President Biden is set to sign a bill blocking gender-affirming trans healthcare for children provided by TRICARE. (A reminder that military members basically can get no insurance besides TRICARE.)
Well, technically, it says 'medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria that could result in sterilization may not be provided to a child under the age of 18', but anti-trans liars often lie that blockers and hormones do exactly that (There is no evidence that blockers do that _at all_, and a few years of hormones generally do not.), and 'could' is wide enough for the Trump administration to drive a bus through.
Oh, it was a good idea. It worked out great for everyone. Democratic consultants made a ton of money, elected officials have a great career ahead of them as lobbyists and make plenty of money while in office, too. And because Democrats are never actually fully in power, they get built-in excuses to never do anything at all that might piss off their donors...not that, at this point, the American people even _understand_ what's going on. It's much easier to just be angry at immigrants and trans people and wokeness.
And now they get four years of, they assume, more #Resistance LARPing. (I am sad to inform them that some of the LARPing this time will be with live ammunition, but they are extremely unlikely to catch any flak and might want to just retire safely to the stacks of money.)
When something works out great for someone and they retire extremely wealthy, it seems a bit silly to assume their actions were 'misguided' in any sense. It seems much more likely people just made some stupid assumptions about where those people wished to be 'guided' to.
I'm not saying that Harris needed to come up with policy to address it.
I'm saying that Harris needed to identify it, needed to break the things that were grouped together as 'inflation' into discrete things and promise to try to fix them, individually.
It's weird how no one seems to understand this: The way issues are presented makes a difference, both in how people understand them and, thus, vote. AND in what people think is solvable and worth trying to solve.
If the Democrats made it clear just how destructive some of the housing policies are, there would be pressure to fix them at the levels they can be fixed.
Also, you, like Democrats, have made the very incorrect assumption that the problem is cities and NIMBY. Yes, that is what causes problems in cities. But housing is at absurd prices literally everywhere, mostly because of the consolidation in the market and, just like food, the limited number of people owning the supply has decided to hike up prices to insane levels to make a profit because they understand that people cannot do without and it it takes a decade for serious competition to exist. (And nothing is stopping them from buying that competition either.)
The Democrats need to, uh, point this out. Explain this. And come up with something to stop it, either via existing antitrust laws or at least proposing new ones.
You know, a reason people would have to vote for them instead of against Trump.
But the people who give them money to get elected are exactly the people doing those things. And thus the Democratic message and policy is: More of the same!
BTW: Rural communities are exactly as worried about being 'gentrified' as urban places, they just don't use that word. They talk about 'traffic' and 'over-priced groceries', and are less worried about being driven out because they own houses. But it's exactly the same concerns, and most of them are not about abstract things, but the very real problem that they don't have anywhere else to live, no one is building cheap housing for them to move into, either in in their existing location or anywhere else they could possibly live, and even if they have somewhere to live they have to be able to afford to live there.
Oh, sorry, and I failed to mention the third thing that looks like 'inflation', but isn't really, the cost of housing. Again, a specific thing that...no one is willing to do anything about.
The problem is not some vague amorphous 'inflation' that just magically started happening. It's wages _not_ going up for decades, housing going up way more than it should for slightly shorter than that (With acrash in the middle), and a bunch of pretty recent price gouging. All of which needs to be addressed as individual problems, but, perhaps more important for a hypothetical past Kamala Harris, need to be _identified_ as problems and not the abstract concept of 'inflation'.
A reminder that everyone here talking about 'inflation'...the problem is not inflation.
Well, not exactly.
There is a problem with inflation, but the problem is actually for several decades that wages have not kept up with it, not that it exists. Low levels of inflation are fine, but low levels of inflation plus slow wages are a disaster. The government takes so long to react to this that by the time anywhere managed to get a $15 min wage, it already was outdated. This is not a recent problem, it's just one that is constantly becoming worse.
Meanwhile, there is a more recent problem of price-gouging in food costs, where food suppliers realized they could raise prices and no one would do anything about this and the free market has not corrected this yet (Because, of course, market corrections can take quite a long time if the number of suppliers is very small, which we have allowed to happen.) If you want, you can argue that's not 'price gouging', but it doesn't really matter what you call it: They decided to make us spend more money on food for no real reason, and no one in the market has stood up and said 'Wait, I can underbid them and make a bunch of money from volume!' You can argue that _will_ happen, eventually, that's how markets work, but it hasn't happened yet.
Now, you may wonder why I mention that, and it's because it's two problems that Democrats flatly refuse to address: Low wages and extreme lack of competition in the market.
That is the only way this situation actually gets fixed, not yammering about inflation, but directly addressing those two specific problems somehow. I won't even try to propose anything, because it doesn't matter: Nothing will happen.
