The issue here is the police having anything to do with digital forensics…this should have been outsourced to a group that knows how to detect these things and not some cop that barely knows the traffic laws in his own state.
In my experience ops don’t know shit. It’s all about “gut feelings”. "Well “his feels illegal so I’m gonna arrest them and if I’m wrong I get to sit at my desk all day or go on a paid vacation” is how it is.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been stopped by cops for riding my bicycle on the road. Literally to the point where I have a laminated card I keep in my wallet with the relevant laws saying “this bike is illegal on a sidewalk and cars must give way on the road”
I’ve had a few threaten to arrest me “for being a piece of shit” or “for wasting my time” like I’m the one who made them stop…
I’ve been stopped because I “fit a description” multiple times, the “description” being “man on a bike” with nothing else, supposedly.
I’ve been stopped for speeding in a school zone before, and if it wouldn’t have been a waste of time, I’d have let it go to court and showed my helmet camera video that clearly shows my phone GPS as well as cycling computer (glorified speedometer) readout that clearly shows I was well under 25. Granted I’ve gone 49 in a 45 for about 3 seconds before I realized one rock and I’m dead and slowed down, there’s 0 chance of me speeding past 20 on flat ground unless I’m trying to set a personal best.
I’ve been stopped for “being a road hazard”, not having enough reflective things, having “too many lights” (one forward flasher, one steady, and one rear/one steady rear light), not signaling “and hand signals don’t count anymore” lol OK…
Pretty much whatever they feel like stopping you for, they’ll stop you and come up with a half-assed excuse later. They don’t know the laws they enforce, and if they did, they would be considered a liability to other cops and quickly be ejected.
Actually, I was assuming more people have heard the joke “more astronauts have come from Ohio because they’re fleeing the state” more than assuming “this person is American”
But yeah, Ohio. People meme on it being boring and full of cow farms and corn fields for a reason.
Also occasionally our rivers catch on fire and trains get a bit tipsy.
It’s funny you say that, because I turned a good bit of my right side into what looked like hamburger by flipping my bike on a pothole.
There’s a running joke (probably in every state, but I’ve mostly heard it in relation to Ohio) that the state flower is a traffic cone, and the state tree are the big orange barrels. Brand new roads get ripped up every winter because plows and road salt aren’t good for… Well, anything except cars. And they’re not even goor for cars long term.
Good gravy. Glad I live in Seattle. They are finally make a few physically separated bike lanes instead of just painting a bike symbol on the side of the road.
As someone in the more rural bits, I’ve ridden my bike on 2 lane non marked roads a few times - however, the amount of social media complaining in my town is absolutely appealing when it comes to cars. People complaining about speeding, then complaining about people going 2mph under the speed limit. I do my best to stick to trails or sidewalks because if you happen to inconvenience anyone - they might make it a point for you to have a bad day. And that’s sad.
Hell, the supreme court codified “gut feeling” into fucking law.
I can’t remember the name of the case, but it was referenced in “Talking to Strangers” by Malcolm Gladwell. A guy was pulled over because the cop believed the lens to his taillight was cracked, which led to an arrest on drug possession charges. Turns out, the state that they were in didn’t have a law about ‘cracked lenses’, but the cop thought they did. Our fucked up SC upheld the probable cause, the resulting search and seizure, and all the rest of the fruit of the poisonous tree by saying: "that the officer thought the activity was illegal was enough basis for a probable cause stop.
I’ve always thought it was nuts that cyclists are told not to use sidewalks. If a cyclist hits a pedestrian on a sidewalk, it sucks but it isn’t that big of a thing. Comparatively, if a car hits a cyclist on the road, then the damage to human health can be far worse. So why put the cyclist in that situation if a sidewalk exists?
On-scene stuff is a bit different. You're not doing the actual analytics on scene if you can help it, you're obtaining the evidence. Of course that still needs specialist training, you can't simply copy and paste shit, but it's very different to what goes on in the forensic lab.
Yeah absolutely. We’re on the same page. Just pointing out that they’re slowly rolling more tech out to the knuckle draggers which can be concerning if not done properly (and a lot of the time it isn’t).
Indeed. I'd say the on-site guys really need training. Beyond working directly on the master image and writing to it or reporting false findings, there isn't as much that can be irrevocably fucked up in the analytics room.
Acquisition is a whole different story. One seemingly small fuck up and the evidence is toast.
The BIs are usually who handle this stuff, but it sounds like this never was sent up to the state investigation units. This literally sounds like bob came off patrol and said “heard about them deepfakes must be one of them”
This sucks but it is a hard lesson about dealing with large companies. If any company wants anything that doesn’t comes off the shelf of the store, they have to pay upfront. Pay has to be by a certain amount of days in advance of delivery date or the date is not guaranteed and will be late. Work doesn’t start until payment is done. If they want to pay after delivery, sign a contract, require an advance of at least half of the bill or materials cost (whichever is highest), non-refundable, include a cancellation fee. Put this shit up as terms of service on a website and direct everyone to that page whenever you are contacted by a new client. The larger the client company, the more important it is to be this strict. For you it might be a bankruptcy inducing amount, but to them it will be immaterial pocket change, so you have to hold your ground.
I was a small business owner in this same situation. I got a contract, I got partial payment up front, then they reneged upon my finishing the job and asking for the rest of the payment. They said they’d pay me 10% of what they owe, AND demanded additional services for free. I took my contract to a bunch of lawyers, all who said the same thing “They’re too rich to sue. They will delay, stall, and after years, even if you won, they still probably won’t pay.” What they owed me, they bragged about paying every time they flew their private jet. They could easily have paid, but instead they decided to destroy me and my company.
This isn’t something the small business owner can protect against. To the rich, none of us or our laws matter.
The partial payment wasn’t large enough if it left you wrecked at the end. Generally the partial payment should pre-pay to cover all of your expenses and labor. The final payment is the profit margin. That way you are never on the hook for a potential loss and will always break even.
So for the bakery, they should have had a full prepay policy on all special orders. Even if “customers” walked away because of the policy.
This is why small claims exists. $7500 and THEY have to prove they DON’T owe it. If they don’t show up, you win summary judgement. That should cover most things and even if it doesn’t, it will all least soothe the wound.
They wracked up a bill of over $100k, and then forced me to take $11k after demanding more free services. The service they demanded I wasn’t able to do and told them this. They didn’t care, so I did what they told me to do, which ended up damaging the product (because I couldn’t fucking do it and told them this). I gave them their product, they gave me the $11k blood money, then they turned around and sued me for $75k for damaging the product (in the fashion they demanded) of which I was forced to pay $25k. This took all my funds, and I had to sell everything.
Oh yeah, and the only lawyer that would represent me, ended up being best friends with the billionaire who was suing me. He didn’t tell me this until after I payed him his $10k lawyer fee, and after he got me a “great deal” of only having to pay $25k to this bloodsucking POS trumper billionaire.
When I say you don’t matter to a rich person, know it’s literally the truth.
Where we failed is that $120k was supposed to be a middle-class income when living costs this much. The fact the median is 63k is a sign that all the excess value has been sucked out of the masses and funneled into the coffers of the billionaire class.
