Well, they’re separated by the Panama canal, so by the same token that Africa and Asia aren’t the same land mass, neither are the Americas.

Not the way their business works… I think that franchising is an innately predatory business model and in need of severe legal reform. Let’s not ask McD to do it, let’s make them

In this case, the franchisees (small business owners) are saying the big business (McDonalds, which makes its money off of real estate and franchise fees) is going to be fine but they (the people that make money from owning a restaurant) are in trouble.

For many of them, it’s true; they didn’t consider whether they could open this business if they had to pay a living wage. Unfortunately, that’s not our problem, but it won’t be a problem for McDonalds either.

For some of us at some times in our lives, having a relationship with two people is less work. It requires much more communication, better scheduling, and much more attention to your partners’ feelings … but that might be a good investment of time anyhow, and often gets overlooked.

I find that having multiple partners helps me appreciate each partner much more, for themselves – it’s easy to mix up how much you love just having a partner and being loved, with how you actually feel about that person. Poly gives you the distance and contrast to see your partners clearly, and that can be really special.

Yeah, this is my dynamic as well. My partner and I have been together for a decade and poly from the beginning. It’s not at all a secret, but people are so used to monogamy as a norm that they often just think our other partners are super close friends that hang out at our house a lot.

I’ve been in poly relationships most of my adult life, around 15 years now. I’m certainly familiar with the type of relationship you describe, but the long term, stable poly relationships are the ones that have been poly from the get go.

I don’t tend to date people who are “opening things up” in a previously monogamous relationship, because being someone’s learning experience is a bummer.

I’ve been in poly relationships for years. They work really well for me and my significant others, but we are pretty discreet about it because folks tend to be huge assholes about it.

Generally, you don’t see the poly relationships that work great; mostly, people see the type of scenario one of your other commenters described because the stable relationships are less visible.

We don’t! That’s the joy of it, just like people do, our algorithm will constantly waffle back and forth and argue with itself over whether these things are salads

I know, I was being humorous but it is in fact the way most categorization works. Very seldom is it a taxonomy; the way we recognize faces, voices, shapes, etc … it’s all probabilistic.

What we need is a salad categorizing multilayer neural network

So teeeeechnically, a salad is a dish composed of mixed ingredients. You could make the argument that you mix any two set of chopped ingredients and bingo bongo, it’s a salad.

However, I like to think that dishes’ ingredients aren’t a taxonomic thing, they’re a probabilistic thing. In other words, there’s no such thing as “not salad” or “salad”, only shades of saladness.

• Serve it cold? Ok it’s saladier

• It’s made up of chopped ingredients? Saladier still

• Those ingredients are mostly vegetables? Getting pretty saladish

• They’re mixed together? Even more salad like

• They’ve got some sort of dressing mixed in? Now it’s very likely a salad!

… and so on. To me, your SO’a dish has a pretty high Salad Probability^tm

The definition of what “good coffee” is vary from place to place. The northeast has absolutely phenomenal American style coffee (focus on drip coffee and long pours), a lot of Europeans are after a really good espresso for €1.5.

Am an executive… agree with you on all fronts

It’s potentially worse than useful and actively confusing.

Welcome to philosophy! I’d recommend reading Spinoza, he lays it out very intelligently.

It’s simultaneously a way of disproving the existence of God (he was kicked out of his Jewish community and hounded around Europe by the Catholics for his atheism), and a way of replacing it with the concept of the infinite / of the universe. Lends itself to meditation and contemplation, but not to any kind of religious dogma.

BTW, the concept has nothing to do with love, or the fundamental aspect of humanity, etc. It’s just infinite extension, which encompasses every aspect of humanity, and of everything else.

I have a more complicated answer these days than I used to… the short answer is “no,” but the caveats make it longer.

I don’t believe in a god in the sense of an all knowing human type being that has thoughts and wishes and passes down commandments – basically, not the religious kind of God.

At the same time, I appreciate a lot of the Jewish traditions I grew up with, and Judaism has a lot more lassitude around what “God” means to you. To me, it’s Baruch Spinoza’s conception of God … basically, just “the universe,” of which each person is an integral part.

So in a “college freshman on acid feeling one with the universe,” kind of way, sure I believe in God. In a, “He got upset I masturbated way,” then no, not at all.

I mean look, it’s cool that they’re doing this and all, and the idea or a trans Atlantic flight in 3 hours is neat for sure … but air travel is already really damn fast, could we focus on making it less shit in other ways?

• Can we get the carbon footprint down so it doesn’t contribute so much to the end of the world?

• Can we cut fuel costs significantly so it doesn’t have to be so miserably expensive?

I’ve got chestnut trees in my yard, but they’re Japanese chestnuts – yours might be, too.

My dad has been obsessed with this my whole life. The dude just really likes American chestnut trees.

He’s part of an advocacy organization that is testing blight resistant genetic hybrids, and planting chestnuts in their yards to preserve them in the meantime.

If you, too want to be obsessed with chestnut trees, I believe it’s tacf.org

The shareholders can go and buy a diversified portfolio on their own, by investing in many companies, so they can derisk their portfolio without conglomeration.

If they already own shares of the conglomerating company, its returns will be lower (they don’t care that it’s less risky; they’ve diversified already). Similarly, the returns of the company that is now becoming part of the conglomeration will likely be reduced, which negatively affects shareholders of that company.

The benefit is really only for the people whose prospects are deeply tied to this company, and only this company… its management employees, who are compensated by the company (often in the form of stock that they can’t sell till they leave, or that vests over a long time frame).

Thanks, now I have clinical depression