@mad-rocket-scientist So, the BLM was right to do exactly what they did; back off, wait for things to calm down & people to go back to their lives, then make whatever arrests they want, quietly, with as little muss or fuss as they can.
Except that I rather seriously doubt that the government will be arresting anyone.
Oh, sure, Bundy will eventually get arrested, but what about all those people randomly milling around threatening law enforcement? Are they going to get arrested for that, or trespassing, or anything? Hell no.
Meanwhile, the government will always invent reasons to arrest non-threatening, fairly civil protesters on the left.
Will the government send in spies, like it does for every left-leaning group? Hell no. (As I've pointed out elsewhere here, the anti-government groups have way more connections to each other, and to actual violent terrorists, than our threshold of other terrorism.)
Saying 'The government should treat the left better' ignores the simple fact it doesn't.
The forces of the right always, ALWAYS abuse government power, and demand more and more power. The only way to make them stop, the only way to get limitations, is to start using it against them.
I suspect WordPress has some sort of algorithm that sees certain words in certain orders and automatically (incorrectly, in my case and presumably yours) classifies the comment as “threat” or “violent/abusive language” and trashes it.
Ah, I didn't even think of that, I bet that was it. I tried removing some emphasizing, just in case Wordpress didn't like my '*'s, but that didn't help. There was indeed a lot of 'threatening language' and 'violence' in my post, although obviously because I was talking about it, not threatening people. ;)
...'rule by law' means exactly the same thing as 'rule of law', you twit. No one has any idea of what sort of nonsense you've imagined as the different. (Probably the 'of law' are laws you like, and 'by law' is laws you don't.)
Rule of law means that the justice system in this country has very specific laws, and is required to enforce those *equally*, and *only* enforce those laws. And, as far as anyone can tell, that is also 'rule by law'.
And I have no idea what *you* think 'rent seeking' is, but it is not 'rule by law'.
And your sentence 'the very essence of the system forces everyone to engage on specific terms of control structures' is complete gobbledygook.
A system, *by definition*, 'forces people to engage on specific terms'. That is the entire premise on a system, although you actually means 'under specific terms' or 'with specific terms'.
But you do not engage (under terms) *on* something, you engage (under terms) *with* something. What does it possibly mean to engage *on* control structures? Do you mean engage on the *topic* of control structures? What are you talking about?
You're some sort of Markov chain robot, sprouting nonsense that no one can understand, so no one can reply to you.
Oh, and it's 'A significant portion of the masses *have*', not 'has'. Seriously, portions of things are always plural, as are 'masses'. I normally ignore spelling and grammar mistakes (and you've made plenty of others), but how the heck do you get that wrong? 'masses has'? Does that even vaguely sound right in your head?
@mad-rocket-scientist So good to see you want a shooting incident to break out. Congrats, you are no better than the militia who are itching for the feds to shoot first.
Uh, no. I said to *arrest* the people there. Or at least try. If it turns into a shooting incident, it's the people who showed up with guns and refused to disarm who made it one.
Did *I* bring the guns? Do *I* think the correct course of action is to violently overthrow the government?
Something like 500 people are killed each year by law enforcement. But, of course, they're poor and usually black, and often *innocent* of anything except being black in the wrong place, whereas the people at the Bundy ranch, if they don't stop threatening police, are *objectively* the sort of people law enforcement are *allowed* to shoot.
And we've killed hundreds of thousands of people in the name of fighting terrorism, but of course those people were dark and not here.
I'll take your objection to a hypothetical of a dozen people deliberately deciding to point weapons at law enforcement and thus getting shot a bit more seriously when it become proportional to the actual facts of just how many people get killed each year by the government due to a) pointing weapons at police, or just *claiming* to have been pointing weapons at police, or b) attempting to overthrow the US government in some extremely diluted way, like because they lived in the same country that a president claimed was somehow related to WMDs which was somehow related to a terrorist attack.
People who *actually* are pointing weapons at law enforcement, and are *openly* attempting to overthrow the US government? Heaven forbid we do anything about that.
But old white people can get away with blatantly threatening law enforcement and operating terrorist networks across the country. Why? Because anti-government terrorism is the fallback of racists, and because one political party has decide to be sure to never step on the toes of racists.
I have attempted to reply to this post *three times*, and for some reason it won't let me.
So I will simply point out that your assertions that poeple who run around *threatening* violence against the government and *threatening* to overthrow it are in no way related to those people who commit violence in the name of overthrowing the government is a bit insane. Of course it's the same people. It's all one group of people, a few thousand of them, openly operating terrorist cells in this country.
How many of the folks associated with things having potential to be like the 2012 Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting, the Knoxville Unitarian Universalist church shooting, the 2008 Times Square bombing, the 2011 Spokane bombing attempt, the 2013 Los Angeles International Airport, the 2009 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the 2010 Pentagon shooting were at Nevada, do you think?
What sort of insane troll logic is that? That all potential terrorists shoot at law enforcement all the time, and if they only *threaten* law enforcement, and not shot them in a single specific instance, they can't actually be potential terrorists?
In my universe, a group of people that think the correct response against the US government enforcing the law is to threaten them with violence, are pretty much the most likely people in the US to become terrorists, period. And, in fact, this is statistically true.
I'm not saying any specific individuals *are* terrorists, but the groups are where terrorists come from, at least our local non-Islamist terrorists. And, this is not some sort of contest as to which is 'more terroristy'. We should pay attention to all sources of terrorism.
But we already spend all sorts of efforts on things that are, frankly, outright unlawful *entrapment* of Islamist terrorism, finding disgruntled idiots and slowly feeding them plans and resources, and then triumphantly arresting them.
We talk about 'radical mosques' because some imam visiting there once said something. (Again, I'm not arguing we shouldn't...the legal system seems to be working fine here, even if sometimes the media is a little too guilt-by-association.)
Meanwhile, we haven't actually gone after the racist separatist trying-to-overthrow-the-government wackjobs at all since the mid-80s, I think. Despite the fact that, instead of hiding in in the dark, they're running around in the open threatening law enforcement. We don't even have to invent clever plans to come up with reasons to arrest them.
Almost every single one of them is blatantly breaking some law or another (Almost none of them correctly pay their taxes, for example...they make up some nonsense about how they don't owe any taxes, and put that on their tax form. And then simply don't pay court decisions against them.), and the actual potential terrorist faction of them would probably not go quietly if the police showed up.
Instead, we treat every single one of them as individuals, despite they fact they are literally members of groups calling for the overthrow of the US government, passing around magazines talking about the day people will rise up and throw off the government, going to what can only be described as training camps, etc, etc.
(Reposting because this didn't post the first or second time. Sorry if it shows up twice.)
