No, that’s not how associations tend to work in the US. Very likely he came from an association in an adjacent field and is essentially the conduit to Leadership and in charge of executing their strategic plan and such. He is not paid by the companies is individuals directly he is paid by the association. If they don’t do well collectively he is probably out and would be working somewhere else potentially entirely unrelated.

In associations longtime professionals tend to work with the same sorts of groups, but very often their jobs and those of the Members are entirely unrelated and the specialization is more due to connections and being able to say you understand how to work with those sorts of people.

For example I have been working mostly with research scientists most of my career at at this point. I have no background in science, but I have a lot of contacts with people who work for scientific associations and I can say that I an very used to their personalities and have a record of success I can point at. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t go do a fine job for realtors or something since the jobs would be basically the same, but that I landed here and it’s the easiest fit at this point. K

Chances are that Mark Patterson is not a medical service provider. I am sure he is very well compensated, but he would be association staff, not industry.

This is undeniably good and I would like to see more. I would really like to see the federal government seriously look at the issues with power transmission and storage as those are the main hold ups in green energy right now and a lot of that is regulatory hurdles.

We could pretty easily hit all of our renewable goals in 5 years if power transmission projects didn’t constantly get bogged down in NIMBY lawsuits.

I am not saying that the apparatus of government should be used to run roughshod over people with concerns about this, but we cannot let individuals stop vital infrastructure projects.

The comment you are replying to was dickish, but this is a porous argument. In general the price of materials per cookie is going to be very low and an equivalent batch to what you would get in a box is still going to probably be around 15-20% of what you would pay at the store. Most cookie ingredients are shelf stable, most of them are very cheap, and you generally don’t need a lot of them with the vivid that you will already be ahead material wise for the next batch.

Honestly, if they are extracting a resource from public land for private gain they should be paying way more or buying that land at the market rate. No more corporate welfare.

I really wish Biden would take a harder line to get that under control. At the very least it’s aid that ought to be going to Ukraine which is instead being used for that disgusting mess.

The only justification I can think of is that it’s the only leverage we have over them and without it they would have no reason to be “restrained” at all. Even then I have my doubts.

Most of them don’t actually spend very much time in DC. A lot of them spend half the week back in their districts or more on average.

Yeah, I was trying to be careful with my comment not to imply the reason for secession was “states rights” since there are still plenty of idiots who are happy to bang that drum.

They didn’t secede because they were told to stop slavery. They seceded because it looked that the national consensus was moving against the expansion of slavery to new states and territories, which would have limited slave states overall power in the long run.

They were very explicit that they were leaving to protect slavery as an institution, but to be fair nobody in power was threatening to abolish it when they did so.

They have to get usable at some point, but I got tired of the (shitty off-brand) smart watch I had after a couple minutes. I replaced it with a fully analog Seiko watch and a fitness tracker ring.

Way easier to manage and still meets the needs addressed by the smart watch.

I think I have seen Central America referred to as a sub continent, but that doesn’t really make sense other than to create a formal differentiation between them and USA/Canada.

North America is a continent.

The one good thing that W did was the do not call registry, that worked for a while at least.

It’s the ring road that sounds Washington DC and it’s inner suburbs in Virginia and Maryland. The designation is 495 of you are really curious about the road itself for some reason.

Let’s not besmirch Blanche Deveroux’s good name here.

Also a Mazda 3 is not that small, neither is a Corolla.

I have a 2023 Tuscon and I love it. The car drives incredibly smoothly, the handling is amazing, I spend about $30 a month on gas total (hybrid), it practically drives itself on the highway, and its a super comfortable and spacious interior. That being said, I do wish it had more physical buttons on the console, I think they are going back to that in the future, but I can easily live with how it is now, I just dont really fiddle with things while I am driving.