I vaguely remember the Bicentennial. The special quarters. Parades & fireworks. I know it was in the wake of Vietnam, and I remember MIA flags. I know it was in the middle of the Carter-Ford campaign, but I don’t remember it being a Republicans-only kind of thing. Maybe I was just young and naive.
I assume ‘disillusioned with the Democrat party’ after 2008 means the bank bailouts and lack of prosecution. Conservative brain is generally ok with businesses fucking the economy over, but they expect (at least ideologically) that companies will fail when that happens. Not their company, but nebulous companies that don’t employ them or their friends.
TBH, I would have liked to see a lot more fraud cases come out of 2008. I would have liked to see banks get ‘right sized’ so there’s no more “too big to fail.”
I don’t understand all the negativity towards folks like this.
Skepticism whether they’ve “changed their ways” or just rejected the one person who hurt them.
These are people who were totally down with draining the swamp of all its career politicians and bureaucrats, right up until they were the bureaucrat being drained. They were down with storming the Capitol so only real American votes would be counted. Article bravely stays away from racism. The whole “be a conservative like everyone else” and “vote for Trump like everyone else” vibe suggests they’ll be ready to vote for the next demagogue who promises them easy solutions to intractable problems.
There’s no indication in the text that they have suddenly discovered empathy, only that they’ve learned small government policies cost them their government job. Maybe that’s just the way the article was written, but I don’t think empathy is something one just discovers at middle age.
Had a friend training for Iron Man. He’d do like 15 mile bike in to work (and back), 5 mile run at lunch, and swim in the evening. Dude would eat sticks of butter straight out of the refrigerator for lunch. I couldn’t watch.
Think she’ll be eligible for any of that $1.8B ‘weaponized prosecution’ fund?
Not who you replied ti, but I’ve been on purelymail for about a year and a half. No complaints. $10.yr is great, and their billing statements claim I could be around $3/year if I switched to their advanced billing. I have nagging concern that they’re hosted on AWS, and if your goal is to completely free yourself of US tech giants, then purelymail won’t.
I feel like Tupperware, Amway, and Mary Kay were the Ubers of 1980.
My folks (over 70) claim they get rudimentary cognitive tests basically every time they see a doctor - “Who are you here to see?” “What day is it?” etc. I’m ready to believe that some form of cognitive assessment is a routine part of geriatric care. I’m not ready to believe that a full-on MCoA is routine, unless patient fails the “Can you spell ‘world’?” part.
I think they’re probably just the only tests he’s passed in his entire life. Good for him, our special boy!
Yes, but also I don’t think the Democrats have any stronger candidate to run against Republicans.
This is a real problem. Who’s in the national Democratic pipeline? Biden kind of sucked the life out of anyone associated with him - Anthony Blinken? Lloyd Austin? Pete Buttigeig was the closest thing Biden had to an attack dog, but he keeps losing elections and I don’t know what he’s doing now. I thought Katie Porter was cool for a while, but she blew her run for senate and is currently choking on a run for governor of California. Bernie’s too old.
I don’t even know who else is out there.
Basically the same reason the US hasn’t switched to metric.
At what point does a tax on equities essentially become a continuous draw-down of wealth on the same money year after year, resulting in absolutely no incentive to invest in business and for that matter a situation where it is impossible to build up any wealth? How will startups be funded? How will large, shoot for the stars projects be funded?
That’s actually the point: use taxes to force rich people to make high risk investments.
If you can’t figure out how to turn enough profit on your farm to pay the property taxes, then you sell your farm to pay the taxes and someone else gets to put the capital to better use.
If you can’t figure out how to turn enough profit on your $10B company to pay the wealth tax, then you have to sell enough of it to pay the tax, and someone else gets more say in how the company runs.
Wealth tax encourages people with ungodly fortunes to make bigger, more risky bets, because they have to overcome the constant drain of wealth tax. Ultra-wealthy shouldn’t just coast along on the low returns of super-safe investments, because those are the people who can afford to lose part of their fortune.
Instead, we have the guy with $1000 YOLOing his life savings on GME options, because the $80 he can get from an index fund isn’t going to get him to retirement, while Berkshire Hathaway is sitting of $300B of US treasuries.
Income tax may be a solution to government revenue, but it’s not a solution to inequality.
Capital accumulates exponentially, and if you don’t address that exponential growth, then there will be ludicrously wealthy people, social immobility, and all the problems we have now. Tax wealth.
Of course it will be complicated. Of course there will be court cases. All of that is true of the current system. We can’t get to a working system if we don’t even start. Tax wealth.
For most of our history, real estate was wealth. You needed property to grow crops, mine resources, build a factory, or do any kind of venture that would make money. It’s only in the 20th century that we really start having a significant amount of wealth in stock markets that couldn’t be directly traced to a physical asset. The robber barons figured that was a good excuse to stop taxing their wealth.
Luigi.
If you want the real answer…
I don’t have the reference handy, but the gist is: They use pithed frogs, and they do not jump out of slowly heated water. Intact frogs do jump out, but you can’t know if that’s because of the heat or some other random frog thought. Frogs have really elaborate reflex systems (eg: wiping reflex ), and a pithed frog given a sudden, large noxious stimulation will do something a lot like a jump, but the neural pathways accommodate to a slowly changing stimulus and fail to elicit movement.
Yeah, Orwell had the clarity of fighting against a literal right wing coup. A clear, decisive event to separate the non-violent time from the violent time, and violence instigated by people without even nominal consent of The People.
The slow rise of militancy, matched with spreading desperation, at least so far lacks a trigger. And in the particular case of the US, we have, like, 30 shootings a day just being us. That makes it a lot less shocking when a couple of those are government shootings. We let the right wingers take over the government (arguably, 250 years ago), and they’re just slowly boiling the frog.
I believe Orwell was speaking of the Spanish Revolution (1936), in which he fought on the side of the socialists.
Pacifism is a great ideal, and (I believe) a lot of conflicts can be solved by honest negotiation. Once the shooting starts, though, the time for pacifism has ended. In the US, right now, it’s not clear whether the shooting has started. I mean: ICE is definitely shooting people; people are definitely being injured and dying as result of the administration’s actions, but it’s not Shooting-shooting, and it still seems like avoidable, poor-policy harms. The question is: will it escalate to civil war level violence? And if it does, will strict pacifists already have blocked any hope of resistance?
.63W: N100 server with 2 HDD & 2 SSD. Cable modem. 5-port POE switch. WAP. Ooma VOIP device.
The POE & WAP are like 10W between them, but I had to add them to get strong enough wifi to one particular client. Authentik somehow consumes 3W. Immich also has a high idle load, so I leave it down most of the time.
A kg of almonds takes 3000 liters of water, so that’s 1.9 calories per liter.
Near as I can tell water cost of meat ranges from 2000 l/kg for chicken to maybe 15,000 l/kg for beef. That’s 0.09-0.6 calories/liter. So, 3-20x more people can eat almonds than meat.