Maybe if I could see what you were talking about, I could figure out how it could get into cartomizers and clearomizers (it would almost certainly require the banning of pure atomizers) and whether the topping off becomes a problem.
I basically was suggesting something that worked rather like a key and a lock. You attach the cartridge to the bottle, twist it or whatever, and that opens a port between it and the inside.
But that was just a hypothetical idea. I didn't mean for the FDA to figure out any particular method of childproofing. I was assuming they're just say something like 'The industry must childproof things.' and leave it to them. Like childproof pill bottles...I'm pretty sure it didn't mandate how childproof caps on pills worked, just that they had to have them.
I do like the point about squirt bottles, though. As you pointed out, the stuff doesn't actually taste very good, so if all that can be consumed is one squirt, no little kid is going to drink it past that one. So that in itself might be all the childproofing it needs, or that plus a standard 'depress and rotate' childproofing.
And that also would help fix another problem...people *spilling* the liquid on themselves. As is rather obvious from nicotine gum, you can take it in through the skin.
Take care of those two things and I think you have taken cae of the vast majority of the problem. Incidents would be far less common and particulaly hazardous incidents extremely rare.
Oh, let's be honest here. If we're talking about kids that poison themselves, this is *already* way way down the list. Yes, cases are 'skyrocketing'...because it's brand new and there were no cases four years ago.
60,000 children each year are rushed to the hospital because they stupidly do something that will poison them. My own brother had to have his stomach pumped when he was a kid because he ate an entire bottle of chewable vitamins...because of the iron. Iron toxicity is, in fact, the leading cause of poisoning death of children under 6.
And yet you can still buy iron supplements in non-childproof containers.
This is just an issue because people *want* there to be some issue about this. 'Kid smoke, so kids obviously will try to drink ecigarette juice!'. It's inventing an issue just so there is an issue.
That said, there's no reason not to make it smaller, especially as there's already an uphill battle because people are idiots.
The biggest theat then would be homebrewing.
Expect another issue the first time someone figures out you can put THC in there.
If you replace that with the words 'black man', and read his statement, it's exactly the sort of thing that would cause the right-wing to completely tear itself apart as half the people tried to defend his comments.
Instead, the 95% of the right said WARNING! CAN'T USE THAT WORD! ALERT ALERT! and disavowed him. (Hilariously, he probably thought he was being *polite*.)
It would have been much much much funnier and revealing if he'd used some other word.
Heck, if he replaced it with the code words of 'poor people', he'd *almost* fit into the modern GOP. Not at the national level, it's a little too rough, but it's exactly the sort of thing I can see a candidate for mayor sprouting at some local meeting.
I don't think the problem with Waco is that they were 'left wing'. I'm not even sure what is meant by saying they were 'left wing'...I'm not sure they were, in any way, political. They were *apocalyptic*.
The problem at Waco was basically there was very little reason for the government to be there *at all*. Almost every justification turned out to be invented, except for the gun charges. (For the most obvious example, there's no real evidence of child abuse.)
And the situation was contained. They weren't, for a completely random example, armed roving gangs running around threatening law enforcement.
But, instead, the Federal government showed up where they didn't need to be, and acted in completely stupid ways that any idiot could have seen were counterproductive. A lot of the FBI's behavior seems to reside on weird technicalities about how they didn't attack the compound...except, uh, shooting their dogs and firing tear gas towards them? I don't know how the people inside were magically supposed to know they weren't being shot at.
All this despite the fact that Koresh, instead of the insane person he was portrayed as, was actually somewhat reasonable, and probably would have eventually acceded to demands to turn over his illegal weapons. Instead, it turned into exactly the situation that his religious beliefs said was coming, the 'invasion' he expected.
That said, I don't think the result is really the FBI's fault. Apocalyptic cults tend to end up dead, almost by definition.
Again, I have no idea if you're being sarcastic, and I'm getting a little annoyed at you because of that.
Yes, they *would* be associated with the same groups. There is one loosely-affiliated anti-government right wing *treason* movement in this country, all reading the same magazines and all talking to each other. It overlaps about 90% with the white supremacy movement. (And that 10% is, perhaps, me being generous.)
The *specific words* that Bundy was using, 'Sovereign citizen', was a specific phrase originating in the 'Posse Comitatus movement', a white supremacy movement. As has been pointed out, the fact he started babbling racist nonsense should have been expected by no one. Hell, the sad thing is he probably thought what he said was reasonable because he at least is *willing to share the country* with black people. He's like the most moderate guy he knows!
Those people are Bundy's ranch did not appear out of nowhere. They are all part of a loose-knit group that claims to refuse to recognize the US government's authority. There is a group right now, composing of *thousands* of people, that *openly* assert they will break the law if tested. Some of them *just did*.
And they are, incidentally, almost to a man, *racist assholes*.
And in this country, law enforcement runs stings all the time. A sting is simply creating circumstances where a criminal is likely to commit a crime.
So I suggest we...do that. Completely. All those guys that just threatened law enforcement? Well, let's try *detaining* those people. I mean, they were wandering around with guns during an attempted law enforcement action which had to be stopped due to threats...it seems reasonable to take them down to the FBI office for questioning, see if they can identify people making threats.
Let's see the reaction to that attempt. Let's see if they shoot.
Let's get this little armed insurrection started, and flatten these idiots. Take entire movement apart, as much as possible. Individually. Make each one either stand up to the US government and start shooting, which they've openly been sprouting erections for this entire time, or they are demonstrated to be liars and lose all respect.
The regulators were not stupid. The regulators ignored the stupid people and made reasonable rules.
In fact, they didn't go far enough. They really should be requiring some sort of childproofing or *something* on the bottles. Perhaps some sort of mechanism where the way to refill a cartridge is to lock it in place and tilt the bottle, and that's the only way the liquid normally leaves the bottle...it never actually pours through open air.
I mean, unlike normal childproofing, we don't have to make it easy enough for adults to get into it. No one needs to 'get into' it...they just need to refill one specific thing with it. So make it where it only pours when that one things is attached. (This is assuming a standardization of cartridge sizes that I am sure does not exist at the moment, so this obviously would have to be phased in.)
@jaybird I really doubt that such a sweep would prevent the next Major Nidal Hasan or Tsarnaev brothers but… hey. It’s not out of the question, right?
I'm not sure whether or not you're serious. You do know that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was, in fact, a reader of white supremacy and 911 truther propaganda, right? (Also, 'homegrown'?)
And it sure is interesting you picked the two vaguely Islam-ish attacks, despite the Tsarnaev brothers also being right-wing wackjobs, and the Major Nidal Hasan not really being terrorism. (Terrorism is attacking civilians. Attacking a military base, while treason, is not terrorism.)