It’s both. If the price of homes aren’t reflecting an affordable price, you have to ask, who’s buying them? It’s not the average family - it’s corps sucking up homes as investment assets, driving up prices to sell to each other and the “lucky” family or two that get to empty out their retirement fund just to have a place to live. That’s not reflective of a natural, reasonable increase. That’s the result of hedge funds destroying the housing market for the rest of us, just to pad their bank accounts.
That may be true in some of the lower priced Midwestern markets, but I sell real estate in Boston and I don’t see big corporate interests in the single family or owner occupied 2-3 family market. as much as big corporations have ruined a lot of things in this country, I don’t think we Dan just wave our hands and say “corporate buyers” and explain away our housing market problems.
We have a confluence of decades of exclusionary zoning and restrictions on building that make meaningfully adding to the supply of housing almost impossible. We have a huge deficit of qualified workers in the building trades, in part because all the work dried up after the great recession and people left the field and in part because we’ve pushed more and more kids to go to college. We have a mortgage system that’s nearly unique worldwide that allows homeowners tremendous advantages in keeping their housing costs low, but inversely provides tremendous disadvantages to having them move around more often and free up housing stock (so lots of aging singles and couples in big houses better suited for young people with kids). We have a society that’s bizarrely fixated on single family living even though we desperately need more density in most markets. And we have the problem of wage stagnation. None of those things are directly attributable to corporate ownership of large numbers of houses.
I’d love for there to be some silver bullet where we could just say “disincentivize corporations from owning small housing stock” and solve the problem, but it’s nowhere near that simple.
You’re right, it’s more complicated than just blaming corps, and I don’t want to imply an issue this complicated could be completely solved with one change. They’re definitely exacerbating the issues we already have, though, and dealing with them could only help.
In the late 70s around 23% of US corporate revenues went to pay salaries. By 2012 that had fallen to 7% - in other words, just before neoliberalism really took off almost 1/4 of the money workers spent buying goods from US companies was almost directly back in workers’ pockets, whilst by 2012 less that 1/14 of what workers spent buying goods from US companies ended back in workers’ pockets.
All that excess money that doesn’t get recycled back to workers anymore has got to be pooling somewhere.
I read it ages ago when I was still frequenting a certain finance discussion forum (whose name totally evades me now, and I did just try looking up such forums but failed to find it) back in the post 2008 Crash years, hence why the end date in that statistic is 2012.
This is the best I found on the subject. Note that the numbers are quite different from the statistic I quoted since they’re not the same thing (it’s about labour share of income in the whole Economy, rather than the corporate labour to revenue ratio) but you can see the very same trend I mentioned in this report and what’s used there is almost certainly a better statistic to get an overall view of what’s going on.
a certain finance discussion forum (whose name totally evades me now…)
I used to frequent a few finance forums too; maybe I can help. Was it a personal finance/FIRE forum (e.g. bogleheads.org, forum.mrmoneymustache.com, etc.), or some other kind?
Nah, it started as a forum made by an ex-edge fund guy which in the beginning had quite a lot of people over there with a background in Investment Banking like me, but it kept getting more and more american goldbugs and preppers and was eventually swamped by simpleton Libertarian politics.
The problem is you need to be a couple to have a house.
In the 80s and even 90s the mother of the house probably didn’t work. I know mine didn’t. Now they have to. The prices have gone up to match this “new normal” because there simply aren’t enough houses. Or at least not enough houses in the places people want to live.
The free markets have settled on the idea that a house should cost two incomes. The government needs to step in to build affordable homes and get them into the right hands. No landlords scoffing them all up.
But there have been an absolutely breathtaking number of death row cases that have been overturned due to new evidence that had exonerated the condemned.
It seems pretty clear that the state is doing a very crappy job of determining guilt, and therefore shouldn’t be handing down such a permanent sentence.
My wife is a detective and deals with a lot of suicides. Use of nitrogen or helium are the new go to for folks that wanna go peacefully. That’s why the party balloon helium tanks have 10% o2 in them now. They were a popular, cheap method sadly. The human body doesn’t give two shits whether it’s breathing a 80% nitrogen/20% oxygen, or 100% nitrogen. All it needs is something that can displace the co2 in your blood. Nitrogen works just as well as o2 for this. It’s when the body can’t exhaust co2 that it goes into asphyxiation. If you were having problems breathing, you were breathing the wrong stuff. It’s biology, yo.
Years ago when I was in a bad place in life I attempted suicide using a tank of nitrogen and an oven bag. Thankfully I was stupid as hell and didn’t tie the bag properly or something. So when I passed out the bag managed to come off somehow. Still not entirely sure how it happened but either way I’m thankful it did and I managed to survive for better days.
Anyways, Im telling you this to let you know I can very much confirm that breathing nitrogen is painless and was no different than regular breathing.
Your body only starts the alarm bells when it can’t exchange out the co2 in your lungs. It can’t really tell the difference between pure nitrogen and some other gases coming in vs the optimal mixture we need to breath. So the alarms never really go off. There’s more to the science behind it, but it’s kind of a glaring flaw evolution left in our bodys survival system that can be taken advantage of including for use in anesthetic.
Yeah sort of. At first I started feeling very drunk, but not like normal drunk. I can’t really think of good analogy other than it was like half way in between drunk and a small amount of anesthetic maybe?
It was this slow dip into unconscious, it wasn’t like sleeping where I’m vaguely aware of the passage of time. But it wasn’t the instant knock out of anesthetic or normal unconscious either. It was like lowering myself into a pool if that make sense. Wasn’t a bad feeling, just kind of different. Had an awful migraine that lasted a couple of days afterwards though.
Thanks I’m extremely happy everday with my failure! Lol
I’ve been in a high altitude simulation chamber to experience hypoxia after rapid decompression. 💯 didn’t give a fuck, was a bit giddy, and if left there long enough with dwindling oxygen would have for sure died. No problem taking a breath.
haha I can’t remember if we were doing cards like that or not. I remember having to answer questions writing them down on a form. Between the handwriting and the answers themselves it was hilarious; and of course educational. It was for certification to do high altitude jumps. you can bet your ass I made sure I was on oxygen per regs every time. No forgetting to pull the cord for me thank you very much.
I have, sort of. I’ve worked HazMat most of my life. One of the jobs I had years ago involved neutralizing a large pit of acid. It was just a huge pit in the ground with a roof over it. From the outside, it just looked like someone had pulled the roof off of a house and set on the ground. There were only two openings, one at either end, so it was completely enclosed. The method here was to send the two youngest (and therefore invincible) guys into the pit with acid suits and full faced respirators, with buckets of soda ash, we walk around in it and stirred it up while we sprinkled the ash around. Safety standards back then were not what they are today. Anyway, the people in charge realized that there would be a reaction with gases betting released, hence the respirators, but no one considered the possibility that the gases might be heavier than oxygen. Which they were. We didn’t know what kind of acid it was but this was an old fertilizer plant, so probably nitric. Which means the gas was most likely nitrogen. Whatever the case, we got into trouble when we realized that we were both getting rather lightheaded. We tried to leave, but the only way out was up a ladder and by the time we got to it the other guy, we’ll call him Rick, could only get about half way up before he just couldn’t move anymore, which left me leaning on the ladder at the bottom, completely unable to help, as I was in the same state. Luckily, our foreman was a lunatic and he jumped in and pulled us out. You are absolutely not supposed to do that because you are just as likely to end up in the same trouble as the guys you’re trying to save.
