It’s complicated, and people can have different philosophical approaches to the goals and purposes of criminal punishment. But my argument is that people should be internally consistent in their views. If people believe that the consequences of a crime should be considered when sentencing for that crime, then emotional consequences should count, too, because emotional harm is real harm.
I didn’t think I’d ever agree with Hawley
Hawley represents the future of the Republican party, in my opinion: populist conservatism that is willing to bend on party orthodoxy on how taxes and regulations shouldn’t be captured by big corporate interests, but is just completely abhorrent on cultural issues (and whether the government should be involved in those issues).
In an earlier political era, there would be opportunities for cross-party dialogue on the issues that the parties have deemed non-partisan (where divisions don’t fall within party lines and party leadership doesn’t care that their members hold a diversity of views on), but the number of issues that fall within that category have plummeted in the last 20 years.
Why do we punish based on consequences caused by the crime, then?
A drunk driver is punished much more severely if they hit and kill a person, than if they hit and hurt a person, than if they hit a tree, than if they don’t crash at all.
As long as we’re punishing people based on the actual impact of their crimes, then emotional impact should count.
why evidence rules exist in court.
Sure, but not for victim impact statements. Hearsay, speculation, etc. have always been fair game for victim impact statements, and victim statements aren’t even under oath. Plus the other side isn’t allowed to cross examine them. It’s not evidence, and it’s not “testimony” in a formal sense (because it’s not under oath or under penalty of perjury).
I’d argue that emotions are a legitimate factor to consider in sentencing.
It’s a bit more obvious with living victims of non-homicide crimes, but the emotional impact of crime is itself a cost borne by society. A victim of a romance scam having trouble trusting again, a victim of a shooting having PTSD with episodes triggered by loud noises, a victim of sexual assault dealing with anxiety or depression after, etc.
It’s a legitimate position to say that punishment shouldn’t be a goal of criminal sentencing (focusing instead of deterrence and rehabilitation), or that punishment should be some sort of goal based entirely on the criminal’s state of mind and not the factors out of their own control, but I’d disagree. The emotional aftermath of a crime is part of the crime, and although there’s some unpredictable variance involved, we already tolerate that in other contexts, like punishing a successful murder more than an attempted murder.
Along the same lines, from the same writer/creator, Armando Iannucci, there’s The Death of Stalin. The absurdity of how the inner circle navigated the politics around Stalin, including after his death, is hilarious but also a good look at how these power dynamics work in an authoritarian, despotic government.
Or also from Iannucci, Avenue 5, which basically is set in the future where all of this political nonsense continues, and is in the background of a comedy about a space cruise ship.
Everyone has their own reasons. If you disagree with their management, then you should celebrate other people choosing to leave, even if for different reasons than your own.
How you gonna keep them down on the farm factory (after they’ve seen Paris a school library stocked with books)?
Republicans killed a COVID era $3600/year child tax credit, letting it lapse in 2023 back to the 2018 amount of $2000, which was increased from $1000 as a replacement for the $5050 tax exemption parents used to be able to get before the 2017 Trump tax reforms. For a married couple whose combined income was between $75k and $150k, that $5k tax exemption was worth about $1250, so it was a bad trade for them (or anyone making more).
If Republicans were serious about financially incentivizing having children, they’ll need to support the kids throughout the entire life cycle: healthcare for pregnant women, including through labor and deliver and post partum, support for families with young children (including parental leave mandates), subsidized daycare, good schools, parks and libraries, and economic stability (including in housing costs).
But they’re not, so here we are.
I don’t brush anything under the rug. I actively shared the Tweet that started this hole BS.
I get that. But my point is that you can’t claim that Proton’s CEO is acting independently of the Proton corporation itself when Proton’s official corporate accounts chimed in on his side on this.
Both of the American parties are a shitshow
Not on antitrust. The Biden administration was one of the strongest advocates for consumers on antitrust issues we’ve seen since Robert Bork convinced Reagan to tear it all down.
Anyone who says otherwise is trying to lie to the American public about it, and should be called out for actively advocating for false MAGA propaganda. Andy Yen did it, and Proton agreed with it.
Proton didn’t decide anything, Andy Yen posted ONE tweet and then doubled down on it with the Proton Reddit account which was deleted.