Meanwhile, you ignored the 2012 Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting, the Knoxville Unitarian Universalist church shooting, the 2008 Times Square bombing, the 2011 Spokane bombing attempt, the 2013 Los Angeles International Airport, the 2009 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the 2010 Pentagon shooting...
...you know, I'm just going to stop there. But all those were by either racist kooks, or anti-government kooks, or usually both. (Although, to be fair, the last on that list was by a left-wing anti-government kook, but he wasn't part of any *group*, and I didn't say we'd get them *all*.)
I've been watching people talk about regulating ecigarettes with complete amazement. It's just astonishing the amount of nonsense showing up.
For example, why on *earth* would random people who didn't smoke be tempted into vaping, and, if they didn't already smoke, *why would they use nicotine*? What sort of crazy person would do that? Why do we care about this stupid hypothetical?
And we have a rather large public-health reason to reduce the amount of smoking...but do we actually have any public health reason to reduce the amount of *nicotine* use? Yes, it's not great for you, and highly addictive, but is it worse than, for a random example, caffeine?
Considering the complete stupidity of people about this, I suggest that the industry made a mistake when it called them 'ecigarettes'. They should have invented some new name, and talked about the flavors and stuff, and only incidentally mentioned 'BTW, if you're addicted to cigarettes, you can get special juices with nicotine in them, which act like nicotine gum.'
No, that wouldn't have really worked, but 90% of the people on the 'regulate ecigarettes' side are so astonishingly stupid that I suspect if they were called 'portable vaporizer' or something, it wouldn't even trigger in their head.
Of course, these are the same people that don't allow smokers to stand near buildings or anything, because they might pass within ten feet of someone smoking and instantly get secondhand smoke cancer. When in actuality, if you're outside, you're pretty much not getting any appreciably amount of secondhand smoke, especially for the three seconds it takes to walk past someone. (No, smelling it does not mean you are inhaling smoke.) But heaven forbid we have any sort of sanity in that policy.
Note I'm saying this as someone who thinks cigarettes should actually *be slowly banned*, as in, we should slowly raise the smoking age. Someone who is ten years old right now should *never* be able to smoke legally. Because I believe in actual medical evidence...smoking is horrifically bad for you. And I also believe the actual scientific evidence that secondhand smoke is almost as harmful for people to spend hours in smoke a day in an enclosed space...but outside? For a split second? Uh, no. You inhaled more toxic chemicals sitting at that red light behind another car.
@jaybird My main hope at this point is that the authorities arrest him when he’s buying groceries in town or filling up his truck with gas rather than set up some weird power play SWAT kinda thing to prove a point.
Really? What I want the authorities to do is to assert he's under arrest, and head to arrest him.
When threatened, they should take track down the name and identity of every single person that obstructed justice.
Then let them all leave...and arrest them all over the next couple of weeks for obstructing justice, and pretty much anything else they can throw at them, up to and including insurrection.
Think of it as an 'insurrection sting operation'.
Actually, I'm kinda hoping this *is* what happened, that the Federal government *did* manage to catch a lot of them in breaking the law, and will be eventually arresting and charging them all. Such a sweep would probably take down a lot of the homegrown terrorist groups we've got running around.
Your comment would be less completely idiotic if the Federal government was telling Bundy what to do on his own land.
Sadly for the idiocy level of your comment, they are telling him what to do on *their* land.
The whole idea that Bundy would 'live peacefully' with other anarchists is idiotic. What would clearly happen is that he would graze his cattle on *their* land, also.
@katherinemw If they had, the cops would have shot them. The cops beat up and arrested many of them despite non-violence.
That, right there, is the core different between the left and the right.
Uh, no.
That's the core difference between how the *government* treats the left and the right.
The left gets arrested, and assaulted, and let's not even get into how often the police *themselves* trick the left into breaking the law at peaceful protests so they can be arrested. (Google 'Brooklyn Bridge ows'.)
Meanwhile, the right *openly threatens insurrection and forms what can only be called terrorist cell, and somehow, that's all fine.
This is completely insane, and needs to stop.
The goddamn government should have dropped in with SWAT and arrested any one at Bundy's ranch that even *slightly* broke the law. You're on public land and you refused to move? You refused to put down your weapon when asked by law enforcement? You are now under arrest.
Yes, it would have turned them in martyrs and others asshole white supremacist anti-government loons would have sprung into action...and the fucking government should have ground them *into a fine paste*. Kill them if they don't put down their guns, LIKE ANYONE ELSE WHO THREATENS LAW ENFORCEMENT. (And, in a final move, arrest half of Fox News for inciting a riot.)
The US government, this week, negotiated with terrorists.
I've fucking tired of the fact the right wing in this country gets away with anything short of murder, and the left gets arrested on bullshit trumped up nonsense.
At some point, it just becomes blatantly obvious that the entire right side of the court's 'logic' is just 'What can we say to get the outcome we want?'.
Remember, folks, Roberts thinks *jumping through stupid hoops to follow the law* is 'getting around' the law.
You want to know something there's 'no technological reason' for?
Requiring *any* payment for someone to replicate *freely available content* to people who could already get it the other way. That person is providing a public service, and doing a favor for the original distribution.
And oddly, I say this as someone that *loathes* cable companies. But I see absolutely no reason why them setting up an antenna and an amp and running broadcast TV to everyone's house should require them to *pay* for that.
The 'public performance' rules of copyright are completely nonsensical at this point, and should be restricted, at the very least, to not cover things that are freely available and replicated unaltered.
“I mean, there’s no technological reason for you to have 10,000 dime-sized antenna, other than to get around copyright laws.”
It's things like that that make me despair of the Supreme Court.
Yes, you idiot. Aereo is doing it *this* way because the *other* way would be illegal, and this way *isn't*. Wow, we've got a bunch of rocket scientists on the court here.
Renting equipment is legal.
Time shifting is legal.
Transferring data you own over the internet is legal.
Every single bit of Aereo's business model is legal.
"I mean, there's no technological reason for you not to drive your car at 120 miles an hour, other than to get around speed limit laws."
@patrick They got rid of them at the district-drawing point of the process. Which doesn’t have anything to do with campaign spending and has a lot to do with how we draw districts
I agree that's a problem, but a slightly different one. *That's* why the crazy ones sometimes win elections. The reason they win *primaries* is because they have money behind them.
You'll notice that, if what you were talking about was the sole problem, we'd have no crazy Senators. And we do. But let's not pretend this is an either-or thing.
Gerrymandering allows pols who wouldn't be elected to get elected, but only *inter-party*...the primaries themselves still mattered, and kept out the crazies.
And massive spending gives credence to loons who under normal conditions wouldn't be allowed near the political process *at all*. They now get an extra 20% or whatever votes.