The experience with the gas was not unpleasant. I should have been terrified, but was mostly just mildly concerned. The only real effects I remember feeling are the lightheadedness and being really sleepy.
Nitrogen hypoxia is a risk wherever liquid nitrogen is used. If too much boils too fast, it will displace the oxygen in the room. People in the room won’t even realize what happened until they pass out and die shortly thereafter.
There are reports of people rushing in to rescue those who passed out, and suddenly passing out themselves and needing to be rescued as well. That’s how insidious it is. And that’s why MRI scanners (which use liquid nitrogen) have oxygen sensors in the room. You can’t trust your own body to tell you that all the oxygen is gone.
They are cooled by liquid helium, but also have a liquid nitrogen outer dewar as well with a vacuum insulator in between. The N2 takes the brunt of the ambient heat so you don’t have to top off the (much more expensive) helium as often.
(CW - shows pig putting its head into a box filled with inert gas to eat food. The pig falls over, regains consciousness, then immediately places its head back into the box to continue eating)
I’m willing to bet what you inhaled was carbon dioxide – that gives an instant feeling of suffocation. Which ironically makes it one of the safer asphyxiant gasses, as it’s heavier than air and you can detect it’s presence instantly. Inert (“noble”) gasses like helium, argon, and nitrogen don’t have that effect.
CO2 is also cheap, readily available, non-toxic, and doesn’t cause physical damage. This makes CO2 asphyxiation somewhat popular for “stunning” or killing in places like slaughterhouses, labs working with smaller animals, or “feeder” animals for reptiles.
It’s also cheaper to keep people in jail forever than put them to death because of all the appeals. And despite being more careful, we still get it wrong.
Also, in my mind, death is a release. Keep those fuckers stuck in their filty meat suits while they rot in prison for the rest of their lives with no hope for escape. The especially heinous ones will get extra comeuppance from the other inmates
This is what changed my mind on the death penalty. I have no problem putting a murderer or pedo to death, but we keep freeing people when new evidence is found that proves their innocents. Until we can get it right 100% of the time, we should just lock them up until death.
I would argue that we need the death penalty as a way to protect society from the absolutely most dangerous criminals but it’s very frequently misapplied. I would say, for instance, that people that are serial killers, or serial rapists (or serial child molesters), people for whom there is no significant doubt that they’re guilty, and people that will reoffend if they ever manage to get out of prison, should be executed. A simple murder for hire, or a robbery? No. Ed Kemper? Absolutely.
I think that even life sentences with no parole are overused; most people can be rehabilitated and returned to society safely, if we were willing to dramatically overhaul our criminal justice system to not be based on punishment and retribution. (But if we did that, then how would we get free prison labor…? /s)
All of western Europe has abolished the death oenalty completely. Many of these are countries with very low rates of serious crime.
Meanwhile countries with the death penalty, but usually also very long prison sentences and high rates of incarcerations like the US are pretty bad with crime.
It is impossible to justifiy the death penalty empirically. The statistics actually indicate that the death penalty is linked to more crime.
Also the problem is, that clear cut beyond a doubt is what every judge who sentences someone to death, will claim about the case. Yet there is hundreds of cases in the US alone, where people were later exonerated. Some only after they have been murdered by the state already. There is nothing to gain, but a lot to loose with an execution. It cannot be overruled anymore.
The statistics actually indicate that the death penalty is linked to more crime.
Correlation =/= causation. C’mon, you know better than this. It’s more probable that they have lower crime to begin with. Serial killers are not uniquely American by any stretch of the imagination, but they are quite uncommon relative to the population in other developed countries.
Read what I wrote again. I’m advocating for the death penalty in very, very limited cases, where there is no significant doubt at all, where there is no reasonable or even unreasonable belief that an offender can be rehabilitated, and the offender is extremely likely to harm more people if they ever have the opportunity.
Thats why i said indicate not “proof”. But again you say no significant doubt at all. But that is always the case of the people making the decision. For them there is no doubt, yet there is regularly wrong decisions.
Would you then claim that there was any significant doubt as to the guilt of John Gacy, Theodore Bundy, Edmund Kemper, Gary Ridgeway, John Geoghan, et al.? Would you agree that they would have all posed a significant risk of future harms had they managed to escape?
No proof is 100% absolute; there is always the possibility of some error. Video evidence? Could be tampered with. Eyewitnesses? Memory is fallible. DNA? Must be from someone with near identical DNA. Confession? Those are very frequently coerced (and, seriously, confessions are a pretty terrible way of determining guilt, esp. when there’s no forensic or corroborating evidence). 29 bodies or people you were last seen with found in the crawlspace of your home with your DNA and fingerprints on them? Pure coincidence, it’s too good to be true, must be planted.
Given that it’s impossible to know a thing with absolute certainty, how good does the evidence have to be before you would admit that there was not a significant chance of a false positive?
Can’t know if you don’t try. Some artists have come out and said they had these urges and art is the thing anchoring them enough to keep them from doing heinous things.
…And there’s your key. Moreover, they think that art keeps them from doing it; they have no way of experimentally knowing whether or not they’d do those things in the absence of art. It seems more likely that art is their excuse and that, in the absence of art, they would find anothe,r different reason to avoid committing atrocities.
There’s a distinction between wanting to do a thing, and actually doing the thing.
Prisons (at least in the US) have never been about prisoners and their reform. It’s about how much money they can bring in from the state and practically free labor. Like most things in the US it is driving by profit margins.
Eh, no. We had prisons before we used prisons as a stand-in for chattel slavery. OTOH, we used to kill a lot more people for much less severe offenses, so people didn’t usually end up in jails for very long. And there was a period of time where we believed in reform, but that was well over 100 years ago now.
Yeah this is one reason why I generally don’t support the death penalty. There’s no way to undo it. At least if evidence exonerates someone 50 years later, they’re still alive.
I know that COVID isn’t regarded to be a serious disease if you’re vaccinated and reasonably healthy, but I had mental fogginess for about 2 months after my infection.
I mostly seemed outwardly okay during that time, but it was a tremendous effort to just do the bare minimum.
I hope he ducks out if there’s even a fraction of those types of symptoms.
Look, we all know Biden is basically a bajillion years old. Trump, on the other hand, is so young that he hasn’t even been born yet.
It’s crazy to put into perspective what a small blip all this is compared to the age of the earth, which has existed since the beginning of existence and will continue until the end of time.
Even our infinite and immeasurable planet is nothing when you compare it to the solar system, which contains everything that’s ever existed ever.
Same happened to my wife. Had long haul covid and now has a very hard time learning new things and retaining information for short periods. It’s been hard but she has learned to use better note Tekkno and task management apps to help.
Paxlovid isn’t just for hospitals, and for a time it was available for free with any insurance and the barest “medical need.” I got COVID in 2023 and got Paxlovid just by asking the doctor nicely.
(And despite that, my symptoms were awful and it took two months to fully recover. )
My experience has been that the antivirals are pretty easy to get just for a regular case. If you catch it, don’t assume you can’t get them. But do contact your doctor early, as there is a time window. Better to get on them early when you’re not feeling that badly than wait until you think you’re sick enough to justify it.
You don’t need to be hospitalized to get all the antivirals. In fact, that’s the whole thing paxlovid is supposed to prevent. Anyone with risk factors can take paxlovid, and it’s very effective at preventing severe covid. It should be started as soon as possible, not waiting until someone’s already hospitalized. Even in unvaccinated people, if taken early in the course, is 90% effective at preventing severe disease.
Remdesivir is the one that’s generally only for hospitalized patients, though even that can be used pre hospital too.
Anyways point is, if you get covid, and have risk factors for severe covid, call your doctor or urgent care to get paxlovid to take if you can, especially if you’re unvaccinated.
And yeah between getting diagnosed quickly, getting paxlovid I’m sure, and being immunized, Biden will very likely be fine.
And to add on “risk factors” is incredibly broad. Being overweight or having some very common diseases counts. And that’s only if the prescribing medical professional is being a stickler.
I took Paxlovid when I got COVID. Started taking it the day I tested positive. Worked great initially - I was very tired for around a week, sleeping for most of the first two days, but didn’t feel completely terrible.
However, a day or two after I had finished taking it, the symptoms came back much worse and I was pretty sick for another week and a half. Apparently rebound/recurrence of symptoms happens in around one in five people that take Paxlovid.
I know that COVID isn’t regarded to be a serious disease if you’re vaccinated and reasonably healthy
Bruh…
At 81 years old, life is a serious medical condition.
People of that age die of “little” shit all the time.
And remember he’s saying he just tested positive, it’s not why he’s been like this for at least the last year it’s that he’s going to be even worse through the election.
This is the thing with old age that I think most people won’t understand until it happens to them. The body’s ability to deal with those things severely deteriorates with age. You can be peppy and active one day, and on death’s door the next. COVID has proven to be particularly bad for the elderly, but every “minor” ailment or injury is much more serious, and possibly life threatening given the wrong mix of complications. Biden has probably the best chance being in the position he is, and testing positive isn’t the same as being symptomatic, but he’s by no means free and clear. It’ll be interesting to see how this turns out.
I didn’t get the mental fogginess but even so, I really haven’t ever felt that I fully recovered. I used to be an Ironman when it came to getting sick but now it’s like I get knocked down every few weeks with some flu-like symptoms.
Don’t downvote him, it’s entirely possible. However, it was more sudden of a change than I equate to aging. I know all the other effects, those are more subtle
That happened to me. I got COVID pre-vaccine, and for years after that I got every bug going, including multiple COVID infections. After time this seems to have passed. I have now gone one year without COVID, which is a miracle. I feel like my first infection buggered up my immune system. I think I have finally recovered now. I wish you the best of luck.
I have two young, vaccinated and otherwise healthy family members who lost their ability to work or even walk for more than 100m outside their house for 6+ months. Covid can be extremely serious even now.
I’m 42, vaxxed, and what passes for reasonably healthy in the US (which is to say, all kinds of fucked but still technically able to work). I had covid this week and at the peak I actually needed help standing up after kneeling to rummage through a drawer.
It also exacerbates mental decline in elderly patients. You can also lose 3-9 IQ points with each infection. It stays in the brain for long after the initial infection and disrupts the brain-blood-barrier. It’s honestly (still) pretty scary: www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2400189
I know that COVID isn’t regarded to be a serious disease
Generally by capitalists who want their workforce to keep making them money.
By the millions who actually get it and are left chronically ill (or who don’t survive at all), many who aren’t “reasonably healthy” yet don’t deserve any less consideration - not so much.
I don’t think vote to obscurity can apply here. Trump will always have a platform because he is a living engagement machine and that drives the Internet mad. He wins he’s the top story, he loses he’s the top story, he gets convicted he’s the top story. The man is immortal in the worst way possible and the world is basically f*cked.
Nah, this is just want Trumpers want you to believe. He gets attention because he’s genuinely trying to foment a fascist overthrow of the government, not because he’s some media mastermind.
This is the one possible scenario that could make things even worse. They can’t replace the head of the snake, but they can sure as fuck pump that the head was shot and injured. They did the same with Hitler.
History is repeating itself far to close for this to be comfortable.
Can’t say that’s necessarily true (that last bit). They are sworn in to duty to protect current or past president’s with their life, regardless of personal belief.
My perspective is that the secret service guys are bound to life.
I recalled hearing a couple things over the course of the Jan 6th impeachment hearings, which is the President has some say in who his personal detail is, and that there was some info pertaining to them being supportive of him personally. I’d have to review to be certain though.
I know a couple current and former USSS agents, they’re hardcore trump supporters. That’s not to say they all are as I don’t know them all, but they are law enforcement after all.
if we get a video showing something changing on his face before he touches it or falls to the ground, I think that would rule out false flag, or at least they would have had to actually shoot something at him to do that.
Those that were going to stay home because he’s a rapist with 34 felonies will still stay home. This means nothing unless it comes out that it was a planned stunt, then he loses whatever credibility he had. Wait, never mind, he has zero credibility so his cult won’t give two shits and will continue to do and think whatever fox “news” tells them to do.
Trump lost the popular vote to Clinton by 2.9 million votes. He lost to Biden by 8.8 million votes. The last Republican president to win the popular vote was George W. Bush.
It’s a Republican’s best friend, the Electoral college. More people want progressive candidates, not regressive backwards criminals.
He was elected by the minority of the population, and with the help of a Senate that represents a minority of the population, appointed a third of the Supreme Court.
With a more representative electoral system (like Ranked Choice voting) Republicans would be free to place a more moderate candidate as their first vote, assured in the knowledge that their vote would still count against the people they don’t want in office.
In the short term, I am expecting right-wing nutjobs to do their own sort of retaliatory shootings, targeting whomever their personal info bubble blames as a group.
Further violence and a mild Civil War are not best case scenario. Queer people dying for your cause is not best case scenario.
Best case scenario (and what seems to be the alt theory on literally every social I have, and on some I don’t have), is that everyone believes this was a false flag (and/or there’s evidence it was a false flag). That fact that so many people IMMEDIATELY questioned the shooting is a really good sign. People just don’t trust him at all. Boy Who Cried Wolf etc
Nobody is changing their vote over this shit. Democrats are pretty entrenched in not Trump. They knew what was at stake this election as soon as Trump stepped back up.
@captainlezbian, Trump can reach any height with his totally accurately reported 6’3" 215lb frame!
@echodot, Trump could easily wrench open any box you can imagine with his 100% for real large-man hands that are not even anything like a tiny baby’s at all!
