As the other poster pointed out, California, in fact, has one of the lowest felony theft thresholds out of any of the states. In fact, it has the 12th lowest felony threshold in the union. [1]
Of the top 15 states with the highest felony thresholds, only 4 of them are Democratic states. Two states are purple (but have voted red in the last election). So, it would seem Republicans states actually tend to have the highest felony threshold amounts across the US.
It was actually Oklahoma who started the trend to increase the felony threshold in the early 2000s.
Do you want to know which states have the highest felony theft thresholds? It’s Texas and Wisconsin at $2500. In 2014, California went from a threshold of $400 to $950. In 2015, Texas went from a threshold of $1500 to $2500, so California’s threshold has always been much lower even in the recent past. [2]
On top of that, California actually repealed parts of prop 47 in 2024.
I have a double yellow headed Amazon. He doesn’t seem too interested in other birds (not very interested in my sister’s dove or the wild parrots that fly over head). I’ve put on Blue Planet or YouTubes videos before and he likes to listen to the bird songs/talk, but seems more interested in the sound than the video.
My parrot is interested in my dog though and has picked up of few of my dog’s training commands. He started to say the release command for when my dog sits for his meals so now I get my parrot to use the command on cue, and get the bird to release the dog (and the dog gets dinner and he gets a treat).
If I’m giving attention to my dog, he sometimes wants to come and sit with us on the couch and get some pets himself. He also used to like to drop food for my older dog (who passed), but my younger dog isn’t a huge fan of vegetables so the bird stopped doing it. If my dog seems like he wants to go out the bird will say “you wanna go out?”But most of the time they kind of just ignore each other.
His language is very situational. When I uncover his cage in the morning, he says good morning, when I leave for work or to go out, he says goodbye. He makes water pouring sounds when I pour water, and call himself a good bird when he knows he’s done something good, or say ‘mmmm’ when I’ve given something he likes. He’ll say “wanna go out” when he wants out of his cage. He’s not overly loud for a parrot but does like to belt out some opera regularly.
He learned most of his phrases/words within his first 2-4 years, but I’ve had him for 6 now and he’ll add a new word/phrase into his vocabulary from time to time.
My bird also loves high protein and fatty foods (nuts and coconuts). I’ve never really allowed him to eat my food, but more recently he’s become interested in any food that I’m eating that he knows he’s allowed to have (nuts or popcorn etc), and will say “hello” over and over until I’ve gotten him his unsalted versions of them. I make him do tricks for them usually and that keeps him pretty polite about it. He’s a pretty big bird at 17”.
He used to be a lot more adventurous about food, but he knows what he likes now and usually sticks to his favorites. He also likes to dip each of his kibbles into his water before eating them.
I’ve never expected to get a parrot, but he sort of dropped in my lap and I rescued him. These parrots live as long as humans, so it’s quite the commitment. But he’s a very smart and sweet boi and he’s managed to charm his way into my life.
My African Grey (21m) also dips his kibble in the water. He's done it for at least the past two decades and changing his water is more frequently required than filling up his food bowl. It's interesting to hear your Amazon does it too. Perhaps it's just logical and "cereal without milk" is universally disliked.
My parrot is very particular about food, but will try most things. He likes his sweetcorn cooked, peas cooked, carrot uncooked, etc. He also drops dog food down to the dogs and watches the dogs eating it, and then likes to eat some of the dog food himself (the dog food is mixed with boiling water and cooled so that it is more soggy). He has also successfully trained a young budgie to copy him.
We try not to feed him too many fats. He has access to seeds all of the time, sometimes we put millet in the cage, and occasionally we break up peanuts for him. He is rather partial to a cashew, but they are very fatty. He's not a big bird and smaller birds have more trouble with fats.
He's about 1 year now and seems to be sexually mature, we're hoping we can get him to either do tricks or talk, but not sure about how to train him.
This is a bit reductionist. While I agree that there are some out of touch and terrible people in powerful positions in Hollywood, a ton of average working class people rely on Hollywood to make a living (i.e. catering, film crews, manufacturers, retail, etc).
It’s like saying that the entire tech industry should be destroyed and screw all the tech workers, they should all lose their jobs because Zuckerberg is an awful person.
I agree with you that Scientology is a criminal organization though.
I’m sorry, but this is a ridiculous take and you clearly have no actual insight into film crews (American or otherwise).
The standard work week for a union film crew in Los Angeles is 12 hours a day, 5 days a week. Often those days can stretch into 14-16 hour days. Crews regularly find themselves having to work a 6 or 7 day week and even holidays while on a project.
Without a union, crews would likely be working close to minimum wage for highly skilled and often physical and dangerous high pressure work. These jobs have almost no work life balance. The power imbalance between studios and their employees is massive, especially in regard to below the line crew.