With just gerrymandering, you get crazies defeated in primaries. With just massive spending, you get crazies that win primaries and go down to sound defeat in the general. (As the Republicans keep tripping over.)
When you combine *both*, you get crazy elected officials.
@patrick
But we’ve also seen that this doesn’t affect electoral outcomes all that much.
You're wrong there.
Massive spending (Especially if you count *Murdoch* subsidizing an entire cable network for decades, which for some reason never seem to count when talking about 'spending'.) has completely eliminated centrist Republicans, and seriously cut back on *standard* Republicans.
That is an 'electoral outcome'.
What massive spending *hasn't* done is produce the tidal wave of elected Republicans people might expect.
People vote for name recognition and party more than they do who spends the most didge.
Right, which is exactly why the spending is having the opposite effect it's intended. It's occasionally resulted in far-right lunatics being elected, or just showing up at elections as 'Republicans', which has turned people off from the Republican party.
It turns out that massive spending does do exactly what people think. It results in people being able to win primaries despite having massively unpopular ideas. It also results in those people sometimes winning elections.
This, oddly, often is *not* a good thing for people supporting those massively unpopular ideas. Because it turns out that people, believe it or not, don't like it when politicians attempt to enact massively unpopular ideas. (The super-rich need a class in Tautology 101.) Hell, a lot of people are taking issue with actual implementation *even when* they thought they supported the idea.
The massive amount of money being thrown around is not having 'no effect'. It generally is having *the opposite* effect of intended, but that's still an effect.
(I do agree that “Constitutional Republic” is the least helpful of the above phrases.)
Yeah. I'm not entirely sure what a *non*-Constitutional Republic would look like. The very premise of a republic is that it has, at base, some sort of structured government. The whole point in putting 'Constitutional' in front of things is to signify that, as in 'Constitutional Monarchy', that there is a system of laws that are harder to change than just 'the people in power want them to change'. Which is pretty much how it has worked in every Republic, ever. You have laws that are easy to change, and laws that aren't.
While you could technically have a Republic with a 'flat structure' of laws where no law is harder to change than any other (I.e., the elected officials could, tomorrow, make it illegal to vote of the other guy, or whatever they wanted.), I'm not sure such a system of government is actually plausible, and probably would not qualify as a 'Republic' in any meaningful sense. So 'Constitutional' is a completely absurd qualifier. It's like saying 'Asbestos-free Cereal'.
In fact, it's a pretty absurd qualifier most places it's used in the modern world. I understand what 'Constitutional Monarchy' is trying to say, and I would indeed say that England, for example, had a Constitutional Monarchy...under the Magna Carta. That would be a perfect way to describe England *then*, a world where the monarch was in charge, but their powers were curtailed in specific ways.
Nowadays, however, modern Britain is more a 'Republican Monarchy', or even just a 'Republic'. We no more need to mention Britain's monarch than we should mention the US's poet laureate.
Frankly, a more useful method of qualifying a system of government would be one that signifies how the executive and legislative interact...a completely separate executive and legislature, or a Parliament-type affair? Sadly we don't seem to have qualifiers for that, or if we do we don't use them.
@tod-kelly Here in Portland, for example, it’s pretty common for liberals to push for state and city regulations that limit the kinds of foods available to those more expensive foods preferred by upper middle-class liberals. They are also the ones more likely to push for new-housing building regulations that don’t measurably make a house safer, but make it “nicer” and of higher quality — but at a significantly increased price tag.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Not the safety regulations, the 'higher quality' nonsense.
There's a certain strain of liberal thought that says that poor people are 'taken advantage of' by buying crappy things. So we shouldn't let people sell crappy things.
And I'm okay when the crappy things are *actually harmful*. No, we shouldn't let people sell toys that are cheaper because they have lead paint on them. No, we shouldn't let payday loans with insane interest rates happen. And there are, indeed, things we probably shouldn't let people put in food.
And we do need some sort of minimum level of functionality for residences. Working water and heat and electricity and stuff like that. No rats. Stuff like that.
But that's it. That's where the regulations should stop. Making people build houses with at least 1500 square feet or whatever, and have a lot size of half an acre or whatever, is nonsense. It does not help anyone at all. There's no reason the poor couldn't live in essentially hotel rooms, because otherwise they'll live in their cars. (And guess what? Very few cars have running water.)
And *both* parties do this. The left out of a misguided attempt to protect the poor, and the right in an misguided attempt to protect property values.
@brandon-berg For that to make sense, there would have to be large numbers of vacancies. The way monopoly profits work is that the monopolist chooses to increase profits by selling fewer units at a higher price. He can do that because he has no competition to lure away all his customers with lower prices, but demand curves still slope downward. If he raises prices above the market-clearing level, he will sell fewer units. If vacancy rates aren’t high, then there must not be monopoly pricing.
Vacancy rates are astronomically high, so your point is demonstrating rather exactly the opposite of what you want it to.
There are somewhere between 14 and 20 million empty houses in the US. Meanwhile, on the buyer side, there are something like a million homeless families in America, and about another 2 million families who are not technically 'homeless', but are living in other people's basements and their couches and stuff and would like their own house. (1)
Ask yourself what would happen in a *functioning* market where there are around 5 times as much supply as demand? Houses should be an absurd buyer's market, with sellers desperately trying to lure them in via any means possible, especially as housing inventory is *incredibly expensive* to upkeep. Houses aren't like extra cell phones where you can stack them in a warehouse somewhere....there's taxes, actual required property upkeep, vandalism to worry about, etc.
And, yet, you don't see reduced prices. Granted, housing prices have 'gone down', but that's only because they had a completely insane bubble to deflate from. Empty house inventory *continues* to grown, and, somehow, housing prices are the same.
But all the houses are owned by a few groups, either giant holding companies or, most recently, banks. They keep their high monopoly prices. A few *individual* sellers have figured things out and lowered prices, but the monopolies have no incentive to do so. A lot of the monopolies are geographical, so it's hard to see nation-wide, but it's true.
1) Let's not quibble over the number of homeless...because notice the *less* homeless people there are, the *stronger* the supply/demand imbalance is, and the *lower* home prices should be in a free market.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Cliven Bundy, Mass Resistance, and the Fragility of the Rule of Law”
@mad-rocket-scientist
So, the BLM was right to do exactly what they did; back off, wait for things to calm down & people to go back to their lives, then make whatever arrests they want, quietly, with as little muss or fuss as they can.
Except that I rather seriously doubt that the government will be arresting anyone.
Oh, sure, Bundy will eventually get arrested, but what about all those people randomly milling around threatening law enforcement? Are they going to get arrested for that, or trespassing, or anything? Hell no.
Meanwhile, the government will always invent reasons to arrest non-threatening, fairly civil protesters on the left.
