OK, so now I halfway-hope the vigilantes that try to do this will end up facing criminal charges for it

But, I also halfway-expect cops and prosecutors to look the other way if the victims of this kind of crime ends up being the kind of people they’d be disproportionately policing and convicting anyhow

While on the one hand I can agree there’s a place and time to be present and participate appropriately, on the other hand it’s so goddamned tiring to see politics that in situations of nuance zoom in on ‘control them’ as a thing everyone can rally to as if the solution of phone control was really going to be simple and accomplish its objectives.

I mean, criminalizing drugs seemed on its face to be a simple-enough thing to do, and a good idea- who could object to that, right? Who favors addiction, right? What could go wrong? Fundamentally, the ask for enough power to ban anything isn’t a trivial ask, and it shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.

…thus showing that the “Law and Order” party was never about law, they just want a particular kind of order- that is, a hierarchy wherein people below them on the status-ladder know not to try to hold them accountable to anything, including the law or even plain decency.

To them, the law is the cudgel to keep the poors and plebes in their place- low in the order- never to be applied to them.

It’s not so bad once you’ve got your teeth into the problem

assuming you can code, that is

Fun fact: spreading conspiracy theories about the evils of fluoride in the water (it’s mind control! pollutes our precious bodily fluids!) was one of the talking points that crypto-fascists threw against the wall to see if it would stick- if you recall the line about your “precious bodily fluids” in Dr. Strangelove, that was a nod to that particular vein of conspiracy theory that was making the rounds in the far-loony fringes of what was then the Republican party

Legitimately, how do they fix this? Like what options are there?

When it’s a feature and not a bug, you don’t “fix” it, it is working exactly as planned.

In the first paragraph the article all but prompts the Fed to jack up interest rates, which makes borrowing money more expensive and when employers don’t borrow or spend on payroll, the result is more people lose jobs and when fewer people have money, in theory that should reduce upward demand pressure on consumer goods prices. In short, jacking up interest rates is the Fed’s way of prompting layoffs and wage cuts- by making working people poorer. They’ve been doing this very effectively to keep wages under control, so much so that even when ‘inflation’ like this is just price gouging it’s the first thing Wall Street wants to hear.

Of course, this ‘interest rates fight inflation’ mantra assumes that the inflation is really caused by too much money out there competing to buy too few goods and services, but when it’s the result of price collusion or just price gouging, it means prices for things went up and wages just went down. (and that in turn makes Wall Street fat and happy)

In the case of real estate, it’s been established that real estate commissions (and prices) have been inflated due to price collusion among realtor groups- in the case of rents, there is a lawsuit over price collusion driving rents up.

When it comes to gas prices, that’s less likely to be price gouging but it is very likely to be the consequence of supply/production decisions made with politics in mind, by people that probably stand to gain politically if voters vote against the incumbent.

When you have financial engineers overriding the decisions of mechanical engineers, you get crashy airplanes and eventually, caught up murdering people that might talk to investigators in order to defend those juicy profits

…sort of like how when administrators and insurance folk and lawyers and judges override the decisions of doctors and nurses, you end up with highly profitable hospitals and people dying for it

…all a bit like when the bean counters run your software company, layoffs designed to boost stock price by showing investors ‘fiscal discipline’ leaves your engineering teams shorthanded and forces them to de-prioritize bug fixes and dealing with technical debt and rigorous testing and you end up shipping lots of bugs when you release your product

Also it occurs to me that there are other factors that disqualify candidates from being president- the bit about being 35 or older means AOC can’t be president right now and the bit about being a natural-born citizen disqualifies Schwarzenegger and isn’t it interesting that the court hasn’t taken up the issue on how that denies voters their democratic rights? I mean, when you want to understand how to apply the constitution as it pertains to who may not serve in office, don’t you want to consider all the disqualifiers and their mechanisms?

If you’re under 35 or foreign-born, it doesn’t take an act of congress to bar you from office, those things are the law and already in the constitution with plain wording. A plain reading of sec 3 of the 14th amendment basically reads as if the authors of the amendment intended it to take an act of congress (with 2/3rds majorities, in both houses) to allow an insurrectionist that previously took an oath of office to serve again, but the court magically inverted that by asserting the only congress could invoke section 3

Nope, this is the court bending over backwards to deliver a political outcome

I’ve been watching the tech to make actual meat from cell lines emerge with some optimism- it promises to make it possible for us to have meat in our diets without all the greenhouse gases and feedlots and the like- but it also threatens to consolidate the protein industry into even fewer corporate hands if it’s not well-regulated.

The meat industry is honestly pretty awful (environmentally, politically, ethically, etc.) and I find myself rooting for the plucky young frankenmonsters that might come along and knock them down even though I’m pretty sure they’ll be worse if they’re not well regulated from the start.

This is where windfall taxes come back into basic utility. Also it becomes the basis for antitrust action on price collusion if all the sellers coordinate

…you really do need to be specific. Otherwise, it sounds like you’re claiming that “the production processes” (of what, everything? all products in the entire economy?) require PFOAs- and that’s plain bullshit.

Yes, there are some products for which there aren’t equivalent inputs, and you don’t need to be vague and generalize over all of productive everything in the economy in order to make that point- but given the opportunity to be specific, you specified “production of base chemicals that are used in various other follow-up products” and that’s not a straight or specific answer to a direct question.

there is no other material known to withstand the temperatures and pressures needed in the production processes?

Production of what, exactly?

Aaaaaaand in 3… 2… 1… abortion rights are about to become a bit more popular at the polls

While they’re at it, why not cap processing fees as junk fees? It for sure doesn’t cost 2.9% of your grocery bill to facilitate the payment- it’s all automated and there’s little to no labor involved in the actual processing, it’s just collecting economic rent

It’s so wild that the ‘but the people have democratic rights to choose among candidates’ crowd invoke that argument to make the candidate that’s promised to end democracy and rights one of the options they can vote for

You know, because democracy

One wonders what will happen to these schools’ accreditations, really.

I mean, if you’re teaching something you call history and you don’t teach students how to put the course content in its historical context and interrogate those sources critically, you’re not teaching them history, you’re indoctrinating them.

…tho to be fair, that’s honestly what passes for US History in most US schools. The more history I learn, the more I realize most of us aren’t taught

Yeah these are the same folks arguing that if the authors of sec 3 of the 14th amendment wanted to specifically prevent a former president that engaged in insurrection they would have, so we can conclude they didn’t want that. So, if they had every opportunity to write religion into the constitution and didn’t do it, what now?

Then when you notice that they specifically wrote in the first amendment the establishment clause- and then you realize that Jefferson explained its purpose to be creating a wall of separation between church and state, what now again?

I’m gonna go with: don’t send cops on welfare checks. Send somebody competent to respond to mental health challenges, preferably someone not wearing a police uniform (after all, at this point a lot of folks think “unaccountable killer” when they see that uniform and there’s honestly reason for that).

LOL McDonald’s hasn’t seen my shadow in 10 years at least