The film crew’s union (IATSE) in one of its most recent contract negotiations, had to seriously fight to get workers a ten hour turn around- meaning that productions are now obligated to give film crews 10 hours off before having to be at work the next day. Studios and filming locations are often a 40min-1hr drive each way with LA traffic, so crews sometimes only get about 8 hours at home before they need to be at work the next day. That’s 8 hours to let the dog out, eat, shower and sleep before having to go to work the next day. And that’s only just a recent union win.
The union frequently has to fight the studios from clawing back healthcare and the members regularly accept very modest pay raises (3%) even during the last almost decade of high inflation. Only in the last contract was the crew able to get any sort of raise the reflected the rate of inflation but barely made up for decades of stagnant raises negotiated in the past.
To top that off, crews rarely actually get to see that full rate that is negotiated because studios have negotiated to exclude certain productions from the base rate. Instead, those exclusions get a discounted rate for below the line crew which many productions fall under (called roll back rates, which covers several tiers of movies, season 1 & 2, and it resets if the crew is replaced, streaming pays less into healthcare, etc, etc.)
Film crews in general (american and international) tend to be very hard workers. International crews don’t work any harder than American crews (I’m sure they work just as hard though), however their cost of living is much lower and the studios don’t have to pay healthcare because most countries that studios are filming in have low healthcare costs or some form of socialized healthcare. These countries that studios are bringing production to tend to have cheaper locations and often have huge tax incentives to draw in productions which overall has had a pretty big effect on the American film industry.
Crews make a very middle class salary in America but have to live in HCOL cities where the studios and filming hubs are. Many crew members really end up making a poor or lower middle class living because it’s an incredibly competitive industry and not always very stable work since crews are constantly needing to find the next job after their project has wrapped.
There are many reasons that productions are moving over seas. The union or the workers aren’t the problem here.
If it’s both brothers for that hourly rate, then that is only $50 an hour; and probably also has to cover expenses like business insurance, car insurance, gas, tools/equipment, car and equipment maintenance, certifications and contractors licenses, etc, etc.
And I’d bet their rate even has to take into account the time in their “off” hours when they are writing estimates, invoicing, communicating with clients, marketing, and so forth.
They don’t just clock out when they finish fixing your plumbing. Even at $100 each, it’s not pure profit. Running the business probably eats into a big chunk of their hourly rate.
Why link an article from a year ago, before the trial was even scheduled? You cherry picked one quote ignoring the rest of the article that actually answers a lot of questions your quoted expert asks.
<< “The bottom line is that it’s murky,” said Richard Hasen, an expert in election law and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles law school. “And the district attorney did not offer a detailed legal analysis as to how they can do this, how they can get around these potential hurdles. And it could potentially tie up the case for a long time.””
If you continue to read further in the article you linked then you would see that the DA had an answer to that:
<<“Bragg said the indictment doesn’t specify the potential underlying crimes because the law doesn’t require it.”
But beyond that, the DA did offer an explanation to how they could move forward with charging Trump:
<<“Falsifying business records can be charged as a misdemeanor, a lower-level crime that would not normally result in prison time. It rises to a felony — which carries up to four years behind bars — if there was an intent to commit or conceal a second crime. Bragg said his office routinely brings felony false business records cases.
In Trump’s case, Bragg said the phony business records were designed to cover up alleged state and federal election law violations. The $130,000 payment to Daniels exceeded the federal cap on campaign contributions, Bragg said. He also cited a New York election law that makes it a crime to promote a candidate by unlawful means.
“That is what this defendant did when he falsified business records in order to conceal unlawful efforts to promote his candidacy, and that is why we are here,” one of the case prosecutors, Chris Conroy, told the judge Tuesday.
Prosecutors, however, also alluded to another accusation involving tax law: that Trump’s scheme included a plan to mischaracterize the payments to Cohen as income to New York tax authorities.
“They did talk about tax crimes, and I think that could be potentially more compelling for the jury,” Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor, said on ABC News. “It’s a safer bet than the campaign finance crimes.”
Bragg is “going to bring in witnesses, he’s going to show a lot of documentary evidence to attempt to demonstrate that all these payments were in furtherance of the presidential campaign,” said Jerry H. Goldfeder, a veteran election lawyer in New York and the director of Fordham Law School’s Voting Rights and Democracy Project.”
> And they ignored the statute of limitations in order to bring these charges several years late.
Again, in the article you linked it explains how they were legally able to extend the statute of limitations for this case:
<<There were some extensions during the pandemic, and state law also can stop the clock when a potential defendant is continuously outside the state.
There are only 5 states with federally owned land over 50% (Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Alaska and Oregon). Other states west of the Mississippi don’t necessarily have a large percentage of federal land. For instance, Texas only has 1.78% that is federally owned, Arkansas at 9.38%, Oklahoma at 1.59%, Kansas at 0.52%, and the Dakotas at 3.91% and 5.41%. In fact, there are only ten states with over 30% of federally owned land in the Union, granted they are all in the Western part of the States.
This entire tirade is unhinged and filled with insane claims and trash science.
