Yeah, you can think of it as a simple transaction fee for debit transactions, and a full blown credit and risk shifting system for credit transactions. The banks charge high fees for credit transactions because they’re actually lending money and bearing some credit risk for them, whereas the debit transactions are just moving money from one account to another.
This stuff takes a while to get going.
The FTC sued to stop Microsoft from acquiring Activision in December 2022, but lost.
DOJ sued Google in January 2023, and won their trial last month.
The FTC and DOJ started rulemaking on new merger disclosure and review requirements in June 2023.
The FTC sued Amazon in September 2023.
DOJ sued Ticketmaster/Live Nation in May 2024.
The last two years have shown aggressive antitrust enforcement for the first time in about 50 years, when Robert Bork basically convinced the Supreme Court and all Republicans to impose almost impossible standards for antitrust regulations.
I think this article misleadingly states what the stats show.
Each American generation is less religious than the older generations, and Gen Z is no different. It’s just that Gen Z women are far less religious than previous generations, a bigger gap than the men. From the study that provides the underlying stats:
What’s remarkable is how much larger the generational differences are among women than men. Gen Z men are only 11-points more religiously unaffiliated than Baby Boomer men, but the gap among women is almost two and a half times as large. Thirty-nine percent of Gen Z women are unaffiliated compared to only 14 percent of Baby Boomer women.
In other words, Gen Z men are less religious than Boomer men. This basic conclusion doesn’t seem to come through in the original article, which almost suggests that young men are more religious than older generations.
The kinetic energy in that stardust, and the gravitational potential energy of stardust pulling itself into tighter balls, doesn’t necessarily come from fusion. There’s all sorts of cosmological forces and energy out there, and I don’t think they all trace back to nucleii smushing together.
So is biomass. And wind. And fossil fuels. And hydro.
In fact, I think only geothermal and fission aren’t fusion-based.
This is a counter to the Democratic party supporters you see everywhere who always get irrationally upset at third party voters, not about Republicans.
Plenty of us Democrats are very much in support of a ranked choice voting schemes, or similar structural rules like non-partisan blanket primaries (aka jungle primaries). The most solidly Democratic state, California, has implemented top-2 primaries that give independents and third parties a solid shot for anyone who can get close to a plurality of votes as the top choice.
Alaska’s top four primary, with RCV deciding between those four on election day, is probably the best system we can realistically achieve in a relatively short amount of time.
Plenty of states have ballot initiatives that bypass elected officials, so people should be putting energy into those campaigns.
But by the time it comes down to a plurality-take-all election between a Republican who won the primary, a Democrat who won the primary, and various third party or independents who have no chance of winning, the responsible thing to make your views represented is to vote for the person who represents the best option among people who can win.
Partisan affiliation is open. If a person really wants to run on their own platform, they can go and try to win a primary for a major party, and change it from within.
TL;DR: I’ll fight for structural changes to make it easier for third parties and independents to win. But under the current rules, voting for a spoiler is throwing the election and owning the results.
Racists would pay quite a bit of money to be able to target certain ethnic groups.
I didn’t know I was learning a life skill at the time.
The House of the Dead 2 was a really popular arcade game at the time, so adapting the preexisting game into an at-home typing trainer was actually genius innovation.
There was. If you map that onto the growth in population you’ll see that tickets per person has been dropping since about 2000.
The NOVA system is bad science, in my opinion.
When asked to classify centuries-old staples like cheese or jam or bread or pickles, the experts struggle to find a consensus on which category any given food is. And so the classification system itself is so imprecisely defined that studies based on the system will rest on a shaky foundation.
It’s better to identify what specific foods and what specific cooking techniques are bad and how they might be bad, rather than trying to say that the act of chopping, blending, mixing, cooking, or fermentation automatically makes a food less healthy.
If certain additives are bad, say that those are bad. Don’t try to lump in the other processing techniques into one basket.
Typing of the dead
Still my favorite example of gamification: take a useful task and make it so fun that people will gladly devote hours and hours of their time to it.
For the U.S. at least:
With condos, there’s a condo association that owns all the common areas. Then the association itself is owned by the owners of the units, and the management is elected by the owners.