How are you going to say that Proton didn’t say anything and then acknowledge that the official Proton social media accounts were making statements like this:
Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses
That’s the context you keep brushing under the rug. The official Proton position is not just that Trump made a good choice, on this one thing, it’s that you should vote for Republicans over Democrats.
Yes, it was official corporate Proton position to delete that comment. But it was the official Proton position to make that comment in the first place.
OpenAI’s commercial entity
They should never be allowed to call this a “non-profit”
They never did. The nonprofit parent owned shares in a for-profit subsidiary, which was structured in a way that investors in the for-profit subsidiary could never control the company (the nonprofit would own a controlling share) and had their gains capped at 100x.
Andy Yen went out of his way to criticize Democrats on antitrust, which is how you can tell it’s actually a pro-Trump position unsupported by the actual facts.
I like Gail Slater. She’s possibly the best choice among people who Trump likes, to head DOJ’s Antitrust Division. She has bipartisan bona fides.
But to say that Democrats, after 4 years of Lina Khan leading the FTC, and a bunch of the reforms that the Biden FTC and DOJ made to merger standards and their willingness to sue/seek big penalties for antitrust violations, aren’t more serious than Republicans about reining in big tech consolidation and about stronger enforcement of antitrust principles, completely flips around the history and is a bad faith argument.
Andy Yen could’ve praised Gail Slater, and that would be that. Instead, he took a post by Trump that didn’t even mention Democrats, and made it about how the Democrats are bad on taking on big tech. That’s the problem everyone had with it.
That’s not an outrageous medical bill. It’s an outrageous bill for clawing back government benefits for those whose full time care for family members prevents them from working.
school gun team
This fucking country, man.
economic conditions for the average individual worker
My point is that there are at least 20 million people who were not in that category in July 2020 who ended up in that category in April 2025. So the economic conditions for the average person who worked at some point in that 5-year period is going to be a big improvement as the employment rate increases.
So if you try to stabilize the cohort you’re looking at, whether it’s the 140 million who were employed in July 2020 or the 160 million who were employed in April 2025, then tracking the moving median needs to be accounted for.
A comparison between July 2019 and July 2020 makes this obvious. The weekly earnings shot up from $964 to $1016 (5% increase in a year that only saw 1% inflation), but nobody would consider that to be an improvement in conditions. Instead, many of the bottom earning workers just got laid off, making their conditions worse. If that metric isn’t a good standalone indicator of what average people are experiencing, it should be evaluated with the other metrics in mind, too.
All of these stats matter, because it shows multiple facets of a complex economic system.
Bottom quartile earnings are here.
Real Median Personal Income
I don’t like using personal income as a metric that represents what’s happening to regular people because it’s noisy data that incorporates retirement income and investment income in the numerator, and includes in the denominator non-earners (including the idle rich, retired people, full time students).
But as part of a broader look at multiple metrics, it should be considered.
Others include the different categories of unemployment (including the underemployed, the weekly hours worked, marginally detached), read with other employment indicators like layoffs and volunary quits, job openings posted, people making unemployment claims for the first time, etc.
Wages didn’t keep up with inflation
Counting back from July 2020, the average weekly earnings per worker came up just short. But the huge addition of workers during the economic recovery would have been expected to dent that further.
Compare the exact same comparison from July 2019 versus April 2025, we have weekly earnings going up from $964 to $1236 (28.2%), while the inflation over that time period was 24.6%. So workers gained across even that metric over this time.
But we’d never say that the economic conditions for regular people improved between July 2019 and July 2020. Those huge job losses during the first few months of the COVID recession were devastating for regular people, even if the average earnings among people who kept their jobs shot upward. It wasn’t because their wages went up, it was that the people who were the lowest earners lost their jobs. As they reentered the workforce, they were taking higher paying jobs than the ones they were previously laid off from, so that overall average stayed stable with the artificially elevated July 2020 number, through improved bargaining power during the great resignation and some recovery of union power, especially in the summer of 2023.
That’s why economic conditions for regular people can’t be measured by a single metric, and all the different stats need to be read together.
The net economic power of workers went down.
The aggregate economic power of workers went up, because the actual number of workers went up by 20 million, or 14% of the workforce as of July 2020, and the number of unemployed or involuntarily part time went down over that period of time. There were a lot more wages being distributed per unit population, even if the real wages slightly decreased per worker.
That’s the joke. It’s why the price keeps getting marked down.