> giving premarital sex for free to a few select men
Is your problem with this that women are having sex? Or that they aren’t prostituting themselves? Or perhaps the problem that they aren’t having sex “with you”?
> Women are out of control. They can't control themselves, and refuse to be controlled by any man
Control themselves from what exactly? The examples you give are breaking up with/divorcing a spouse, getting cosmetic surgery and dying alone. The biggest problem you have with women, it seems, is that women are fully autonomous human beings.
> Every single woman I've dated has been clinically insane, cheating, and promiscuous beyond belief - first I thought I might be the problem, but then I saw the stats. It's everyone's problem, and women aren't going to fix it.
Stats? What stats?
> 90% of women are hopelessly addicted to hormonal birth control, stunting their sexual maturity.
Literally not possible. Are these the stats that you keep talking about?
> This entire tirade is unhinged and filled with insane claims and trash science.
Which claims are insane and trash science? Because I've looked these up. For example, I said that "Suicides at up 37% in 20 years, 80% male." and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention clearly lists [1] (Data Table: Suicide Rates) the rate was 10.4 per 100k people in 2000, and 14.1 per 100k in 2021. 14.1 divided by 10.4 gives 135.57, an increase of 35.57% in 21 years.
> Is your problem with this that women are having sex? Or that they aren’t prostituting themselves? Or perhaps the problem that they aren’t having sex “with you”?
The problem is that every sexual partner a women has decreases her odds of successful marriage. The Institute for Family Studies [2] (Figure 1) clearly shows a correlation between a woman's premarital sex count and her divorce rate. She literally loses the ability to pair bond.
Prostitution is a very strong word. What I mean by "free" is that they're not securing commitment before giving it up, and ending up with no commitment (marriage). Nice try with the ad hominem. The National Survey of Family Growth [3] lists the number of lifetime sexual partners for sexually experienced men at 6.3; I lost count around a dozen years ago so no, I'm definitely not "unhinged" because "I'm not getting any". Try again.
> Control themselves from what exactly? The examples you give are breaking up with/divorcing a spouse, getting cosmetic surgery and dying alone. The biggest problem you have with women, it seems, is that women are fully autonomous human beings.
Control themselves from spreading their legs without commitment. Control themselves from fleeting negative emotions. Control themselves from destroying families over social media propaganda. Control themselves from permanently mutilating their bodies for vanity.
If being a "fully autonomous human being" means "self-destructing to extinction" then yes, perhaps thinking that women are capable of being fully autonomous humans beings is indeed the grand mistake. No human being is fully autonomous. We are all halves of a whole, and part of larger society. Women seem hell-bent on denying all that, to everyone's detriment.
> Stats? What stats?
The UK Mental Health Foundation [4] finds that "Women between the ages of 16 and 24 are almost three times as likely (26%) to experience a common mental health issue as males of the same age".
The 2018 General Social Survey [5] noted that 28% of young men aged 18-29 did not have sex within the past year, while the corresponding stat for women was 18%. Meaning, more women are having sex with less men -> women are more promiscuous. This corroborates my personal experience in dating.
> Literally not possible. Are these the stats that you keep talking about?
The 2017 rate of birth control among women was 64.9% [6]. It has only gone up following the "sexual liberation" and "fuck around and find out" attitudes. Nearly all women I've dated had a hormonal birth control implant. I can't find conclusive and up-to-date numbers, maybe 90% is slightly high an estimate, but it seems realistic to me.
Nice try, try again. I've now staked my claims in excruciating detail. If you're trolling, nice job wasting my time looking all this up for the umpteenth time.
That was very kind of you, and I appreciate that you value life so much, no matter how small; but I’m going to say you are an extreme outlier.
Realistically, how many people would go to all that trouble to save an ant nest on land that they are building on? And that’s not mentioning how many ants probably died in the move or were left behind and died in the rebuilding of the foundation, even despite all the care you took.
I mean I think I'm a little different, but not completely unheard of. I'm sure if you gave people the option , the time and money, they'd do something similar.
And that’s not mentioning how many ants probably died in the move or were left behind and died in the rebuilding of the foundation, even despite all the care you took.
I don't know but I know enough to know that moving the food source away, removes the ant's, they'll go elsewhere to find food. Now imagine what having an IQ of 5000 and almost unlimited time..."The AI".
Of the top 15 states with the highest felony thresholds, only 4 of them are Democratic states. Two states are purple (but have voted red in the last election). So, it would seem Republicans states actually tend to have the highest felony threshold amounts across the US.
It was actually Oklahoma who started the trend to increase the felony threshold in the early 2000s.
Do you want to know which states have the highest felony theft thresholds? It’s Texas and Wisconsin at $2500. In 2014, California went from a threshold of $400 to $950. In 2015, Texas went from a threshold of $1500 to $2500, so California’s threshold has always been much lower even in the recent past. [2]
On top of that, California actually repealed parts of prop 47 in 2024.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/felony-thef... [2] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri...