“Local officials confirmed Mr. Barnett’s suicide. When asked how Mr. Barnett managed to fire the sniper shot through his bedroom window, the officer first on the scene only replied, “Trust me bro.”, while stuffing a large stack of 100 dollars bills back down the front of his pants.”
[2 week later] Former lead detective found dead in in what investigators have ruled a suicide. He apparently hung himself after a fit of rage where his house appeared to have kicked in his own front door, tore the hard drive out of his security camera hub, punched himself in the face a number of times, then tied the rope to a bannister and strung himself up.
(Interwebz pedant voice) actually there are several scenarios possible where one could conceivably kill themselves with a sniper rifle 100 yards away . . . People who don’t know about this are just so credulous, but weapons science has known for a long time that JFK actually killed himself . . .
Yeah, well my mate Paul met this Italian couple whilst he was backpacking and they invited him back to their room for a threesome and they gave him some LSD. When they got there the bloke one pulled a screwdriver on him and made him shit in his own shoe and eat it.
“We’ve got a big surprise for you all today! Everyone look under your seats”
Audience members find a leaflet and begin reading
“We are in possession of the most destructive explosive ever devised by man. A single one of our newly developed atomic bombs is actually the equivalent in explosive power to what 2000 of our giant B-29s can carry on a single mission. This awful fact is one for you to ponder and we solemnly assure you it is grimly accurate…”
Such as letting a comedian best-known for making fart jokes while wearing a bikini come on to her show as if she were a medical expert (she admitted on the show that she went to the “University of Google” and Oprah didn’t challenge that) to lie about how vaccines cause autism. And it wasn’t even the first time Oprah spread that lie.
She’s endorsed multiple on her show selling junk science and grifts. She perpetuates myths about losing weight and health to promote her products. She basically did the same thing on Maui that everyone gets angry at Zuckerberg for doing Kauai, which was buy a fuck ton of land and then kick everyone off of it. She presents like a black girl that made it, but is infact just another billionaire member of the American aristocracy. Is she better than most? Sure, but it’s not hard to be better than people like Trump and Koch.
I downvote that type of meme humor because I don’t find it adds to discussion. Even if I agree with the person, I downvote them every time.
Up/downvotes are meant for promoting relevant discussion and suppressing off-topic content, spam, trolls, and hate. They are not and were never intended to be dis/agreement buttons. People just misuse them.
I’m not convinced from that comment that the user they’re referring to is a tankie, but simply put, I’d describe a tankie as the alt-left equivalent of the alt-right.
They’re not quite as violent in my opinion, but they push pro-china/russia propoganda and misinformation, and are just as self-deluded and delusional as the alt-right. I’ve also seen tankies justify Hamas’ attack against Isreal, which I find inexcusable and morally reprehensible. The same can be said of the IDF’s genocide against innocent Palestinians.
Tankies are on the fringe and are just on the other end of the bell curve of the alt-right.
You forgot to mention IRGC propaganda and misinformation. The current Gaza conflict is, without a doubt, the biggest propaganda victory the IRGC has ever had. They’ve got the US left absolutely fractured. People were worried about 2024 elections? HAHAHAH just wait. We’re so fucked.
Sure, my point was that they didn't know. That they were just out here throwing out words they had no clue about and (in my and others opinion) doing it as an attempt to drive wedges in the community. That's literally the joke up the thread that the guy baited the moron in with. I've met some of these people in real life. They weren't violent. They absolutely we're deluded apologists, but outside of talking revolution in the streets (which I don't think is to imply violence either, Iceland for example) they we're very much passive folk that just got pulled into a lame MLM.
To your later point, personally I agree, that the attack Hamas carried out on people in Israel is inexcusable. I don't think that is ubiquitous on the left, nor should it be. It parallels quite clearly in the discussions we're all having as to the validity of attacks on civilian populations but to some it is also a question of self defense under the massively imbalanced power dynamic between the two countries. Not only are we talking about apartheid here, but what is clearly becoming erasure. The longer this madness goes on the more people are going to question the validity of that Oct 7 attack and as I see the atrocities carried out daily I wonder if that point will come for me as well.
That's the significance of this story. Wolf fucking Blitzer, is starting to question this shit. If you ever needed a warning that you are taking the lead in the "bad guy" race, this is a skull and bones in the tea leaves.
Not sure what tankies have to do with it, but I think everyone understands mocking text, and yes, there is a lot of pro-IDF astroturfing on all social media platforms currently.
I think this is bad news tbh. Harris can be as capable as she wants, but if the broadcaster doesnt stop Trump from a endless ramble or cut off his mic if he escalates to intolerable levels of behaviour, then this could end badly.
Don’t give Fox News respect. Start talking shit about it right now. Call this what it is, a scared old weird man who will only debate Harris on a “news” network currently paying billions for lying to everyone about the last election. Harris will treat Trump and the “journalists” playing moderators like children which is how we should’ve been treating them for years. Talking to them like adults validates their lies and bullshit.
Harris should call them out. “I said a debate on a news source, not some weird entertainment channel. Might as well have the weather channel moderate the debate!”
While entertaining for us, I don’t think that’d be a wise reaction. If she wants to win, she probably also needs to sway some people that are lifetime FOX junkies. Such a reaction could have a ‘basket of deplorables’ effect (being the stone cold truth, but hardly effective)
Being nice to idiots has proven to be hardly effective. Kamala needs to read word for word the arguments the Fox News lawyers made when they were in court for the dominion case. Fox News isn’t news it’s entertainment and they don’t employ journalists they employ entertainers. This is what Fox News said.
No, what she needs to do is win this election. That’s her job, everything else (like taking entertainment corpos to task for their shady tactics) comes secondary right now.
I fail to see how one impedes the other, in fact I would argue it would help her win. If she’s running on doing just that why wouldn’t she take a shot. Why hide? You think any Fox News fanboys would be swayed by anything Kamala says? Her time would be better spent attracting unregistered voters and she could do that by saying the quiet part out loud.
I fail to see how one impedes the other, in fact I would argue it would help her win
Okay, give me an argument why setting Fox straight will help her win the election, because just saying so isn’t an argument. I’d argue that time spent bickering ‘with Fox about Fox’ isn’t time spent getting people that wouldn’t otherwise vote for her, to vote for her. (and that, by the way, is how one impedes the other)
Why hide?
Nobody said she should hide.
You think any Fox News fanboys would be swayed by anything Kamala says?
And this is the main point: Yes actually. If she makes salient points about matters that are dear to them, something is going to gnaw eventually. Have you seen Bernie Sanders’ appearances on the network? The audience definitely seems to be on his hand some of the time, just because he points out that what they have been told on the network isn’t making sense. It can be done. A bunch of them are a lost cause for sure, but certainly she ought to be able to get some of them to vote for her, she running against Trump (for fox sake!).
Her time would be better spent attracting unregistered voters
Agreed 100%, those also watch Fox though. And Trump spouting his garbage freely on that channel without opposing voices will not make them vote for Harris.
You really think it’s not ridiculous to point out how ridiculous it all is? There is value in calling out the elephant in the room however there’s no value in validating Fox News and giving into the grift. That only benefits Fox News and Trump.
I am even more convinced now than ever that the conspiracy theory I have been trying to start is true, they are covering up that he was shot in one ear and it went out the other without doing any damage whatsoever.
If you don’t hear from me in 24 hours, they got to me, man, the MIB got to me
Yeah for a guy who’s so fucking pedantic he’s literally asked for the definition of the word “do” in response to a question he seems totally fine with the word “woke” being used for whatever.
Man as someone who loves him way back when as a guest on TVO’s Agenda with Steve Paikin… JP really went off the rails hard. It’s insane that simple gender politics are what drove him batshit crazy. He dug in so hard on being against calling someone “They/Them”.
Well that and the fact he got mind fucked by drugs and was taken to a shady ass either Russian or Balkan rehab clinic. Though I think he has always been a dumbass and was just better at hiding it, IDK even in my highschool anti-SJW phase he struck me as rather dull.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My team already had a manager switch to IC because we couldn’t get any more HC. On our side I don’t know how much more blood they’re getting from the stone.
Everyone knows that firstly it’s grossly overvalued, secondly trump wants to sell, and thirdly whether or not Trump wins in November the shares will be worthless.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe they’re already under investigation for breaking the law when the original SPAC openly said they were going to merge with Truth Social when the law says SPACs have to remain agnostic about what companies they may merge with until they do so
They’ve got to wait long enough for Trump to finish dumping all his stock. Sure he may face a court case about it down the line, but that’s nothing new, he’ll have already laundered the money by that point and stashed it away somewhere.
TBH that’s one thing I don’t blame him for. The real losers and suckers are his base willing to give him money, and he thinks as much of them for certain.
This company is a scheme to finance Trump’s campaign from foreign sources. The foreign investors are “suckers”, in the sense that they lost money on their investment, but they still achieved their goal: funneling money to Trump.
All the retail investors and MAGA heads are just collateral damage.
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