He's not getting locked up. I doubt he'll even be sentenced to any time in a cell even if he's found guilty. He's not even going to get probation. He's going to completely show that the Justice system once again is not equal and fair but not for the reasons he will continue to whine about.
I don’t know what they’ll do to him, but I can tell you: if you were to do what he did, the twelfth time, there’d surely be some sort of stern admonishment, or maybe even real consequences!
You know how I can confidently say that anyone who is against the right to choose hates women?
Because doesn’t matter how much they claim to love children, and how many shenanigans they pull like this one, I know for a fact that not a single one of them would ever in their whole life even entertain the idea of charging a man who masturbated with mass murder.
Well yeah. Alito was executing “the plan” they all already agreed on back at the Federalist Society. SCOTUS has been captured by far right forces. The court is illegitimate and corrupt to the core.
There was about 5 minutes under Warren where the court looks like it might actually be progressive. Other than that essentially it's entire history it's just a archconservative institution that exists as a check on civil rights.
Until the Supreme Court is completely overhauled, it’s going to be extremely difficult to substantively change the heading of this country. Conservatives see this as a win, but they’re too short-sighted to realize they shot themselves in the foot just the same.
I’m no legal expert but I’ve always thought the randomized or rotating court idea (perhaps > 9) filled by lower circuit courts would be better and less partisan overall.
All of Canada’s judges are appointed (which, iirc, isn’t what happens in America).
It is rare to see any judge up here so politically partisan. Part of that may be that we repatriated our Constitution in 1982 (to formally acknowledge our independence from Britain) so judges are basing decisions on a newer document. The other thing is Canadian courts do not put “original intent” above all … they consider the changes in society’s mores and beliefs just as important.
Up here all judges abhor being reversed so work very hard to base their rulings on facts. I’m not sure if it’s the same in America.
They are but they tend to be constantly cycling out at a given time and so seem less concentrated or determined by individual presidents. They are also possibly subject to less lobbying targeting given which group presiding over a specific case would never be certain.
There are 13 circuit courts full of judges, all with their own lifetime appointments. I believe the proposed idea is that the current supreme court could be made up of random, rotating judges on temporary assignments from the 13 circuit courts. Currently, the 9 justices oversee one or more of the 13 circuits. So, we could expand the court to match the 13 circuits, and then, as justices retire/die, their replacements are randomly assigned to terms of 18-24 months from the circuits they oversee. It would still meet the constitutional requirements for the supreme court, as it only requires that there is a supreme Court made up of appointed justices in good standing.
I’m sure it’s more complex than that, but those are the basics of the random appointments and rotating seated justices.
Thing is when people talk about restrictions they mean “These people shouldn’t have guns, but these people should be allowed to have them.” What I’m saying is they should be banned altogether.
Yeah that is a pipe dream, in a country with more guns than people that is bordered on two sides by 2 foreign governments. It just seems unrealistic to say "Just ban all guns" that seems like a massive oversimplification of the problem. We don't have some magical button that just deletes all guns in the borders of the US. Restrictions seem to be a realistic option but one would hope the left gets a bit of a better understanding of firearms since at the moment they mostly make laws about things they have very little understanding of and typically ban things based on how they appear rather than how they operate.
Because its the easiest route at the moment yes but you don't think gun smuggling would be a profitable venture? Seriously part of the reason why the opiate epidemic is so bad is China selling off the supplies for it to the cartels in Mexico, this also isn't to offload the responsibility of this mess on Perdue Pharma. They got the ball rolling and are 100% responsible for starting this mess but you have to be blind not to see how an enemy foreign nation is exploiting the issue and only making it worse to further destabilize a geopolitical rival. Same exact thing applies to Russia and their Interference in the election, they didn't make or start the problem, just took advantage of a fire that has been burning for a while and poured more gasoline into it.
Also again you don't really answer the question of how do you get rid of all those guns. There are 120 guns per 100 people in the US. They aren't going to magically disappear the minute you ban them. You can't just do a full ban, hell I would say half this country wouldn't allow it. So restrictions are the only realistic option.
Oh that ain't happening. Sorry but you have to get around the 2nd amendment firstly (That ain't going anywhere unless we rip up the constitution). You would require most law enforcement to be for it while ACAB typically cops are pro guns... I just don't see it happening in a nation where guns are a fundamental part of this country's history and ownership has been written into the fabric that bind this nation together. Restrictions are the only realistic option here. They work as we don't see an abundance of full auto firearms but a full ban would cause quite a bit of unrest.
Edit: did a double post but deleted it since wasn't sure if the indentation was working correctly and trying to keep the conversation in a single threadline.
Firstly the first 10 are a bill of rights. While technically yes they can be amended it does set a very bad precedence that you are advocating for the repeal of one of those. Not even getting into how unlikely that is since there has only been one amendment that has ever been repealed (18th). You think its a good idea for a nation to get to pick and choose which "natural rights" you are allowed to have at the moment? So if they decide that the 4th or 5th amendments should just disappear, you aren't going to have an issue with that (Yes, the justice system and police really do love to test the boundaries on those 2 but at least having a line is a good thing)?
You think it’s a good idea for a nation to have its constitution set in stone so the way of life hundreds of years ago sets the way forever? What if the first ten included that women can’t own property or vote? Would that be ok because they’re bill of rights? Would that also be a bad precedent? Is it so hard to accept that maybe they couldn’t envision the issues that could eventually come with their decisions back in the 1780s? Would they have included the second if they had known it would lead to hundreds of shootings every year?
Except you are going with a hypothetical but I'll take the bait, seeing as it also goes against the spirit of the declaration of independence, although they did betray that spirit because they ignored the plight of the slaves, I think the removal of the clause of that women can’t own property or vote would be just but again the 2nd amendment has a huge part in our founding myth so its basically going to be impossible to remove. Also do you not think people in the Rural areas are safe from the wilderness? How the fuck are they going to ward off coyotes, foxes, razorbacks, bears, etc. You were suggesting a blanket ban of all firearms.
" Would they have included the second if they had known it would lead to hundreds of shootings every year?"
Also seeing as they literally just won a revolutionary war and failed to make an initial government to form a new one but the nation at that time was based on state militias. I think they would have still included that.
Let’s not pretend that the shootings happening now have anything to do with a militia.
I live in a rural area, close to 30 years outside the city, both in the middle of the woods and in the middle of a field, never had to own a firearm. Heck, my uncle used to live in a northern village and didn’t own one, there’s trained services to take care of wildlife.
Were you a farmer or a rancher? Where your livelyhood is connected to the net worth of animals/food in your possession, you know something that a wild animal may want to take/kill? If the answer is no, then sure a gun isn't a requirement but its still a handy thing to have.