This is something that some alternate universe Harris could have done, or at least promised to do. However, it's something that _this_ Democratic party cannot and will not do.
And now we are in the downward fascism spiral, where it is in the fascist's party best interests to make the economy worse so people cling to it even more, and the opposition party has decayed so much it can't even figure out a logical opposition.
Do we actually think that 66% is meaningfully different than 68%?
By that logic, everyone except Clinton lost _even more_ ground with Jewish voters. Kerry lost 3%, Obama lost _7%_, and Biden lost 3%.
Sure is weird we're now talking about a 2% loss. It's almost as if there's a narrative that people are desperately trying to make.
If there is actually a narrative, it is that Democrats have slowly been losing the Jewish vote, with a small blip as they very slightly came back for Clinton. That's it. It's nothing to do with Harris in particular. (And I'm not even sure that itself is a correct understanding of the situation, but it certainly is better than anything about Harris in particular.)
And the mistake that those people legally in the country make is the idea that the bigots whose party they are supporting will make a distinction between people here legally and illegally.
They may be very very sure they are different, but that ain't how bigotry works.
No he hasn't. He is going to cowardly resign at the end of Biden's term.
Hey, for this fascism, what if we _all_ complied in advance, for fun?
Biden should ask him to resign now and appoint another. I know there isn't actually time, but at minimum it means the acting head of the FBI will be someone _Biden_ chooses until a replacement is confirmed.
I mean, it is very clear that automakers have the technology to make more fuel-efficiency vehicles, and the actual hurdle is cost.
Well, no, I lie.
See, what would actually happen is if they were forced to start selling those vehicles, and they cost what they would, people would just switch to smaller vehicles, which can be made fuel efficient much easier...which would completely bone American car makers who are utterly unable to make good smaller vehicles for some reason. (Japan and Europe would just breathe a sigh of relief and just start selling the cars here they already sell at home and discontinue the bigger stuff. Things actually would be _cheaper_ for them.)
Fundamentally, the problem is that the US keeps coasting along on cheap gas, forever. Because we are extremely stupid.
If I had a magic wand, I'd say 'The cost of gas is magically fixed now, forever. It no longer varies by external factors and no one can change it. Instead, it goes up 10 cents per gallon every year plus inflation. This is irrevocable and will happen regardless of anything, and everyone knows it.'
People would start making saner calculations about the MPG of cars they buy, when they sit there thinking about how much gas is going to be in a decade, and the resale value.
Cheap gas is not good for the US. It's good for the US _in the moment_, but it produces extreme shortsightedness. It is a 'moral hazard'.
It also means outside actors (Who control gas prices) can massive influence American politics in somewhat stupid ways because the American people are, apparently, stupid in all sorts of ways, and think we can somehow get back to 'cost of gas during a pandemic when people were driving 90% less'.
The food dye is something I am 'with him' with also.
It honestly is astonishing how much we alter food to make it look a certain way. Just...change colors.
And yes, they change it like that because we associate that color with that food, but that's literally their fault to start with. It's an idiotic feedback loop where we just use these dyes because the food has to look the way they've been dying it for 50 years.
And, um...there's something people need to know about food. A lot of dyes are...weird chemicals that would actually have problems passing any sort of safety test, they're just sorta...grandfathered in. They've been used in food for decades, so you can use them in food. We don't really know they don't _do anything_.
However, two things: RFJ Jr. is not going to be allowed to add food regulations in an Republican administration. He simply is not. It doesn't matter if he wants to do it.
And..saying he's _right_ about food dyes is...wrong. See, he thinks all sorts of conspiracies about what they cause. I'm not even going to bother to look up what he's said, a bunch of gibberish, but the reason we should not be using them is there is not, and has never been, a reason to use them in our food except to sorta...lie about the food quality. And plenty of them have been found to be actually dangerous.
that “automakers already have the technology” to make SUVs and minivans get the mileage of passenger cars, but don’t do so because, well, because they’re mean.
This reminds me of a very popular conspiracy that somehow lingered until 2000 or so, that automakers had some sort of magical carburetor that would give really really good fuel efficiency, but wouldn't use it.
The funny thing is, some of this conspiracy was true. Not the crazy '600 miles a gallon' or even '60 miles a gallon', and it's unlikely these designs were ever made, but there were theoretical carburetors designed by start of the 90s that could get better gas mileage, supposedly up to 20% better, altering fuel-air mixture in real time depending on conditions in ways that made simple butterfly carburetors look like kid's toys.