Will the government send in spies, like it does for every left-leaning group? Hell no. (As I've pointed out elsewhere here, the anti-government groups have way more connections to each other, and to actual violent terrorists, than our threshold of other terrorism.)
Saying 'The government should treat the left better' ignores the simple fact it doesn't.
The forces of the right always, ALWAYS abuse government power, and demand more and more power. The only way to make them stop, the only way to get limitations, is to start using it against them.
"
I suspect WordPress has some sort of algorithm that sees certain words in certain orders and automatically (incorrectly, in my case and presumably yours) classifies the comment as “threat” or “violent/abusive language” and trashes it.
Ah, I didn't even think of that, I bet that was it. I tried removing some emphasizing, just in case Wordpress didn't like my '*'s, but that didn't help. There was indeed a lot of 'threatening language' and 'violence' in my post, although obviously because I was talking about it, not threatening people. ;)
And I see it's up, woo. Thanks.
"
...'rule by law' means exactly the same thing as 'rule of law', you twit. No one has any idea of what sort of nonsense you've imagined as the different. (Probably the 'of law' are laws you like, and 'by law' is laws you don't.)
Rule of law means that the justice system in this country has very specific laws, and is required to enforce those *equally*, and *only* enforce those laws. And, as far as anyone can tell, that is also 'rule by law'.
And I have no idea what *you* think 'rent seeking' is, but it is not 'rule by law'.
And your sentence 'the very essence of the system forces everyone to engage on specific terms of control structures' is complete gobbledygook.
A system, *by definition*, 'forces people to engage on specific terms'. That is the entire premise on a system, although you actually means 'under specific terms' or 'with specific terms'.
But you do not engage (under terms) *on* something, you engage (under terms) *with* something. What does it possibly mean to engage *on* control structures? Do you mean engage on the *topic* of control structures? What are you talking about?
You're some sort of Markov chain robot, sprouting nonsense that no one can understand, so no one can reply to you.
Oh, and it's 'A significant portion of the masses *have*', not 'has'. Seriously, portions of things are always plural, as are 'masses'. I normally ignore spelling and grammar mistakes (and you've made plenty of others), but how the heck do you get that wrong? 'masses has'? Does that even vaguely sound right in your head?
"
@mad-rocket-scientist
So good to see you want a shooting incident to break out. Congrats, you are no better than the militia who are itching for the feds to shoot first.
Uh, no. I said to *arrest* the people there. Or at least try. If it turns into a shooting incident, it's the people who showed up with guns and refused to disarm who made it one.
Did *I* bring the guns? Do *I* think the correct course of action is to violently overthrow the government?
Something like 500 people are killed each year by law enforcement. But, of course, they're poor and usually black, and often *innocent* of anything except being black in the wrong place, whereas the people at the Bundy ranch, if they don't stop threatening police, are *objectively* the sort of people law enforcement are *allowed* to shoot.
And we've killed hundreds of thousands of people in the name of fighting terrorism, but of course those people were dark and not here.
I'll take your objection to a hypothetical of a dozen people deliberately deciding to point weapons at law enforcement and thus getting shot a bit more seriously when it become proportional to the actual facts of just how many people get killed each year by the government due to a) pointing weapons at police, or just *claiming* to have been pointing weapons at police, or b) attempting to overthrow the US government in some extremely diluted way, like because they lived in the same country that a president claimed was somehow related to WMDs which was somehow related to a terrorist attack.
People who *actually* are pointing weapons at law enforcement, and are *openly* attempting to overthrow the US government? Heaven forbid we do anything about that.
But old white people can get away with blatantly threatening law enforcement and operating terrorist networks across the country. Why? Because anti-government terrorism is the fallback of racists, and because one political party has decide to be sure to never step on the toes of racists.
"
I have attempted to reply to this post *three times*, and for some reason it won't let me.
So I will simply point out that your assertions that poeple who run around *threatening* violence against the government and *threatening* to overthrow it are in no way related to those people who commit violence in the name of overthrowing the government is a bit insane. Of course it's the same people. It's all one group of people, a few thousand of them, openly operating terrorist cells in this country.
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How many of the folks associated with things having potential to be like the 2012 Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting, the Knoxville Unitarian Universalist church shooting, the 2008 Times Square bombing, the 2011 Spokane bombing attempt, the 2013 Los Angeles International Airport, the 2009 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the 2010 Pentagon shooting were at Nevada, do you think?
What sort of insane troll logic is that? That all potential terrorists shoot at law enforcement all the time, and if they only *threaten* law enforcement, and not shot them in a single specific instance, they can't actually be potential terrorists?
In my universe, a group of people that think the correct response against the US government enforcing the law is to threaten them with violence, are pretty much the most likely people in the US to become terrorists, period. And, in fact, this is statistically true.
I'm not saying any specific individuals *are* terrorists, but the groups are where terrorists come from, at least our local non-Islamist terrorists. And, this is not some sort of contest as to which is 'more terroristy'. We should pay attention to all sources of terrorism.
But we already spend all sorts of efforts on things that are, frankly, outright unlawful *entrapment* of Islamist terrorism, finding disgruntled idiots and slowly feeding them plans and resources, and then triumphantly arresting them.
We talk about 'radical mosques' because some imam visiting there once said something. (Again, I'm not arguing we shouldn't...the legal system seems to be working fine here, even if sometimes the media is a little too guilt-by-association.)
Meanwhile, we haven't actually gone after the racist separatist trying-to-overthrow-the-government wackjobs at all since the mid-80s, I think. Despite the fact that, instead of hiding in in the dark, they're running around in the open threatening law enforcement. We don't even have to invent clever plans to come up with reasons to arrest them.
Almost every single one of them is blatantly breaking some law or another (Almost none of them correctly pay their taxes, for example...they make up some nonsense about how they don't owe any taxes, and put that on their tax form. And then simply don't pay court decisions against them.), and the actual potential terrorist faction of them would probably not go quietly if the police showed up.
Instead, we treat every single one of them as individuals, despite they fact they are literally members of groups calling for the overthrow of the US government, passing around magazines talking about the day people will rise up and throw off the government, going to what can only be described as training camps, etc, etc.
(Reposting because this didn't post the first or second time. Sorry if it shows up twice.)
[MikeS: Rescued from spam filter]
On “The FDA’s Light Hammer Comes Down”
Maybe if I could see what you were talking about, I could figure out how it could get into cartomizers and clearomizers (it would almost certainly require the banning of pure atomizers) and whether the topping off becomes a problem.
I basically was suggesting something that worked rather like a key and a lock. You attach the cartridge to the bottle, twist it or whatever, and that opens a port between it and the inside.