Actually if you’re involuntarily committed you already lose your right to firearms (iirc there are steps to regain your rights, but they were not taken here). Red flag laws aren’t just bad from a “gun” standpoint, they’re bad because “innocent until proven guilty” gets thrown out the window and it becomes “guilty until you can prove you’re not crazy,” and proving the negative is always a more difficult position. It perverts our whole justice system, and while I have issues with other things doing the same thing (racism for example), adding more is imo not a good idea. I’d rather see them actually enforce the laws we already have which while more stringent than “my roomate seems unstable,” also would have prevented this. I mean the guy was commited (making him a prohibited purchaser) and displayed violent ideation to a degree that warrants keeping him for a little while, so they let him out, don’t take his current guns, and afaik fail to input his commital to NICs, that’s three things that already could and should have been done in this specific case red flag laws withstanding.
To be fair, Democrats generally want reasonable restrictions on guns, such as ones that would have prevented this person from owning them and more liberal ones would have supported mental health programs to help this person not reach this point, Republicans want neither.
I’m in favor of mental health checks on an annual basis. Crazy people shouldn’t have access to guns. And you can bipartisan this all you want, the VAST majority of irresponsible gun owners are REPUBLICANS (or whatever center->right bullshit title they choose. LiBeRrRtaRrRiANz
A bulletin put out by the Maine Information and Analysis Center, a database for law enforcement officials, said Card was a trained firearms instructor and was believed to be in the Army Reserve.
It added that law enforcement said Card “recently reported mental health issues to include hearing voices and threats to shoot up the National Guard Base in Saco, ME.”
The bulletin said Card was reported to have been committed to a mental health facility for two weeks this summer and then released. NBC News has not been able to independently verify the bulletin’s statements about Card’s history. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lewiston-maine-shooting-robert-card-what-know-rcna122262
The Gun Control Act (GCA), codified at 18 U.S.C. § 922(g), makes it unlawful for certain categories of persons to ship, transport, receive, or possess firearms or ammunition, to include any person:
who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution;
The rule, which was finalized in December, added people receiving Social Security checks for mental illnesses and people deemed unfit to handle their own financial affairs to the national background check database.
I don’t think this guy would been in either category, but yes.
I think he ought to have been arrested when he threatened to shoot the National Guard facility.
Surely the child of a billionaire conservative who was given control over his daddy’s media empire will have more reasonable and nuanced beliefs that don’t further destroy the world like his father did…right?
Things always change. They just never get “perfect” because a new problem is always around the corner. Life is certainly no utopia though, nor will it be any time soon. We will not live to see the end of problems.
That’s what it seems like people are hoping for anyway, some kind of problem-free world. It is unrealistic.
No, I just see 40 years on a scale bigger than my own lifetime. Again, I don’t expect to live to see the end of these problems. I will probably die of old age before they are all completely solved. Just like many other problems were actually solved before I was ever born.
We’ve solved a lot of problems in the past few decades, just not all of them, and we added new ones on top.
Stop hoping for a problem-free world. Your children, if you choose to have some, will see problems of their own. Some will be those we’ve failed to address. Others will be brand new.
You sound like someone at a book club talking about the book they didn’t read. Murdoch was the one causing the problems. His son will likely continue to use his father’s media empire to lie and manipulate.
No, he’s not a cause. He’s a symptom. This is an example of “great man history”, where Murdoch is seen as somehow special, and if we had prevented him from fucking shit up, things would be fine.
I would argue that if he didn’t do it, someone else would’ve, because it’s a systemic problem, and he is just one example of it, just like Trump. They are not the cause of illness, but a symptom of illness.
I’m not really confident enough to say. Like all things with society, its very complex, an equation with dozens or hundreds of variables, not just a few.
There’s a lot of theories though, income inequality and expanding corporate influence are commonly attributed factors. It’s really the rise of populism that we’re looking at, and that’s ultimately rooted in citizen dissatisfaction. That’s what opens the door for people like Murdoch and Trump in the first place.
Yes Murdoch and Trump, two billionaires that use media to manipulate people into thinking billionaires are their friends; “job creators”. You’re right that if it wasn’t Murdoch it may have been someone else, but it was him and he objectively moved public discourse further towards the pro-business, pro-wealth hoarding, anti-union world we live in.
Dude literally created the 24 hour news cycle and the dogshit that has been destroying the US for the last few decades. You think all those people would have gathered on January 6th without Faux News telling them the election was stolen?
Murdoch was responsible for a lot of horrible shit, Jan 6th for sure, but he did not create the 24 hr news cycle.
Why is everyone suddenly trying to pretend I’m defending Rupert Murdoch? I said things do change. That is not the same as liking Rupert Murdoch. I’m not in a kids sub, so wtf is going on…?
Rupert Murdoch is directly responsible for an overwhelmingly large amount of the bullshit that is American politics and cancel culture today. He is a cancer to society and I hope he dies a slow, miserable death. You are on here acting like he isn’t one of the worst human beings to have existed in the past century.
That’s what it seems like people are hoping for anyway, some kind of problem-free world. It is unrealistic.
I think you are mistaken. People are upset for a lack of progress. How the pace of improvement is endlessly kneecapped.
We won't live to see the end of our problems. But there are several problems in our lives that could be ended very, very quickly if we actually gave a damn.
While I understand there’s been some very disappointing backsliding in the past decade or so, in order to see no progress anywhere you need to cherry pick your examples to actually avoid areas of improvement.
Do you not understand how people work or something?
Nobody is saying there has been "no progress anywhere". But they'll still be upset when there is little progress, or backsliding, on issues that affect them or that they are passionate about.
It's really quite condescending to waffle on about how suffering people need to look at the big picture, and how it's unreasonable to expect their suffering to be alleviated during their lifetimes, when there really isn't a good reason why they should be suffering as much as they are to begin with.
I was specifically responding to someone who said “things don’t change”. It sure sounded to me like “no progress anywhere”. Sorry if my response upset people, but I simply cannot agree that things don’t change.
I’m not disparaging progressives in the slightest, I’m saying we get some wins sometimes. We do succeed in improving things sometimes.
Just telling you how you read to others. Especially with the weird "That’s what it seems like people are hoping for anyway, some kind of problem-free world. It is unrealistic." type comments.
You read like someone chastising people for being angry that their issues haven't received redress.
So, what’s the difference between “things don’t change” and “things will not change”?
Thinking that things won't change with Murdoch's retirement is not the same as things never change anywhere.
I can see that, but I think it should be pretty clear that the one disparaging progressives is the one saying things will not change, even though the mission of progressives is to change things.
My position is a more complicated one that requires some thinking about, but it is fully consistent with wishing for and fighting for an improved world.
Don’t you think it might just be a little reasonable to wish for, not a perfect, problem-free world, but one that is simply improved over the one we have? I think by setting our expectations a little more realistically, we can help avoid a lot of the harmful, negative emotions that have gotten so common, and that don’t really do much to help due to how de-motivating the sensation of hopelessness can be.
Okay, so I'm pretty convinced you're a troll now. Good one.
I can see that, but I think it should be pretty clear that the one disparaging progressives is the one saying things will not change, even though the mission of progressives is to change things.
Is English not your first language?
My position is a more complicated one that requires some thinking about, but it is fully consistent with wishing for and fighting for an improved world.
Uh huh.
Don’t you think it might just be a little reasonable to wish for, not a perfect, problem-free world, but one that is simply improved over the one we have?
