.
It’s also a strength. Places where you can’t criticize things is how you end up with a the emperor has no clothes situation where harm gets perpetuated just because there isn’t psychological safety for people to feel comfortable to speak out.
Most of the staff likely would have told me that it is mandatory. There are news stories all the time about kids being bullied, given detention, and other negative repercussions, for exercising their right to not say the pledge.
The small school I taught at said the pledge every day, but the principal did regularly announce to everyone present that they don’t have to say it (but they did have to be there for it)
High, high chance they wouldn’t have been encouraging. Reasons include their personal political beliefs and the fact they tend to care more about parent reactions than students, because guess which group they’re on equal footing with?
I swear to Charles Darwin himself, they will get so much more reaction out of me if they try to force my kids recite that bullshit. (They currently stand there silently)
Sure, but I assume in some places parents (plural) will raise a stink about a kid that’s not theirs being allowed to not say it in the same room as their own spawn. Dangerous ideas, right? I encourage you to start shit if they make you, though.
I should clarify I’m Canadian, so this specific issue hasn’t come up, but I’ve seen similar things. For example, my local division has a policy, on paper, that pride flags should be flown in schools, but they often aren’t because the staff don’t like angry mobs.
I believe so too. I’ve instructed my children to not recite the pledge (because atheism), and will absolutely make this my hill to die on. It’s bad enough we’ve got money with that bullshit on it.
It’s a stupid brainwashed idiot country and this shit drives me nuts.
I live in New York, one of the most northern and blue states around, and have my entire life. In 7th grade I decided I didn’t like saying the Pledge of Allegiance, the name alone sounded odd to me, like why are children pledging themselves to a country, when we can’t even really understand what that means? So I stopped.
The school staff lost their minds.
Luckily my parents taught me to be firm in my beliefs, if I had truely thought about them and believed them. So I stuck to my choice, and my parents backed me up on it when they arrived at the school 45 minutes after the Pledge normally ended.
On a side note, I had read ahead in my Social Studies textbook that week, and learned about Nationalism in Nazi Germany, and it had sounded strangly familiar to me. Not long after the Pledge of Allegiance incident happened.
Shit like this is why the kneeling protests in the states never bothered me.
Nationalism is a fucking curse. It drives people insane. These guys don’t love our country enough. Those guys love their country TOO MUCH. Its all so miserable and awful for everyone involved.
I’m proud to live in a country with freedom of expression.
Freedom to say anything that doesn’t upset the rich and powerful. Freedom to speak anywhere that the police won’t arrest you and the corporations can’t ban you. Freedom to travel anywhere your credit card can afford to send you and the State Department hasn’t banned you from going. Freedom to express yourself in any way that some Christian Fundamentalist doesn’t think will unduly influence his little rugrats.
Civil liberties are definitely something that have to be continuously fought for. You’re right that there are a lot of elements that would love to see many go away. Abortion is only the start.
Our nearest Pizza Hut delivers via Doordash whether you order direct or through DD, but if you order direct its 30% cheaper. I’m not sure who’s eating the markup.
In my case, since I get DashPass through my CC (not directly paying for it), I’ve seen it discounted to below the price some restaurants list on their websites. I pick up all my orders myself though.
I wouldn’t pay for DashPass directly, personally speaking at least. I don’t use DD nearly enough to justify investing more into it vs. just ordering on the restaurant’s website or calling in the order. The only reason I even use DD is because I get that as a benefit through my CC and it usually pushes the prices to same or lower as ordering directly.
Doordash charges restaurants a percentage of the gross from the sale. Rather than eat this cost, restaurants are encouraged but not forced to add a markup on the prices they give Doordash (or insert your favorite third party delivery app here). They all do it.
If you order from a store’s own website though, Doordash (I don’t know if other third parties do this) did not “find” or create the business/order… they are really only handling the delivery portion.
In this instance, they still have some fees but do not take the large percentage, as that is a finder or broker fee. They aren’t bringing the restaurant the business, it’s the other way around.
Thus, restaurants can use their normal pricing. If you can find the places near you doing this, it’s a much better deal than using Doordash normally.
I feel like schemes like this warrant a law that you’re failing your fiduciary duty as a company owner and can be sued by any of the stakeholders for it if you can’t prove failure to at least break even is due to genuine misfortune. Not even gross incompetence, that should just get you sacked with a dunce cap on top of having the company broken off and sold to a bidder that isn’t hellbent on stripping it for parts.
That or company owners are only allowed to draw funds from the company’s profits and funds coming from anywhere else, including from layoffs and corner cutting, are seized at 150% the value stolen and the company owners involved get treated as though they had committed embezzling so long as the books can indicate that the executives and owners drew more in compensation than was recorded as profit.
So basically, any time a company lets people go that’s stealing, and you want there to be a court thing that judges whether any particular loss was due to mismanagement or “genuine misfortune”?
That seems like a pretty extreme response to high delivery fees don’t you think?
If the executives could have just had less pay, yes, cutting someone off from their entire livelihood is theft. Especially if there wasn’t even cause like criminal behavior or inexcusable misconduct.
And I think it’s perfectly fair to just assume executives are lying about everything they say since *gestures wildly at all the everything since as far back as Smedly Butler.
That's your takeaway? It's like Walmart moving into a town and undercutting indie business prices until the indie businesses close, then raising prices.
What doordash is doing is scraping restaurants' websites for prices, taking a temporary loss, then going to the restaurants saying, "We got all these orders, it's a win for both of us!" to sell the contact, then raising prices and tacking on extra fees, making money off the restaurants and the customers
Especially at the prices the bill comes out to be. I had a day years ago where my car was in the shop, so I used one of them to get lunch. A $10 sandwich ended up costing me $30, and some people do this every day. Fuck avocado toast (which is delicious), this is why people are broke.
I’m not sure the comparison is quite apt, I’m not familiar with any independent food delivery services beyond just asking your buddy to grab some snacks on the way over for a hangout or something.
But I am vaguely familiar with the idea of loss-leading and think its despicable. If no regulation is ever going stand in the way of practices, then knowing they’re being exploited by folks like pizza dude makes me feel a bit better, at least.
In some ways, loss leading can be done in more or less ethical ways. For instance, a small mom n pop hardware loss leading on lumbar or hammers and taking a reasonable profit on ten penny nails. Or something, maybe a better example is the Costco 1.50 all beef foot-long dog and soda but their memberships are reasonable profit for those who would go often enough and buy enough to make it worth it. It's late and I'm tired, I hope you get the general gist. But yes, doordash is just double-dipping on the sleazy. And maybe loss leading isn't ever acceptable, but I'm simply unaware/haven't thought of reasons that make it so. I'm willing to hear any argument against any of it, though.
That’s funny but I think Son is easily the dumbest billionaire. He’s also the bag-holder for the whole WeWork grift. Got more dollars than brain cells.
I mean, Jesus famously overcharged on delivery and transaction fees when feeding the masses with all that miraculously created bread and fish while also losing 13 billion dollars in the process, somehow, right?
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