This is an administration that once had a man who, during a meeting about deportations attended by department lawyers, in response to what would be done if the courts rejected their rationale, said "Fuck the courts."
This man is no longer part of the administration. But not because he was fired for this blatant disregard for the judicial branch. It's because he was nominated to be a judge (and the Senate confirmed him).
Not only that, but it's a dead end for societal policy. Even if a person actually believed parents deserve the most blame for kids' educational outcomes, that person should recognize there's no real way to influence this (short of dystopic levels of forcing kids into foster care). They would then find the second most blame-worthy cause to fix.
I listened to an interview with one of the article's authors, and she said the reason non-violent protests defeat a state willing to order violent crackdowns is because the soldiers performing those crackdowns are regular people. They are not the people who most benefit from an authoritarian state. So when they find themselves being told to beat up or shoot a nun sitting in the street, there's a good chance the soldier would defect.
Here in Pennsylvania, the minimum wage is still $7.25/hour, but the Burger King near me is paying $11.96/hour for new "team members." Every fast food place and gas station around here started paying over $10/hour and often $15/hour for new hires during COVID. Retirees earning some extra cash made up a good number of their staff before that, but I rarely see them anymore. I guess they quit to stay safe and have since adjusted to their new budgets. That plus the tight labor market following COVID meant competition for employees was fierce.
>It's gotten so bad I just don't eat out nearly as much, which is probably just accelerating the downward spiral.
I've also noticed a quality drop in almost every aspect of fast food here: slower service, more mistakes, higher prices, shorter hours. It's like the owners are trying to inch more into cutting costs without going over the edge and losing too many customers. Personally, if I want something "familiar" while traveling, I now do take-out from a steakhouse chain. Only costs a small amount more, but accuracy and quality are so much better. At home, fast food is just too expensive to make sense.
>"*RETIREES* earning some extra cash made up a good number of their staff before that
Are you sure they were retired? Almost every senior citizen I've spoken to in service jobs has told me that they're hired there because it's the only job that would take them - and they didn't get to see retirement.
Every set will introduce two or three new mechanics. Some of the cards from that set will be entirely based around those mechanics (for example, Vehicles as artifacts that become creatures when "crewed" by other creatures). Many cards will be staples needed in every set with a new mechanic attached (e.g., "Target creature gets +2/+2 and gains X until end of turn"). Also, sometimes mechanics are tweaks and improvements to old ones that didn't pan out well.
I listen to the lead designer's (Mark Rosewater) Drive to Work podcast. He's worked for MTG as a contractor or employee since the mid 90s. He's mentioned this problem a couple times. His solutions: (1) See MTG as a basic rules system for playing different kinds of games. Makes sense, considering it has multiple win conditions and methods of achieving them. (2) With each set, focus on a theme and dive as deep as you can. There's been a "World's Fair steampunk" set, a titanic Lovecraftian monsters set, a Greek mythology set.
Did he ever mentioned the impact of AI on the game? Part of the fun back then was to craft a deck, tweak it, play test it etc etc. Nowadays kids would just ask chatgpt to do this instead?
People have been 'netdecking' (constructing powerful decks by assembling a list from off the internet) since long before this recent AI kick.
My favorite way to play is in a draft or other limited event where decks are constructed on the spot from freshly opened product and all players are on a pretty equal footing.
I'm no international poverty economist, but I imagine lower income relative to neighboring countries would still have some effect. For instance, if a poor country suffers a famine in its staple crop, can that government and its citizens afford to import food?
That might have been sampling bias. If they were hired and not fired quickly, they had probably already passed some test for critical thinking. This is like testing whether familial wealth affects SAT scores by comparing the results of rich and poor kids at MIT.