The reason they were never used was two-fold: They were more fragile because they had a lot more moving parts (Anyone who has ever had a car with a carburetor knows they can get stuck.), using a lot more feedback and trying to alter the fuel-air mixture based on many more variables, and at that exact moment, we, uuh, invented computerized fuel injection and we just had a computer create exactly the fuel-air mixture we wanted at any give moment, based off whatever variables we wanted to use. Which worked way better than bouncing gasoline off a series of baffles in convoluted ways.
A young middle-class white cishet man running into a serious medical problem and actually discovering that existing 'free market' systems can, in fact, be unfair and knowingly cause a bunch of harm to people by design while making massive profits...and getting so outraged he shoots the people in charge...is just funny.
Like, just one form of being marginalized, just one system that is actively harming him, and the guy just _snaps_.
That's not exactly what it says. What that says is you can, in court, _disclaim_ a pardon that has been issued to you. And if you wish to use one, you have bring it up to the court, or the court can just ignore it, which I think we all assumed was true if we thought about it.
As far as I can see, nothing stops Biden from issuing Schiff or anyone a pardon, and them just...not saying anything. They don't have to say they reject or accept it. (In fact, it probably doesn't matter if they _publicly_ say anything, they'd have to do it in court.) And maybe it doesn't ever come up.
It's Schrödinger's pardon, and the box doesn't have to be opened until the person wants to open it.
Now, Republicans could try to force the issue by trying to make them testify on the grounds they were pardoned, but...that does raise an interesting question, because that's not the courts, and that's just sorta assuming they already accepted the pardon, which they didn't.
In fact, playing this out, I almost feel they could be forced in front of Congress, assert they will not be accepting the pardon and thus do not have to testify, and then, if charged, could...say, in court, they are accepting the pardon. Things they say to Congress are not part of court, they are not bound by them. (They have to tell the truth, but saying 'I plan to reject the pardon' and then later accepting it is not automatically _lying_. Maybe they just changed their mind, an entirely reasonable thing when actually faced with criminal charges.)
At which point they could get hauled back in front of Congress, but we're pretty far in now.
It is worth pointing out how that poll is _completely deranged_.
And also not measuring 'satisfaction'. It's measuring 'In general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?'.
And even there, it's just nonsense.
It has skyrocketing satisfaction during the 2008-2009 subprime mortgage collapse. I know Obama was a popular president, but I seriously doubt he was _that_ popular. It's almost 25% movement! Wait, is this maybe the ACA? I don't recall that being super-popular either?
It also isn't at its highest for 9/11, that was a dip...it's at it's highest for _the months after_.
I have no idea what that poll is measuring, but it not anything sane.
Yeah, but there are also 'operators' that do all kinds of tasks, or contract out tasks, for rich people while _not_ being part of an organization. They're generally called 'fixers'
Rich people know people who can 'get anything done' (Or ask their lawyer who to contact), and if they need someone killed, and don't happen to have anyone who can do that in their employ, the fixer can make it happen. Ad the rich person will play the fixer some rather large fee for something unrelated, and actual murderer will get paid somehow.
There _are_ professional contracted killing in this world.
They just exist in a way that is totally opaque to everyone else.
Meanwhile, there are a bunch of low-level criminals who will do anything if you pay them, too...including immediately flip on you if they get caught, or just be FBI agents to start with, that's pretty popular.
But it does exist. Somewhere between 2%-5% of all _solved_ killings are contract killings, usually for insurance payouts or monetary reasons like inheritance and pre-nups (You will notice these are all rich people things), and that proportion is probably higher for unsolved ones. Mostly because contract killings are automatically at least _slightly_ harder to solve, due to the fact that actual killer has no obvious motive and the person with the motive probably made sure they had an alibi. And if actual professionals are involved, it could be much MUCH harder to solve.
The popular concept of a hitman is bogus, but it isn't particularly more bogus than the popular concept of 'cat burglar' (Ironically because most theft is actually much easier than the competency porn shown in fiction) or 'car thief'. The actual problem is if you buy into the popular conception of hitmen and try to get one, you will be hiring either a cop or a complete nincompoop.
Here, let me just post the link to Blue Sky, I doubt we can actually embed that. Mods can delete the other one:
"If you're cis, one thing I'd like to impart with regards to trans people is that you are being lied to on an almost unfathomable scale, from billionaires like Musk, to religious fundamentalist groups, to print and broadcast media, to entire governments, they're committed to spreading malinformation."
I must say, it is incredibly lucky (If somewhat expected due to what side actually encourages violence) how all the recent assassins are either right-wing or just loony or incoherent politically.
Not only will it make it harder for fascists to use it as an excuse to crack down on the left, but it sorta innoculates against that possibility if eventually someone on the left also does it.