Who is saying otherwise you absolute spanner?
You are REALLY committed to maintaining your misunderstanding of other people so that you can... I don't know, pretend you're more enlightened than everyone else?
Ah, direct personal attacks and insults instead of a single rational counter-argument. I almost thought this was going to be a real conversation. Ah well, maybe I should’ve known better.
As others have also noted in this comment section, you come across as someone who doesn't actually know what they're talking about, but floats these trivial truisms, while pretending that everyone else is disagreeing with these common sense truths.
It's just the most surface-level observations, while strawmanning everyone else as too extreme, and then acting like an "enlightened" smartarse.
What do you expect? I said I’m maybe interested in discussing complex topics. You replied with how I “come across” to you. That is a feeling. It is not an objective, rational or measurable thing. It is unique to you and people that are similar to you, experiencing a similar situation.
Cool bro. That’s how you feel. I’m not too interested in feelings though, otherwise I wouldn’t have come out with a first reply disagreeing with some dude.
Yeah bud, just the hugest brain on you. Us peasants with "feelings" can't comprehend you when you quite obviously misunderstand basic English sentences.
If you got something other than a feeling in response to this, I’m all ears:
He said things don’t change. Progressives try to change things. If progressives want to change things and he’s saying things don’t change, he’s saying progressives must always fail.
Right, I got that wrong last time too. Allow me to revise.
They said “things will not change”. If progressives want things to change, but things will not change, then they are saying the progressives must fail.
True or false?
edit: If anyone actually got this far, I think this thread was raided by conservatives pretending to be liberals. That actually happens a fair bit, though not usually in places this small. They’re just bored people hanging out on the internet somewhere, and someone makes a post going “hey guys, let’s all go fuck with link”. Used to happen all the time at 4chan, probably still does. And there’s discords and shit that can coordinate crap like this when they’re in the mood.
Could also be properly organized shills, but I’d think they’d have better places to be.
I can’t find any other explanation for the sheer amount of trolliness I’m receiving. A bunch of people elsewhere are trying to pretend I’m defending Murdoch somehow.
What the person I was replying to said, was a hopeless perspective that you consistently hear. It does nothing but de-motivate people. They could have said “Fox” will not change. But I’m real sick of hearing that things will not change when they very, very clearly will. Will Fox improve in the short-term? No, of course not. Will Fox News eventually change? It would be impossible not to.
Saying “things will not change”, under virtually any circumstances, is objectively false, actively harmful and completely pointless. My apologies for hating it, but I won’t back down from this position.
I can’t find any other explanation for the sheer amount of trolliness I’m receiving.
Have you tried looking inward?
Hell you don't even have to look inwards. I told you right here in this thread why people are taking issue with you. It was actually meant to be constructive. But you dismissed it as "feelings".
I didn’t really see anything constructive or that I could use in it. I can’t control how other people see me, and I can’t predict how my words will be received. All I know is those four words were wrong. At every level. So I called it out, and I said why I felt that way.
This is the internet, mistakes in communication are extremely frequent due to nonverbal cues all being missing. I can tell you with certainty that I was expecting that to be fairly controversial, but also to be overall upvoted as opposed to down-voted. I’m actually pretty fucking disappointed people aren’t understanding what I’m trying to say, because it’s pretty important. Hence why I suspect a raid.
Folks around here are usually more willing to engage with nuance and a calm, polite analysis of the specifics of something.
Nobody has raided anything. Your comments have consistently accused others of holding extreme positions, when they simply haven't. You are arguing with positions that don't exist. And when that has been pointed out to you, you have doubled down on your misinterpretation. All while stroking your ego about how intelligent you think you are.
It’s a little sad that you think only “intelligent” people can want a rational conversation. What if I was just autistic and took words really literally? Should I just stfu or something?
Either we got raided, or our demographics shifted rapidly in the shitpost direction in the past short while or something.
I never said I was intelligent. Why do you keep saying it then?
No, at least until I get something that makes some rational sense, I said in no uncertain terms. I will not back down from this position. Work on your reading comprehension.
I’ve yet to get anything but opinions and feelings from you. That is not rational sense, we do not look to our feelings for rational sense. Unless you can find where you tried to be objective and rational and I missed it?
What is objective vs what is subjective is not a matter of me liking it. It’s a set of rules you learn in school that forces you to follow them if you want to consistently “make sense”.
When something “seems” a certain way, that is not an objective thing. It can “seem” different to different people. This is a subjective feeling.
Funny you call me the troll, but you’re also throwing out insults left and right. Not exactly high quality comments, right? You’ll note I’ve given up putting much effort in too, but I think I’ve made my point.
I’d be happy to see a world where people don’t actively create problems for others due to greed, ignorance, or bigotry.
We got enough problems from natural disasters, disease, accidents, etc. If people could just not be dicks and not fuck each other over constantly that would be cool.
His son Lachlan Murdoch is taking over. Lachlan has been co-chair of News Corp since 2014, and a director before that. Given that Rupert is 92, I’m sure that Lachlan has already been calling the shots for a long time. This is not really a change.
Unfortunately his other son who was against his dad’s ways publicly attacked him so he’s got put aside while the smart move would have been to play his game, take over the company and change it.
Why would that have been the smart move? If given the choice of having money and no obligations or having money and inheriting a dumpster fire while lying about what you belief for decades which would you pick? Maybe he doesnt want to be king of the shit pile.
I’m assuming he’s still running he company and this is just for appearances or financial reasons. There’s no way he won’t have control of what they do or say
Lol they spent decades doing the opposite, generating the vast majority of emissions with big manufacturing and big livestock, and then successfully shifting blame on poor peasants claiming the planet is heating because they’re not sorting their recycling well enough.
How about buying electric instead of combustion while trying to not buy a new car unless it’s really necessary? That should reduce emissions, shouldn’t it?
Simpler perhaps, but not really better. High gas prices hurt the poor disproportionately because it’s a larger part of their income, they don’t have as much control over WFH policies or their locations for reducing commutes, and they can’t typically afford to upgrade to fuel efficient vehicles. Plus since almost everything is transported by truck, high gas prices make the cost of everything else go up too.
I think part of the labor shortage is from people who did the math and quit after realising that they weren’t actually earning anything after subtracting transportation costs.
If we’re talking about some sort of tax on employers based on the commute of their employees, it’s going to disproportionately affect the poor anyway. If you tax employers though you’re incentivizing further control of their employees lives.
Yes, higher gas prices would increase the cost of shipping and therefore most products, but there’s no world in which we hold corporations accountable for their externalities and consumer goods remain as cheap as they are.
In Nottingham, UK they made it so companies have to pay for every parking space per year over a certain amount, and that money gets invested in public transport. Over time congestion has grown much slower in Nottingham than similar cities, I’m amazed that more cities don’t do the same.
Modern accounting techniques are amazing and super effective, barely unchanged since their codification in the 1490s by an Italian scholar named Luca Pacioli. The biggest weakness of accounting though is its inability to capture externalities. How does one company record the cost of their employees commute? How do you even begin to calculate that? How do you measure the cost of extra leukemia cases in a town ten years after a train derails nearby? How do you record that in your books? How do you calculate and record the distress these huge noisy shipping vessels cause whales? It’s just so subjective and impractical.