But that was just a hypothetical idea. I didn't mean for the FDA to figure out any particular method of childproofing. I was assuming they're just say something like 'The industry must childproof things.' and leave it to them. Like childproof pill bottles...I'm pretty sure it didn't mandate how childproof caps on pills worked, just that they had to have them.
I do like the point about squirt bottles, though. As you pointed out, the stuff doesn't actually taste very good, so if all that can be consumed is one squirt, no little kid is going to drink it past that one. So that in itself might be all the childproofing it needs, or that plus a standard 'depress and rotate' childproofing.
And that also would help fix another problem...people *spilling* the liquid on themselves. As is rather obvious from nicotine gum, you can take it in through the skin.
Take care of those two things and I think you have taken cae of the vast majority of the problem. Incidents would be far less common and particulaly hazardous incidents extremely rare.
Oh, let's be honest here. If we're talking about kids that poison themselves, this is *already* way way down the list. Yes, cases are 'skyrocketing'...because it's brand new and there were no cases four years ago.
60,000 children each year are rushed to the hospital because they stupidly do something that will poison them. My own brother had to have his stomach pumped when he was a kid because he ate an entire bottle of chewable vitamins...because of the iron. Iron toxicity is, in fact, the leading cause of poisoning death of children under 6.
And yet you can still buy iron supplements in non-childproof containers.
This is just an issue because people *want* there to be some issue about this. 'Kid smoke, so kids obviously will try to drink ecigarette juice!'. It's inventing an issue just so there is an issue.
That said, there's no reason not to make it smaller, especially as there's already an uphill battle because people are idiots.
The biggest theat then would be homebrewing.
Expect another issue the first time someone figures out you can put THC in there.
On “Cliven Bundy, Mass Resistance, and the Fragility of the Rule of Law”
I wish he *hadn't* used the word 'Negro'.
If you replace that with the words 'black man', and read his statement, it's exactly the sort of thing that would cause the right-wing to completely tear itself apart as half the people tried to defend his comments.
Instead, the 95% of the right said WARNING! CAN'T USE THAT WORD! ALERT ALERT! and disavowed him. (Hilariously, he probably thought he was being *polite*.)
It would have been much much much funnier and revealing if he'd used some other word.
Heck, if he replaced it with the code words of 'poor people', he'd *almost* fit into the modern GOP. Not at the national level, it's a little too rough, but it's exactly the sort of thing I can see a candidate for mayor sprouting at some local meeting.
"
I don't think the problem with Waco is that they were 'left wing'. I'm not even sure what is meant by saying they were 'left wing'...I'm not sure they were, in any way, political. They were *apocalyptic*.
The problem at Waco was basically there was very little reason for the government to be there *at all*. Almost every justification turned out to be invented, except for the gun charges. (For the most obvious example, there's no real evidence of child abuse.)
And the situation was contained. They weren't, for a completely random example, armed roving gangs running around threatening law enforcement.
But, instead, the Federal government showed up where they didn't need to be, and acted in completely stupid ways that any idiot could have seen were counterproductive. A lot of the FBI's behavior seems to reside on weird technicalities about how they didn't attack the compound...except, uh, shooting their dogs and firing tear gas towards them? I don't know how the people inside were magically supposed to know they weren't being shot at.
All this despite the fact that Koresh, instead of the insane person he was portrayed as, was actually somewhat reasonable, and probably would have eventually acceded to demands to turn over his illegal weapons. Instead, it turned into exactly the situation that his religious beliefs said was coming, the 'invasion' he expected.
That said, I don't think the result is really the FBI's fault. Apocalyptic cults tend to end up dead, almost by definition.
"
Again, I have no idea if you're being sarcastic, and I'm getting a little annoyed at you because of that.
Yes, they *would* be associated with the same groups. There is one loosely-affiliated anti-government right wing *treason* movement in this country, all reading the same magazines and all talking to each other. It overlaps about 90% with the white supremacy movement. (And that 10% is, perhaps, me being generous.)
The *specific words* that Bundy was using, 'Sovereign citizen', was a specific phrase originating in the 'Posse Comitatus movement', a white supremacy movement. As has been pointed out, the fact he started babbling racist nonsense should have been expected by no one. Hell, the sad thing is he probably thought what he said was reasonable because he at least is *willing to share the country* with black people. He's like the most moderate guy he knows!
Those people are Bundy's ranch did not appear out of nowhere. They are all part of a loose-knit group that claims to refuse to recognize the US government's authority. There is a group right now, composing of *thousands* of people, that *openly* assert they will break the law if tested. Some of them *just did*.
And they are, incidentally, almost to a man, *racist assholes*.
And in this country, law enforcement runs stings all the time. A sting is simply creating circumstances where a criminal is likely to commit a crime.
So I suggest we...do that. Completely. All those guys that just threatened law enforcement? Well, let's try *detaining* those people. I mean, they were wandering around with guns during an attempted law enforcement action which had to be stopped due to threats...it seems reasonable to take them down to the FBI office for questioning, see if they can identify people making threats.
Let's see the reaction to that attempt. Let's see if they shoot.
Let's get this little armed insurrection started, and flatten these idiots. Take entire movement apart, as much as possible. Individually. Make each one either stand up to the US government and start shooting, which they've openly been sprouting erections for this entire time, or they are demonstrated to be liars and lose all respect.
On “The FDA’s Light Hammer Comes Down”
Erm...what?
The regulators were not stupid. The regulators ignored the stupid people and made reasonable rules.
In fact, they didn't go far enough. They really should be requiring some sort of childproofing or *something* on the bottles. Perhaps some sort of mechanism where the way to refill a cartridge is to lock it in place and tilt the bottle, and that's the only way the liquid normally leaves the bottle...it never actually pours through open air.
I mean, unlike normal childproofing, we don't have to make it easy enough for adults to get into it. No one needs to 'get into' it...they just need to refill one specific thing with it. So make it where it only pours when that one things is attached. (This is assuming a standardization of cartridge sizes that I am sure does not exist at the moment, so this obviously would have to be phased in.)
On “Cliven Bundy, Mass Resistance, and the Fragility of the Rule of Law”
@jaybird
I really doubt that such a sweep would prevent the next Major Nidal Hasan or Tsarnaev brothers but… hey. It’s not out of the question, right?
I'm not sure whether or not you're serious. You do know that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was, in fact, a reader of white supremacy and 911 truther propaganda, right? (Also, 'homegrown'?)
And it sure is interesting you picked the two vaguely Islam-ish attacks, despite the Tsarnaev brothers also being right-wing wackjobs, and the Major Nidal Hasan not really being terrorism. (Terrorism is attacking civilians. Attacking a military base, while treason, is not terrorism.)