If you're cis, one thing I'd like to impart with regards to trans people is that you are being lied to on an almost unfathomable scale, from billionaires like Musk, to religious fundamentalist groups, to print and broadcast media, to entire governments, they're committed to spreading malinformation.[image or embed]— Casey S. Pumpkins (@caseyexplosion.bsky.social) December 6, 2024 at 11:03 AM
Doctors are not order takers at a McDonalds. They have a higher duty to do what is right, not whatever is demanded.
Never answered my 'Should minors be able to get birth control?' or 'Should minors boys be able to get mastectomies?'
Oh, let me guess, that is 'objectively diagnosable ', which is nonsense. Trans boys having breasts is as 'objectively diagnosable' as cis boys having them.
What you are attempting to claim is that being trans is not objectively diagnosisable, which...it is. Or, rather, having gender dysphoria is objectively diagnosable.
I could list the diagnostic requirements for gender dysphoria for you, but surely since you're in this discussion making statements about it, you know enough to be able to do that, right?
Or, alternately, have you just been subject to a constant stream of propoganda for almost a decade now from a bunch of very rich people who operate the media with absolutely no pushback?
BTW, if malpractice happened here, it happened HERE. As almost all these detrans lawsuit people have had their story fall completely apart on later examination (And it's hilarious you think this is the first one.), we shall see what happens, but if it turns out her doctors did something wrong, they will have to pay.
But the way this _actually_ works is that a bunch of allegations are made that the doctor cannot respond to (Because of HIPAA) and then once it gets into court, it turns out significant portions are not true, or were deliberately misleading. It almost always turns out, in this 'rushed transition', the person rushing them _were_ the patients.
The case goes nowhere and eventually get dropped.
Here, it's worth pointing out how _wildly insanely fast_ the stuff happened in this story. I don't just mean the treatment, but even _getting to see a doctor_. I know an adult who made an appointment at a gender clinic, and she's was handed a year-long wait...to see actually go to the clinic.
And it's also worth pointing out that there are clearly defined standards of care for trans people, and these event do not conform to them. Mastectomies are sometimes done on minors, but 14 is basically unheard of, it's more 16 and 17. Likewise, puberty blockers generally start at 13, not 12. There is absolutely no reason to start testosterone at 13, either, that's well before a lot of cis boys start showing results from testosterone!
Which makes me think there was something going on, but the thing I suspect is not something that makes Johanna Olson-Kennedy look bad, but rather the parents, who were willing to pay incredibly large amounts of money to fast-forward this because their daughter demanded it.
Why do you care about the 'healthy breasts' of 14-year olds girls? What incredibly creepy terminology.
Also, to make it clear here, you're arguing that neither the minor _nor their parent_ can consent to medical treatment.
Do you think all medical care of children done under 'person is unconscious' rules, where we are allowed to assume life-saving consent but nothing else?
If so, do you think minors should be allowed to be on birth control?
In fact, do you think 14-year old boys with gynecomastia should be able to have healthy breasts removed? Please note that gynecomastia in teen boys is almost entirely benign, to the point that most of it doesn't even require a diagnosis test, and, thus, those are also healthy breasts by any measure. But...minors cannot consent to medical treatment, according to you, so I guess the answer is no?
But, hey, congratulations on being propagandized successfully.
Professional hitmen are not a thing. They are really not a thing. Most of the ones that people hire end up being undercover cops.
No, they do. Just not in the way people think they exist.They do not call themselves hitmen or advertise or make themselves accessible to outside people. You cannot _hire_ them to kill people as some sort of one-off thing.It isn't a _gig_ thing, and it sure as hell isn't the $10k hit per-hit that people seem to think is 'realistic'.
But they do exist. They generally call themselves 'security professionals' or ' 'security consultants'. They go on the payroll, or maybe get hired to do some work. When someone needs killing, they go out to kill them.
If you want people killed, you are going to be paying six figures, and you'll be paying it _aboveboard_, with taxes, because you hired them to do some very very expensive 'security consulting'.
And as a general rule of thumb: If rich people want an illegal thing to exist, it will exist. It will just be priced appropriately, not the very small amount that people seem to think 'a hit' should cost.
For the record, I understand that the PPP was a helicopter dump of money and I have problems with it but they’re down the list.
The upper-middle class stealing will always be way down the list, second only to the upper class stealing.
Experts estimate that approximately 10% of the 800 billion given out as PPP was stolen. This is, incidentally, about the same amount as all retail theft in an entire year...done by a lot less people, aka, they each individually stole a lot more. And they're much much easier to track down, we literally have a list of them.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/16/2024”
President Biden is set to sign a bill blocking gender-affirming trans healthcare for children provided by TRICARE. (A reminder that military members basically can get no insurance besides TRICARE.)
