MirthfulAlembic

I got sort of an inverse impression of Downton Abbey. For me, it was about inevitable change, since practically every single truth held by the most conservative characters is at some point bent or entirely overturned, often by themselves. Literally all of the gentry are huge hypocrites.

It also spends a good amount of time creating parallels in the lives of the different classes that, for me, underscored how there was nothing fundamentally special about the aristocracy besides their wealth. Wealth that they never earned and only held onto because a peasant Irish driver who banged their daughter forcibly removed their heads from their assess.

It just doesn't seek to accomplish all this by making the upper class into Disney villains, since that's rarely how people actually are. But I never got the impression the show was trying to say this is how things should have or had to have been.

Improper quesarito slander.

Speeders. The jaywalking fine in that jurisdiction was negligible because it hadn't been updated in like 100 years, so the cops probably didn't think it was worth their time for a $1 ticket.

You are correct in my opinion. I don't like how many people assume it's a green arrow or that you must go if able, but I wouldn't give it up.

None while I lived there, which was a few years. I had a close call once because people sped a lot, so the perceived distance wasn't always reliable. Cops camped out not far from the area sometimes because it was instant tickets as a result.

Yeah it's one of the most challenging parts. The process of getting therapy is not set up to be easy for the kind of people who need it. Availability is the most limiting factor these days, so if you don't get a good match, you could be stuck waiting months for another try. I got pretty lucky on my second try a few years ago, but my wife just gave up trying to find someone. It's hard to blame her.

A lot of America is made up of roads that most people would agree in isolation should only be crossed at designated/signaled areas. However, if your entire municipality is just made up of those roads and you don't prioritize crossing areas, pedestrians will naturally cross illegally.

I lived in an apartment building that had a parking lot across the street. The nearest crosswalk was a few minutes walk in either direction. The owner tried to petition the city to add a crosswalk, but the laws prohibited too many crosswalks regardless of the practical needs. He even offered to pay for it himself. So, you had tons of people who lived there crossing illegally.

How would a VPN have helped a dude who used the same handle for a porn forum and other sites he personally identified himself on?

I have a colleague who has been at my company in the US for over thirty years. As a result, she was grandfathered in for many major benefit changes, like keeping her pension and the old PTO system. The old PTO system (90s) added days every other year or something with no cap. So she's constantly on vacation with all her PTO. The most you can accrue for long service now is 4 weeks, and that takes decades in theory.

At-will has little to do with curbing union power. You are thinking of right to work laws.

At-will is, as you mentioned, the default that absent a contract either party can unilaterally terminate the employment relationship except for a reason explicitly prohibited by law, like due to being part of a protected class.

Right to work laws harm unions because they allow individuals in a workplace under union contract to opt out of paying union dues while still benefitting from the agreement, draining the union of resources so it cannot be effective in the future.

Seriously. You aren't really managing your employees if they have to organize resource shortages for you. At my job, I tell my colleagues to just take time off and, like me, list a few close co-workers as people to contact in case of emergencies in their OOO reply. Nothing is life-or-death, so people can deal with waiting. It's not like anyone is taking off months straight.

I'm not so sure about gas stations. It seems the government too often has to step in to fund remediation of the soil and safe disposal of the underground fuel tanks when they close. The gas stations never want to pay for the inevitable cleanup in advance because it would be too expensive.