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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • They need a format that breaks the debate up into sections and actually includes fact checking, and a cross examination after each section. Have a team scrambling to find the records, studies, video clips and other evidence that they can bring up. Someone who is mostly honest gets lay ups and affirmation. Someone who lies constantly gets called out and put on the defensive.

    Wouldn’t happen of course. Even if the hosts were down to have someone take on a more adversarial role, Trump would never agree to something that actually holds him accountable for spewing nothing but bullshit. It’s his entire strategy, if he can’t sell snake oil he has nothing to sell at all.


  • This means that anyone who doesn’t like a particular rule or regulation can pick a venue with a friendly judge, challenge it in court, and likely get the outcome they want. Even if judge shopping wasn’t a major problem right now, this would still be a bad idea. The reason Chevron told judges to defer to agencies in matters where the interpretation is ambiguous is because those agencies have the experience and and expertise to understand the issues involved far better than a judge who has to try to master the subject from inside the courtroom.

    This is all the more crazy in light of the recent racial gerrymandering decision, where Alito not only ignored the deference that appeals courts are supposed to show to trial courts (where the case is actually experienced and not just summed up in a brief) but then says that the judicial branch must defer to the legislators when they claim that they are being fair. So judges can just override the executive branch in subjects that they likely do not understand, but they can’t actually contradict the legislature over something like whether a policy is violating someone’s constitutional rights, despite that being one of their core functions for the past couple of centuries.





  • Seems like the first step should be taxing those personal loans that are being used as income. That seems like a simple fix (simple by tax code standards, I’d still expect such a law to be ridiculously complex).

    I do worry about the unintended side effects a of a wealth tax targeting stock ownership directly. That just gives the rich an incentive to squeeze more value out of their investments in order to cover their tax bill. And it seems like it would likely push private companies into selling out more as they grow since the money has to come from somewhere, thus giving even more incentive to cave in to investors who just want to make a quick buck and don’t care about the long term survival of the company.


  • Sounds to me like a way of backing down from their saber-rattling and threats of invasion while trying to not look like they are backing down from anything.

    [Realizes he’s talked up a war that would be disastrous, win or lose] “We’re not going to do that, it’s exactly what they want us to do”

    Of course, that could also just be Xi being full of shit for diplomatic reasons. It’s not like he’d be bound by this in any way. “We’re not going to be tricked by their provocations” can always be followed by a “but now they’ve forced our hand.”





  • I find it interesting that guys like this who want to start a race war always think that this is the thing that’s going to do it. Like we’ve made it through all the other hate crimes, injustices and large scale protests without erupting into a race war, but one more incident will do the trick.

    Also interesting is how closely his plan is tied to the election. He isn’t just trying to send a message before the election, he specifically thinks that his side needs a specific outcome in the election for his plan to succeed. This plan seems to be a direct consequence of current political environment and the messages coming from his preferred candidate and his supporters.

    Now the article doesn’t actually say which candidate needs to win in order to embolden violent white supremacists. But if you need 2 guesses, you should probably consider going back into the coma you’ve been in for the past decade, you’re not going to like the future.


  • Not for the Dominoes trip specifically, but they were paying for me to be there. I would assume that the local Dominoes got some kind of money out of it.

    I’m not saying that the Chik-fil-a thing is something that would have interested me as a kid or that I would pay to send a kid to it. For one thing, the focus on customer service stuff does make it a bit weirder to me. Just pointing out that I had a similar experience and that it was something I enjoyed.

    Some kids would probably love getting to see what happens in the kitchen, making something, and eating it. As long as it’s safe and age appropriate, and assuming they aren’t actually being used as labor, I don’t see how this is harmful.






  • Nearly three decades ago, I remember my grandpa being pissed about proposed changes to social security which were supposed prevent it from going bankrupt. When I asked what his solution was, he said that he paid into the system his whole life, and they owe him the full benefits he was promised. He got a lot more pissed when I asked if he was fine with me paying into the system my whole life and getting nothing, but he didn’t really have an answer. And somehow, I’m sure he thought he won that argument.


  • To be clear, I was just pointing out that the savings aren’t coming from eliminating the death penalty, they are coming from reducing the number of appeals, and therefore increasing the likelihood that an innocent person will spend the rest of their life in prison, which is a bad thing. I’m not advocating for or against the death penalty, but I do think that a life sentence should come with just as many safeguards as a death sentence. The fact that you could release someone who was wrongfully convicted only matters if you actually allow those mistakes to be corrected.

    We could use improvements at every part of the process. The appeals process however can be particularly awful, and is full of arbitrary restrictions and limitations that have little effect other than making it harder to correct mistakes and injustices. Some of them were put in place for no reason other than because politicians wanted to look tough on crime, and apparently overturning convictions looks bad for the justice system’s track record. But really I was only bringing it up because it’s relevant to the cost argument.