Well, technically, it says 'medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria that could result in sterilization may not be provided to a child under the age of 18', but anti-trans liars often lie that blockers and hormones do exactly that (There is no evidence that blockers do that _at all_, and a few years of hormones generally do not.), and 'could' is wide enough for the Trump administration to drive a bus through.
On “From Semafor: Kamala Harris’ digital chief on Democrats ‘losing hold of culture’”
Oh, it was a good idea. It worked out great for everyone. Democratic consultants made a ton of money, elected officials have a great career ahead of them as lobbyists and make plenty of money while in office, too. And because Democrats are never actually fully in power, they get built-in excuses to never do anything at all that might piss off their donors...not that, at this point, the American people even _understand_ what's going on. It's much easier to just be angry at immigrants and trans people and wokeness.
And now they get four years of, they assume, more #Resistance LARPing. (I am sad to inform them that some of the LARPing this time will be with live ammunition, but they are extremely unlikely to catch any flak and might want to just retire safely to the stacks of money.)
When something works out great for someone and they retire extremely wealthy, it seems a bit silly to assume their actions were 'misguided' in any sense. It seems much more likely people just made some stupid assumptions about where those people wished to be 'guided' to.
"
I'm not saying that Harris needed to come up with policy to address it.
I'm saying that Harris needed to identify it, needed to break the things that were grouped together as 'inflation' into discrete things and promise to try to fix them, individually.
It's weird how no one seems to understand this: The way issues are presented makes a difference, both in how people understand them and, thus, vote. AND in what people think is solvable and worth trying to solve.
If the Democrats made it clear just how destructive some of the housing policies are, there would be pressure to fix them at the levels they can be fixed.
Also, you, like Democrats, have made the very incorrect assumption that the problem is cities and NIMBY. Yes, that is what causes problems in cities. But housing is at absurd prices literally everywhere, mostly because of the consolidation in the market and, just like food, the limited number of people owning the supply has decided to hike up prices to insane levels to make a profit because they understand that people cannot do without and it it takes a decade for serious competition to exist. (And nothing is stopping them from buying that competition either.)
The Democrats need to, uh, point this out. Explain this. And come up with something to stop it, either via existing antitrust laws or at least proposing new ones.
You know, a reason people would have to vote for them instead of against Trump.
But the people who give them money to get elected are exactly the people doing those things. And thus the Democratic message and policy is: More of the same!
BTW: Rural communities are exactly as worried about being 'gentrified' as urban places, they just don't use that word. They talk about 'traffic' and 'over-priced groceries', and are less worried about being driven out because they own houses. But it's exactly the same concerns, and most of them are not about abstract things, but the very real problem that they don't have anywhere else to live, no one is building cheap housing for them to move into, either in in their existing location or anywhere else they could possibly live, and even if they have somewhere to live they have to be able to afford to live there.
"
Oh, sorry, and I failed to mention the third thing that looks like 'inflation', but isn't really, the cost of housing. Again, a specific thing that...no one is willing to do anything about.
The problem is not some vague amorphous 'inflation' that just magically started happening. It's wages _not_ going up for decades, housing going up way more than it should for slightly shorter than that (With acrash in the middle), and a bunch of pretty recent price gouging. All of which needs to be addressed as individual problems, but, perhaps more important for a hypothetical past Kamala Harris, need to be _identified_ as problems and not the abstract concept of 'inflation'.
"
A reminder that everyone here talking about 'inflation'...the problem is not inflation.
Well, not exactly.
There is a problem with inflation, but the problem is actually for several decades that wages have not kept up with it, not that it exists. Low levels of inflation are fine, but low levels of inflation plus slow wages are a disaster. The government takes so long to react to this that by the time anywhere managed to get a $15 min wage, it already was outdated. This is not a recent problem, it's just one that is constantly becoming worse.
Meanwhile, there is a more recent problem of price-gouging in food costs, where food suppliers realized they could raise prices and no one would do anything about this and the free market has not corrected this yet (Because, of course, market corrections can take quite a long time if the number of suppliers is very small, which we have allowed to happen.) If you want, you can argue that's not 'price gouging', but it doesn't really matter what you call it: They decided to make us spend more money on food for no real reason, and no one in the market has stood up and said 'Wait, I can underbid them and make a bunch of money from volume!' You can argue that _will_ happen, eventually, that's how markets work, but it hasn't happened yet.
Now, you may wonder why I mention that, and it's because it's two problems that Democrats flatly refuse to address: Low wages and extreme lack of competition in the market.
That is the only way this situation actually gets fixed, not yammering about inflation, but directly addressing those two specific problems somehow. I won't even try to propose anything, because it doesn't matter: Nothing will happen.
This is something that some alternate universe Harris could have done, or at least promised to do. However, it's something that _this_ Democratic party cannot and will not do.
And now we are in the downward fascism spiral, where it is in the fascist's party best interests to make the economy worse so people cling to it even more, and the opposition party has decayed so much it can't even figure out a logical opposition.
"
Do we actually think that 66% is meaningfully different than 68%?
By that logic, everyone except Clinton lost _even more_ ground with Jewish voters. Kerry lost 3%, Obama lost _7%_, and Biden lost 3%.
Sure is weird we're now talking about a 2% loss. It's almost as if there's a narrative that people are desperately trying to make.
If there is actually a narrative, it is that Democrats have slowly been losing the Jewish vote, with a small blip as they very slightly came back for Clinton. That's it. It's nothing to do with Harris in particular. (And I'm not even sure that itself is a correct understanding of the situation, but it certainly is better than anything about Harris in particular.)
On “Asian Voters Abandoned Democrats in Droves and Might Not be Coming Back”
And the mistake that those people legally in the country make is the idea that the bigots whose party they are supporting will make a distinction between people here legally and illegally.
They may be very very sure they are different, but that ain't how bigotry works.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/9/2024”
No he hasn't. He is going to cowardly resign at the end of Biden's term.
Hey, for this fascism, what if we _all_ complied in advance, for fun?
Biden should ask him to resign now and appoint another. I know there isn't actually time, but at minimum it means the acting head of the FBI will be someone _Biden_ chooses until a replacement is confirmed.
On “Thursday Throughput: RFK Jr Edition”
I mean, it is very clear that automakers have the technology to make more fuel-efficiency vehicles, and the actual hurdle is cost.
Well, no, I lie.
See, what would actually happen is if they were forced to start selling those vehicles, and they cost what they would, people would just switch to smaller vehicles, which can be made fuel efficient much easier...which would completely bone American car makers who are utterly unable to make good smaller vehicles for some reason. (Japan and Europe would just breathe a sigh of relief and just start selling the cars here they already sell at home and discontinue the bigger stuff. Things actually would be _cheaper_ for them.)
Fundamentally, the problem is that the US keeps coasting along on cheap gas, forever. Because we are extremely stupid.
If I had a magic wand, I'd say 'The cost of gas is magically fixed now, forever. It no longer varies by external factors and no one can change it. Instead, it goes up 10 cents per gallon every year plus inflation. This is irrevocable and will happen regardless of anything, and everyone knows it.'
People would start making saner calculations about the MPG of cars they buy, when they sit there thinking about how much gas is going to be in a decade, and the resale value.
Cheap gas is not good for the US. It's good for the US _in the moment_, but it produces extreme shortsightedness. It is a 'moral hazard'.
It also means outside actors (Who control gas prices) can massive influence American politics in somewhat stupid ways because the American people are, apparently, stupid in all sorts of ways, and think we can somehow get back to 'cost of gas during a pandemic when people were driving 90% less'.
"
The food dye is something I am 'with him' with also.
It honestly is astonishing how much we alter food to make it look a certain way. Just...change colors.
And yes, they change it like that because we associate that color with that food, but that's literally their fault to start with. It's an idiotic feedback loop where we just use these dyes because the food has to look the way they've been dying it for 50 years.
And, um...there's something people need to know about food. A lot of dyes are...weird chemicals that would actually have problems passing any sort of safety test, they're just sorta...grandfathered in. They've been used in food for decades, so you can use them in food. We don't really know they don't _do anything_.
However, two things: RFJ Jr. is not going to be allowed to add food regulations in an Republican administration. He simply is not. It doesn't matter if he wants to do it.
And..saying he's _right_ about food dyes is...wrong. See, he thinks all sorts of conspiracies about what they cause. I'm not even going to bother to look up what he's said, a bunch of gibberish, but the reason we should not be using them is there is not, and has never been, a reason to use them in our food except to sorta...lie about the food quality. And plenty of them have been found to be actually dangerous.
"
This reminds me of a very popular conspiracy that somehow lingered until 2000 or so, that automakers had some sort of magical carburetor that would give really really good fuel efficiency, but wouldn't use it.
The funny thing is, some of this conspiracy was true. Not the crazy '600 miles a gallon' or even '60 miles a gallon', and it's unlikely these designs were ever made, but there were theoretical carburetors designed by start of the 90s that could get better gas mileage, supposedly up to 20% better, altering fuel-air mixture in real time depending on conditions in ways that made simple butterfly carburetors look like kid's toys.