Meanwhile, you ignored the 2012 Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting, the Knoxville Unitarian Universalist church shooting, the 2008 Times Square bombing, the 2011 Spokane bombing attempt, the 2013 Los Angeles International Airport, the 2009 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the 2010 Pentagon shooting...
...you know, I'm just going to stop there. But all those were by either racist kooks, or anti-government kooks, or usually both. (Although, to be fair, the last on that list was by a left-wing anti-government kook, but he wasn't part of any *group*, and I didn't say we'd get them *all*.)
On “The FDA’s Light Hammer Comes Down”
I've been watching people talk about regulating ecigarettes with complete amazement. It's just astonishing the amount of nonsense showing up.
For example, why on *earth* would random people who didn't smoke be tempted into vaping, and, if they didn't already smoke, *why would they use nicotine*? What sort of crazy person would do that? Why do we care about this stupid hypothetical?
And we have a rather large public-health reason to reduce the amount of smoking...but do we actually have any public health reason to reduce the amount of *nicotine* use? Yes, it's not great for you, and highly addictive, but is it worse than, for a random example, caffeine?
Considering the complete stupidity of people about this, I suggest that the industry made a mistake when it called them 'ecigarettes'. They should have invented some new name, and talked about the flavors and stuff, and only incidentally mentioned 'BTW, if you're addicted to cigarettes, you can get special juices with nicotine in them, which act like nicotine gum.'
No, that wouldn't have really worked, but 90% of the people on the 'regulate ecigarettes' side are so astonishingly stupid that I suspect if they were called 'portable vaporizer' or something, it wouldn't even trigger in their head.
Of course, these are the same people that don't allow smokers to stand near buildings or anything, because they might pass within ten feet of someone smoking and instantly get secondhand smoke cancer. When in actuality, if you're outside, you're pretty much not getting any appreciably amount of secondhand smoke, especially for the three seconds it takes to walk past someone. (No, smelling it does not mean you are inhaling smoke.) But heaven forbid we have any sort of sanity in that policy.
Note I'm saying this as someone who thinks cigarettes should actually *be slowly banned*, as in, we should slowly raise the smoking age. Someone who is ten years old right now should *never* be able to smoke legally. Because I believe in actual medical evidence...smoking is horrifically bad for you. And I also believe the actual scientific evidence that secondhand smoke is almost as harmful for people to spend hours in smoke a day in an enclosed space...but outside? For a split second? Uh, no. You inhaled more toxic chemicals sitting at that red light behind another car.
On “Cliven Bundy, Mass Resistance, and the Fragility of the Rule of Law”
@jaybird
My main hope at this point is that the authorities arrest him when he’s buying groceries in town or filling up his truck with gas rather than set up some weird power play SWAT kinda thing to prove a point.
Really? What I want the authorities to do is to assert he's under arrest, and head to arrest him.
When threatened, they should take track down the name and identity of every single person that obstructed justice.
Then let them all leave...and arrest them all over the next couple of weeks for obstructing justice, and pretty much anything else they can throw at them, up to and including insurrection.
Think of it as an 'insurrection sting operation'.
Actually, I'm kinda hoping this *is* what happened, that the Federal government *did* manage to catch a lot of them in breaking the law, and will be eventually arresting and charging them all. Such a sweep would probably take down a lot of the homegrown terrorist groups we've got running around.
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Your comment would be less completely idiotic if the Federal government was telling Bundy what to do on his own land.
Sadly for the idiocy level of your comment, they are telling him what to do on *their* land.
The whole idea that Bundy would 'live peacefully' with other anarchists is idiotic. What would clearly happen is that he would graze his cattle on *their* land, also.
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@katherinemw
If they had, the cops would have shot them. The cops beat up and arrested many of them despite non-violence.
That, right there, is the core different between the left and the right.
Uh, no.
That's the core difference between how the *government* treats the left and the right.
The left gets arrested, and assaulted, and let's not even get into how often the police *themselves* trick the left into breaking the law at peaceful protests so they can be arrested. (Google 'Brooklyn Bridge ows'.)
Meanwhile, the right *openly threatens insurrection and forms what can only be called terrorist cell, and somehow, that's all fine.
This is completely insane, and needs to stop.
The goddamn government should have dropped in with SWAT and arrested any one at Bundy's ranch that even *slightly* broke the law. You're on public land and you refused to move? You refused to put down your weapon when asked by law enforcement? You are now under arrest.
Yes, it would have turned them in martyrs and others asshole white supremacist anti-government loons would have sprung into action...and the fucking government should have ground them *into a fine paste*. Kill them if they don't put down their guns, LIKE ANYONE ELSE WHO THREATENS LAW ENFORCEMENT. (And, in a final move, arrest half of Fox News for inciting a riot.)
The US government, this week, negotiated with terrorists.
I've fucking tired of the fact the right wing in this country gets away with anything short of murder, and the left gets arrested on bullshit trumped up nonsense.
On “ABC v Aereo — Why You Should Care”
Yeah, that's pretty much my prediction.
But could you expand a little more on 'Aereo doesn’t provide dedicated tuners'?
"
At some point, it just becomes blatantly obvious that the entire right side of the court's 'logic' is just 'What can we say to get the outcome we want?'.
Remember, folks, Roberts thinks *jumping through stupid hoops to follow the law* is 'getting around' the law.
You want to know something there's 'no technological reason' for?
Requiring *any* payment for someone to replicate *freely available content* to people who could already get it the other way. That person is providing a public service, and doing a favor for the original distribution.
And oddly, I say this as someone that *loathes* cable companies. But I see absolutely no reason why them setting up an antenna and an amp and running broadcast TV to everyone's house should require them to *pay* for that.
The 'public performance' rules of copyright are completely nonsensical at this point, and should be restricted, at the very least, to not cover things that are freely available and replicated unaltered.
On “Open Post on Gun Violence”
More than *seven billion* people were not shot in Chicago over the weekend, or the weekend before this one, or the weekend before that.
In fact, more than seven billion people have both never been shot, and have never been to Chicago.
Discuss.
On “ABC v Aereo — Why You Should Care”
“I mean, there’s no technological reason for you to have 10,000 dime-sized antenna, other than to get around copyright laws.”
It's things like that that make me despair of the Supreme Court.
Yes, you idiot. Aereo is doing it *this* way because the *other* way would be illegal, and this way *isn't*. Wow, we've got a bunch of rocket scientists on the court here.
Renting equipment is legal.
Time shifting is legal.
Transferring data you own over the internet is legal.
Every single bit of Aereo's business model is legal.
"I mean, there's no technological reason for you not to drive your car at 120 miles an hour, other than to get around speed limit laws."
On “Just because you’re paranoid…”
@patrick
They got rid of them at the district-drawing point of the process. Which doesn’t have anything to do with campaign spending and has a lot to do with how we draw districts
I agree that's a problem, but a slightly different one. *That's* why the crazy ones sometimes win elections. The reason they win *primaries* is because they have money behind them.