In the city of Seattle, for example, every year, companies over a certain number of employees are required to participate in an annual transportation survey. The employees are surveyed. The questions ask how far the employee commutes to work, how long it takes, and by what method (private vehicle, car pool, public transportation), how many days a year they work from home, or take off, etc. The effort is to assess the impact on environment, parking infrastructure, public transportation, roads, etc.
Obviously, there isn’t a 100% response rate so the data is extrapolated from the responses to the total number of employees employeed at that site (probably why they only poll companies of a minimum size and larger).
If they wanted to implement something like this in seattle, then the next step would be to take the data they already have and start sending those companies a new bill for a new annual tax based on the assessment.
Lots of taxes work off of an estimated assessment rather than having to account for every nut snd bolt of the thing (property taxes, for example).
So how do you do it? That’s how you do it. This isn’t rocket science, and you don’t need to invent new accounting methods or worry about the accounting-sky falling to accomplish it.
Regarding commuting specifically I meant how do you determine the cost of each extra pound of co2 in the atmosphere. It’s inherently incalculable because the effects of climate change are insanely complex. That’s my point about externalities. How do you price the value of standing in an open meadow at dusk?
The point of my earlier comment was that the inability to account down to the last carbon atom isn’t a valid reason not to start with more generalized high-level estimates and work just from those until/if a better way of doing it is either becomes available or becomes a necessity.
It’s like arguing that we might as well not accept the existence of circles because we can’t calculate to the final digit of pi…when really, for most things, we don’t need that level of precision to still do a good job discussing roundness.
Pi can be rounded. It’s infamously difficult to compute externalities in any meaningful sense. Even more difficult to implement a fair and actionable policy for it. You can google “accounting for externalities” and read a bunch f articles and academic papers on the subject, which has been debated for decades.
Beyond fines for dumping chemicals in rivers, and carbon taxes, etc, stronger EPA, etc, I don’t really have any good ideas for codifying a real actual plan into law. Probably easier to raise corporate tax rates up a few points from 21% to whatever and use it to fund green energy and cleanup projects etc, rather than change accounting methods to try and capture the costs that way.
Modern accounting techniques are amazing and super effective,
Hmm
The biggest weakness of accounting though is its inability to capture externalities
Oh so you mean it’s actually dog shit then, if you can’t properly look at external risks outside the clearly defined formulas and can game said fomulas to cook books to one’s liking.
How does one company record the cost of their employees commute? How do you even begin to calculate that? How do you measure the cost of extra leukemia cases in a town ten years after a train derails nearby? How do you record that in your books? How do you calculate and record the distress these huge noisy shipping vessels cause whales? It’s just so subjective and impractical.
You act like these are difficult tasks in the modern era. Commute is pretty simple, what type of vehicle, what are its maintenance costs at certain mileages, what are the crash statistics, etc. Once you have a general fomula you can add an increased payout to cover ireegular externalities to properly hedge against the edge cases. Same shit for the others. It’s not subjective and impractical, it’s just not the going to be perfectly effiecnt as you need to create a bigger financial bubble to account for edge cases. The problem is hyper fixation on extracting the most captial possible from a business. Stop trying to be the most clean cut business and focus on aiding your communities, working to better infrastructure and stop interference with local governments for tax benefits. Then progressive changes can be beneficial to both and reduce external unmitigated risks as we have a more nuanced model to work with.
Lol, call out your bullshit and you have nothing but a reductionist argument, but sure bud I’m the one not playing with a full deck. Go lick some more boots if you can’t engage in constructive conversation.
Come back when you can codify your point into something that can actually be recorded on a balance sheet and P&L. Until then it’s not even wrong, it’s just…word salad…
Before we do anything else we should be working to end lobbying and put every single lobbyist leech on society out of a job. Otherwise this is all pipe dreams. They’ll just lobby it away.
I’ve seen that already, at least pre-Covid and in the U.S. Even though I’m pretty sure that asking that during an interview is illegal, I’ve been on post-interview sessions where someone inevitably says “yeah, but this candidate lives nearly an hour away, while this other candidate lives 15 minutes away…” so they found out somehow.
Never, ever, EVER trust ANYONE who says they’re doing something “for the safety of children”. The war against porn and sex work has been co-opted by christian fascists.
Make no mistake, there is a hysteria around “child trafficking” nowadays, and that hysteria is being harnessed to pass laws that suppress our freedoms. SESTA/FOSTA has put the lives of countless sex workers at risk by forcing them back into the shady world of pimps and back alleys. The Texas ID law is pure government surveillance, and Project 2025 explicitly linked any trans people’s mere existence as “pornographic” and thus subject to all anti-porn laws.
Human trafficking is real. Child abuse is real. And it needs to be fought against.
But never EVER trust anyone who goes to the media and starts shouting about “our children”. It’s a fucking scam, and it’s usually making things worse for the people they claim to want to protect.
NCOSE, the organization that co-sponsored Traffickinghub, was previously known as Morality in Media, and used to rail against sex shops, push abstinence education, and once boycotted Disney for offering partner benefits to gay couples. The group’s president, Patrick Trueman, has served at multiple far-right organizations designated as anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Laila founded Traffickinghub while on staff at Exodus Cry, an anti-trafficking organization that describes porn as a public health crisis. Its founder once called homosexuality an “an unspeakable offense to God.” One of its tax filings described a mission of “abolishing sex trafficking and the commercial sex industry,” which would seem to include porn.
Wow, great article, but it has even more info pointing out that this is a far right attack on sexuality that is using “trafficking” as its trojan horse:
Laila founded Traffickinghub while on staff at Exodus Cry, an anti-trafficking organization that describes porn as a public health crisis. Its founder once called homosexuality an “an unspeakable offense to God.” One of its tax filings described a mission of “abolishing sex trafficking and the commercial sex industry,” which would seem to include porn.
Helen Taylor, vice president of impact at Exodus Cry, told The Independent in an email that the group seeks to neither demonize LGBTQ+ people nor end legal pornography, and that it works to defend queer people, who are often singled out as victims of sexual exploitation.
“Exodus Cry has no campaign to bring down the porn industry,” she said. “We focus on identifying instances of sexual exploitation in the porn industry and calling for change, recognizing that Big Porn needs regulation.”
The questions over Mickelwait’s associations are likely to persist. The 2022 990 tax form for her new group, Justice Defense Fund, filed in late 2023, has the names of three of its four main officers “withheld for security reasons,” and lists only one contributor, their name also “restricted.”
These partnerships, as well as Mickelwait’s penchant for describing Pornhub in terms like calling it a “terrorist” organization, made her efforts seem counter-productive to some, painting the industry as irredeemable and evil rather than imperfect.
Never forget that the IRS spearheaded the biggest CSAM takedown in history by taking down a site called “welcome to video” they even caught a boarder patrol agent. So whenever someone says they want to protect children, remind them that we should be funding investigative agencies like the IRS and OSHA.
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