The reason they were never used was two-fold: They were more fragile because they had a lot more moving parts (Anyone who has ever had a car with a carburetor knows they can get stuck.), using a lot more feedback and trying to alter the fuel-air mixture based on many more variables, and at that exact moment, we, uuh, invented computerized fuel injection and we just had a computer create exactly the fuel-air mixture we wanted at any give moment, based off whatever variables we wanted to use. Which worked way better than bouncing gasoline off a series of baffles in convoluted ways.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/9/2024”
A young middle-class white cishet man running into a serious medical problem and actually discovering that existing 'free market' systems can, in fact, be unfair and knowingly cause a bunch of harm to people by design while making massive profits...and getting so outraged he shoots the people in charge...is just funny.
Like, just one form of being marginalized, just one system that is actively harming him, and the guy just _snaps_.
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That's not exactly what it says. What that says is you can, in court, _disclaim_ a pardon that has been issued to you. And if you wish to use one, you have bring it up to the court, or the court can just ignore it, which I think we all assumed was true if we thought about it.
As far as I can see, nothing stops Biden from issuing Schiff or anyone a pardon, and them just...not saying anything. They don't have to say they reject or accept it. (In fact, it probably doesn't matter if they _publicly_ say anything, they'd have to do it in court.) And maybe it doesn't ever come up.
It's Schrödinger's pardon, and the box doesn't have to be opened until the person wants to open it.
Now, Republicans could try to force the issue by trying to make them testify on the grounds they were pardoned, but...that does raise an interesting question, because that's not the courts, and that's just sorta assuming they already accepted the pardon, which they didn't.
In fact, playing this out, I almost feel they could be forced in front of Congress, assert they will not be accepting the pardon and thus do not have to testify, and then, if charged, could...say, in court, they are accepting the pardon. Things they say to Congress are not part of court, they are not bound by them. (They have to tell the truth, but saying 'I plan to reject the pardon' and then later accepting it is not automatically _lying_. Maybe they just changed their mind, an entirely reasonable thing when actually faced with criminal charges.)
At which point they could get hauled back in front of Congress, but we're pretty far in now.
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It is worth pointing out how that poll is _completely deranged_.
And also not measuring 'satisfaction'. It's measuring 'In general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?'.
And even there, it's just nonsense.
It has skyrocketing satisfaction during the 2008-2009 subprime mortgage collapse. I know Obama was a popular president, but I seriously doubt he was _that_ popular. It's almost 25% movement! Wait, is this maybe the ACA? I don't recall that being super-popular either?
It also isn't at its highest for 9/11, that was a dip...it's at it's highest for _the months after_.
I have no idea what that poll is measuring, but it not anything sane.
On “From the New York Post: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot outside Hilton hotel in Midtown in targeted attack: cops”
Yeah, but there are also 'operators' that do all kinds of tasks, or contract out tasks, for rich people while _not_ being part of an organization. They're generally called 'fixers'
Rich people know people who can 'get anything done' (Or ask their lawyer who to contact), and if they need someone killed, and don't happen to have anyone who can do that in their employ, the fixer can make it happen. Ad the rich person will play the fixer some rather large fee for something unrelated, and actual murderer will get paid somehow.
There _are_ professional contracted killing in this world.
They just exist in a way that is totally opaque to everyone else.
Meanwhile, there are a bunch of low-level criminals who will do anything if you pay them, too...including immediately flip on you if they get caught, or just be FBI agents to start with, that's pretty popular.
But it does exist. Somewhere between 2%-5% of all _solved_ killings are contract killings, usually for insurance payouts or monetary reasons like inheritance and pre-nups (You will notice these are all rich people things), and that proportion is probably higher for unsolved ones. Mostly because contract killings are automatically at least _slightly_ harder to solve, due to the fact that actual killer has no obvious motive and the person with the motive probably made sure they had an alibi. And if actual professionals are involved, it could be much MUCH harder to solve.
The popular concept of a hitman is bogus, but it isn't particularly more bogus than the popular concept of 'cat burglar' (Ironically because most theft is actually much easier than the competency porn shown in fiction) or 'car thief'. The actual problem is if you buy into the popular conception of hitmen and try to get one, you will be hiring either a cop or a complete nincompoop.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/2/2024”
Here, let me just post the link to Blue Sky, I doubt we can actually embed that. Mods can delete the other one:
"If you're cis, one thing I'd like to impart with regards to trans people is that you are being lied to on an almost unfathomable scale, from billionaires like Musk, to religious fundamentalist groups, to print and broadcast media, to entire governments, they're committed to spreading malinformation."
https://bsky.app/profile/caseyexplosion.bsky.social/post/3lcnknt6a2s2t
Read it, there's more.
On “From the New York Post: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot outside Hilton hotel in Midtown in targeted attack: cops”
I must say, it is incredibly lucky (If somewhat expected due to what side actually encourages violence) how all the recent assassins are either right-wing or just loony or incoherent politically.
Not only will it make it harder for fascists to use it as an excuse to crack down on the left, but it sorta innoculates against that possibility if eventually someone on the left also does it.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/2/2024”
Yeah.
Let's see if this Blue Sky embed works:
I doubt it will, so here's the link:
https://bsky.app/profile/caseyexplosion.bsky.social/post/3lcnknt6a2s2t
"
Never answered my 'Should minors be able to get birth control?' or 'Should minors boys be able to get mastectomies?'
Oh, let me guess, that is 'objectively diagnosable ', which is nonsense. Trans boys having breasts is as 'objectively diagnosable' as cis boys having them.
What you are attempting to claim is that being trans is not objectively diagnosisable, which...it is. Or, rather, having gender dysphoria is objectively diagnosable.
I could list the diagnostic requirements for gender dysphoria for you, but surely since you're in this discussion making statements about it, you know enough to be able to do that, right?
Or, alternately, have you just been subject to a constant stream of propoganda for almost a decade now from a bunch of very rich people who operate the media with absolutely no pushback?
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BTW, if malpractice happened here, it happened HERE. As almost all these detrans lawsuit people have had their story fall completely apart on later examination (And it's hilarious you think this is the first one.), we shall see what happens, but if it turns out her doctors did something wrong, they will have to pay.
But the way this _actually_ works is that a bunch of allegations are made that the doctor cannot respond to (Because of HIPAA) and then once it gets into court, it turns out significant portions are not true, or were deliberately misleading. It almost always turns out, in this 'rushed transition', the person rushing them _were_ the patients.
The case goes nowhere and eventually get dropped.
Here, it's worth pointing out how _wildly insanely fast_ the stuff happened in this story. I don't just mean the treatment, but even _getting to see a doctor_. I know an adult who made an appointment at a gender clinic, and she's was handed a year-long wait...to see actually go to the clinic.
And it's also worth pointing out that there are clearly defined standards of care for trans people, and these event do not conform to them. Mastectomies are sometimes done on minors, but 14 is basically unheard of, it's more 16 and 17. Likewise, puberty blockers generally start at 13, not 12. There is absolutely no reason to start testosterone at 13, either, that's well before a lot of cis boys start showing results from testosterone!
Which makes me think there was something going on, but the thing I suspect is not something that makes Johanna Olson-Kennedy look bad, but rather the parents, who were willing to pay incredibly large amounts of money to fast-forward this because their daughter demanded it.
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Why do you care about the 'healthy breasts' of 14-year olds girls? What incredibly creepy terminology.
Also, to make it clear here, you're arguing that neither the minor _nor their parent_ can consent to medical treatment.
Do you think all medical care of children done under 'person is unconscious' rules, where we are allowed to assume life-saving consent but nothing else?
If so, do you think minors should be allowed to be on birth control?
In fact, do you think 14-year old boys with gynecomastia should be able to have healthy breasts removed? Please note that gynecomastia in teen boys is almost entirely benign, to the point that most of it doesn't even require a diagnosis test, and, thus, those are also healthy breasts by any measure. But...minors cannot consent to medical treatment, according to you, so I guess the answer is no?
But, hey, congratulations on being propagandized successfully.
On “From the New York Post: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot outside Hilton hotel in Midtown in targeted attack: cops”
The lawyer didn't even do anything, IIRC.
They have the same thing happen in Jurassic World to one of the lead's assistants, who...also hadn't done anything.
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No, they do. Just not in the way people think they exist.They do not call themselves hitmen or advertise or make themselves accessible to outside people. You cannot _hire_ them to kill people as some sort of one-off thing.It isn't a _gig_ thing, and it sure as hell isn't the $10k hit per-hit that people seem to think is 'realistic'.
But they do exist. They generally call themselves 'security professionals' or ' 'security consultants'. They go on the payroll, or maybe get hired to do some work. When someone needs killing, they go out to kill them.
If you want people killed, you are going to be paying six figures, and you'll be paying it _aboveboard_, with taxes, because you hired them to do some very very expensive 'security consulting'.
And as a general rule of thumb: If rich people want an illegal thing to exist, it will exist. It will just be priced appropriately, not the very small amount that people seem to think 'a hit' should cost.
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My theory is that a) hitmen exist, and b) have loved ones, who c) have UHC health insurance.
It sorta becomes obvious after you realize those three things.
This is a John Wick situation, crossed a bit with Nathan Ford from Leverage. UHC killed a family member.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/2/2024”
The upper-middle class stealing will always be way down the list, second only to the upper class stealing.
Experts estimate that approximately 10% of the 800 billion given out as PPP was stolen. This is, incidentally, about the same amount as all retail theft in an entire year...done by a lot less people, aka, they each individually stole a lot more. And they're much much easier to track down, we literally have a list of them.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.