You'll notice that, if what you were talking about was the sole problem, we'd have no crazy Senators. And we do. But let's not pretend this is an either-or thing.
Gerrymandering allows pols who wouldn't be elected to get elected, but only *inter-party*...the primaries themselves still mattered, and kept out the crazies.
And massive spending gives credence to loons who under normal conditions wouldn't be allowed near the political process *at all*. They now get an extra 20% or whatever votes.
With just gerrymandering, you get crazies defeated in primaries. With just massive spending, you get crazies that win primaries and go down to sound defeat in the general. (As the Republicans keep tripping over.)
When you combine *both*, you get crazy elected officials.
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@patrick
But we’ve also seen that this doesn’t affect electoral outcomes all that much.
You're wrong there.
Massive spending (Especially if you count *Murdoch* subsidizing an entire cable network for decades, which for some reason never seem to count when talking about 'spending'.) has completely eliminated centrist Republicans, and seriously cut back on *standard* Republicans.
That is an 'electoral outcome'.
What massive spending *hasn't* done is produce the tidal wave of elected Republicans people might expect.
People vote for name recognition and party more than they do who spends the most didge.
Right, which is exactly why the spending is having the opposite effect it's intended. It's occasionally resulted in far-right lunatics being elected, or just showing up at elections as 'Republicans', which has turned people off from the Republican party.
It turns out that massive spending does do exactly what people think. It results in people being able to win primaries despite having massively unpopular ideas. It also results in those people sometimes winning elections.
This, oddly, often is *not* a good thing for people supporting those massively unpopular ideas. Because it turns out that people, believe it or not, don't like it when politicians attempt to enact massively unpopular ideas. (The super-rich need a class in Tautology 101.) Hell, a lot of people are taking issue with actual implementation *even when* they thought they supported the idea.
The massive amount of money being thrown around is not having 'no effect'. It generally is having *the opposite* effect of intended, but that's still an effect.
"
(I do agree that “Constitutional Republic” is the least helpful of the above phrases.)
Yeah. I'm not entirely sure what a *non*-Constitutional Republic would look like. The very premise of a republic is that it has, at base, some sort of structured government. The whole point in putting 'Constitutional' in front of things is to signify that, as in 'Constitutional Monarchy', that there is a system of laws that are harder to change than just 'the people in power want them to change'. Which is pretty much how it has worked in every Republic, ever. You have laws that are easy to change, and laws that aren't.
While you could technically have a Republic with a 'flat structure' of laws where no law is harder to change than any other (I.e., the elected officials could, tomorrow, make it illegal to vote of the other guy, or whatever they wanted.), I'm not sure such a system of government is actually plausible, and probably would not qualify as a 'Republic' in any meaningful sense. So 'Constitutional' is a completely absurd qualifier. It's like saying 'Asbestos-free Cereal'.
In fact, it's a pretty absurd qualifier most places it's used in the modern world. I understand what 'Constitutional Monarchy' is trying to say, and I would indeed say that England, for example, had a Constitutional Monarchy...under the Magna Carta. That would be a perfect way to describe England *then*, a world where the monarch was in charge, but their powers were curtailed in specific ways.
Nowadays, however, modern Britain is more a 'Republican Monarchy', or even just a 'Republic'. We no more need to mention Britain's monarch than we should mention the US's poet laureate.
Frankly, a more useful method of qualifying a system of government would be one that signifies how the executive and legislative interact...a completely separate executive and legislature, or a Parliament-type affair? Sadly we don't seem to have qualifiers for that, or if we do we don't use them.
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@tod-kelly
Here in Portland, for example, it’s pretty common for liberals to push for state and city regulations that limit the kinds of foods available to those more expensive foods preferred by upper middle-class liberals. They are also the ones more likely to push for new-housing building regulations that don’t measurably make a house safer, but make it “nicer” and of higher quality — but at a significantly increased price tag.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Not the safety regulations, the 'higher quality' nonsense.
There's a certain strain of liberal thought that says that poor people are 'taken advantage of' by buying crappy things. So we shouldn't let people sell crappy things.
And I'm okay when the crappy things are *actually harmful*. No, we shouldn't let people sell toys that are cheaper because they have lead paint on them. No, we shouldn't let payday loans with insane interest rates happen. And there are, indeed, things we probably shouldn't let people put in food.
And we do need some sort of minimum level of functionality for residences. Working water and heat and electricity and stuff like that. No rats. Stuff like that.
But that's it. That's where the regulations should stop. Making people build houses with at least 1500 square feet or whatever, and have a lot size of half an acre or whatever, is nonsense. It does not help anyone at all. There's no reason the poor couldn't live in essentially hotel rooms, because otherwise they'll live in their cars. (And guess what? Very few cars have running water.)
And *both* parties do this. The left out of a misguided attempt to protect the poor, and the right in an misguided attempt to protect property values.
"
@brandon-berg
For that to make sense, there would have to be large numbers of vacancies. The way monopoly profits work is that the monopolist chooses to increase profits by selling fewer units at a higher price. He can do that because he has no competition to lure away all his customers with lower prices, but demand curves still slope downward. If he raises prices above the market-clearing level, he will sell fewer units. If vacancy rates aren’t high, then there must not be monopoly pricing.
Vacancy rates are astronomically high, so your point is demonstrating rather exactly the opposite of what you want it to.
There are somewhere between 14 and 20 million empty houses in the US. Meanwhile, on the buyer side, there are something like a million homeless families in America, and about another 2 million families who are not technically 'homeless', but are living in other people's basements and their couches and stuff and would like their own house. (1)
Ask yourself what would happen in a *functioning* market where there are around 5 times as much supply as demand? Houses should be an absurd buyer's market, with sellers desperately trying to lure them in via any means possible, especially as housing inventory is *incredibly expensive* to upkeep. Houses aren't like extra cell phones where you can stack them in a warehouse somewhere....there's taxes, actual required property upkeep, vandalism to worry about, etc.
And, yet, you don't see reduced prices. Granted, housing prices have 'gone down', but that's only because they had a completely insane bubble to deflate from. Empty house inventory *continues* to grown, and, somehow, housing prices are the same.
But all the houses are owned by a few groups, either giant holding companies or, most recently, banks. They keep their high monopoly prices. A few *individual* sellers have figured things out and lowered prices, but the monopolies have no incentive to do so. A lot of the monopolies are geographical, so it's hard to see nation-wide, but it's true.
1) Let's not quibble over the number of homeless...because notice the *less* homeless people there are, the *stronger* the supply/demand imbalance is, and the *lower* home prices should be in a free market.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.