With co-ops, the unit owners directly own the common areas in common, and the management is also elected by the owners.
Functionally speaking they’re very similar, and co-ops tend to exist in places where this legal structure predates the invention of homeowner associations (basically New York).
If you you blow the guts out and faces off Russian soldiers by more traditional means they are just as dead
I (and all the people and organizations that have worked throughout the last century to get incendiary weapons banned as anti-personnel weapons) generally feel that the method of killing matters, and that some methods are excessively cruel or represent excessive risk of long term suffering.
The existing protocol on incendiary weapons recognizes the difference, by requiring signatory nations to go out of their way to avoid using incendiary weapons in places where civilian harm might occur. Even in contexts where a barrage of artillery near civilians might not violate the law, airborne flame throwers are forbidden. Because incendiary weapons are different, and a line is drawn there, knowing that there actually is a difference between negligently killing civilians with shrapnel versus negligently killing civilians with burning.
There are degrees of morality and ethics, even in war, and incendiary weapons intentionally targeting personnel crosses a line that I would draw.
The moral high ground is absolutely critical in war. War is politics by other means, and being able to build consensus, marshal resources, recruit personnel, persuade allies to help, persuade adversaries to surrender or lay down their arms, persuade the allies of your adversaries not to get involved, and keep the peace after a war is over, all depend on one’s public image. There are ways to wage war without it, but most militaries that blatantly disregard morals find it difficult to actually win.
In this case? The entire military strategy of Ukraine in this war is highly dependent on preserving the moral high ground.
The United States and the UK successfully blocked attempts to outlaw all use of incendiary weapons, and all use of incendiary weapons against personnel, and all use of incendiary weapons against forests and plant cover.
This is an area where it’s perfectly reasonable to disagree with how the US watered down this convention, to push for stricter rules on this, and to condemn the use of thermite as an anti-personnel weapon and the use of incendiary weapons on plants that are being used for cover and concealment of military objectives.
So pointing out that this might technically be legal isn’t enough for me to personally be OK with this. I think it’s morally reprehensible, and I’d prefer for Ukraine to keep the moral high ground in this war.
Wait is there a way to invent awful things and then patent troll so that nobody can actually bring them to market?
The escalation of Starlink not complying comes from that, not the other way around.
I’ve looked closer (at other articles, too). You’re right - the freezing of the SpaceX accounts came from the same order that ordered that Twitter be blocked, and before SpaceX announced it would refuse to comply.
The proper thing to do is to recognize the legally distinct personhood of SpaceX, which isn’t part of Twitter, even if Twitter/X itself is wrong on the law.
Twitter has accounts that Brazil says violates Brazilian law.
Brazil took steps to shut down those accounts in Brazil.
Twitter refused to cooperate, going as far as to fire all of its Brazilian staff, so that it can’t be reached by the Brazilian courts.
The Brazilian courts ordered all of Twitter be blocked until they comply with local law that they designate a corporate representative who can be served by court processes.
Brazilian ISPs complied with the court order to block Twitter.
Starlink did not comply, and Brazilian courts froze SpaceX’s Brazilian assets, including bank accounts, and started making moves towards de-licensing Starlink, including its 23 ground stations located in Brazil.
The issue escalated to the full Brazilian Supreme Court, who ruled that the assets should remain frozen until Starlink starts complying with court orders.
Now Starlink says it will comply with the court order.
The order to block Twitter went to all Brazilian ISPs, and Starlink is the only one that didn’t comply on Saturday. So the escalation stems from the disregard of an order that everyone was required to obey, but the intertwined nature of both companies being controlled by Musk is both part of the reason why SpaceX would even consider not complying with local law in a country it operates in, and why the Brazilian courts seem to be willing to aggressively enforce their own orders.
Edit: I’m convinced. This comment as originally written presented the facts out of order.
Radio Shack limped along for maybe a decade after their core business stopped making sense, because of their cell phone deals. This Onion article from 2007 captures the cultural place that RadioShack operated in at the time, and they didn’t file bankruptcy until 2015 (and then reorganized and filed bankruptcy again in 2017).