BeautifulMind ♾️ @ BeautifulMind @lemmy.world

Late-diagnosed autistic, special interest-haver, dad, cyclist, software pro

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2 yr. ago

"total victory" sure sounds like they've given some thought to their objectives and it's no accident they're killing lots of civilians

I've been watching the tech to make actual meat from cell lines emerge with some optimism- it promises to make it possible for us to have meat in our diets without all the greenhouse gases and feedlots and the like- but it also threatens to consolidate the protein industry into even fewer corporate hands if it's not well-regulated.

The meat industry is honestly pretty awful (environmentally, politically, ethically, etc.) and I find myself rooting for the plucky young frankenmonsters that might come along and knock them down even though I'm pretty sure they'll be worse if they're not well regulated from the start.

This is where windfall taxes come back into basic utility. Also it becomes the basis for antitrust action on price collusion if all the sellers coordinate

...you really do need to be specific. Otherwise, it sounds like you're claiming that "the production processes" (of what, everything? all products in the entire economy?) require PFOAs- and that's plain bullshit.

Yes, there are some products for which there aren't equivalent inputs, and you don't need to be vague and generalize over all of productive everything in the economy in order to make that point- but given the opportunity to be specific, you specified "production of base chemicals that are used in various other follow-up products" and that's not a straight or specific answer to a direct question.

there is no other material known to withstand the temperatures and pressures needed in the production processes?

Production of what, exactly?

I think the biggest problem isn’t the tax rate, but the fact that the billionaire class can circumvent the tax system entirely

That's only possible because they're allowed to buy influence in the system to make it allow for that. In reality, the other threats (they'll take their wealth to other countries and leave us poor) are bluffing; most of their wealth isn't portable. Also in reality, most of the policies they demand (and get) aren't democratically popular, they're only viable because they spend so much collective money on propaganda and think tanks to get people thinking the money will trickle down or that without them as 'job creators' all will be spoiled or lost.

It's bullshit, and it only works because we let it work. Apparently we need to move in hundred-year cycles between letting the titans of industry squeeze everyone dry before we remember to assert public power to prevent that

it is literally just Poland between Germany and russia

Poland has one of the most powerful militaries in Europe. If you think Russia's been struggling in Ukraine, you haven't seen anything yet. Since Poland joined the EU (and later, NATO) it's become much more prosperous than it was under Soviet/Russian influence:

Yes, the downsides of at-large reps would surely be that if no one rep is responsible for particular local issue(s), it's possible that none would take it up and that would leave some constituencies unrepresented. My thought about that is that when district maps are drawn to purposely divide particular constituencies (I mean, look at all those pack-and-crack maps that split minority groups into districts that mostly elect people that don't represent them), an at-large system might allow those constituencies to unify around particular at-large reps?
I don't know, I'm spit-balling here. But thank you for taking up the question constructively!

Aaaaaaand in 3... 2... 1... abortion rights are about to become a bit more popular at the polls

Ranked Choice Voting? 100% approve.

Get rid of the EC entirely. The popular vote would work quite a bit better as a means of ensuring power is exercised with the consent of the governed.

Scotus and congress both desperately need oversight that is different from 'we oversee ourselves and find we did nothing wrong' when obvs. that doesn't work too well

Tax prep companies... I wish them a prompt and thorough viking funeral.

Fun fact about corporate power at the time of the framers: the colonists felt first-hand the abuse of being effectively governed by crown corporations and shortly after the founding of the USA, corporations were drastically limited in what they could do- for example, they could not engage in politics, they could not own other corporations, could not engage in activities not strictly related to their charters, had charters of finite span, and their charters could be revoked for any violations. If corporations are going to be people today, it's about damned time we started charging them with crimes when they commit crimes- and yank their charters if they re-offend.

One thing worth questioning: do we really need representative districts? Why not have at-large representatives on a per-state basis, with seats allocated to states/apportioned via census? It would be pretty hard to gerrymander an at-large system, I think

It’s like the Supreme Court thinks it can supersede the constitution because it thinks the amendment was poorly worded

That, or they had an outcome they wanted and found a way to get it

While they're at it, why not cap processing fees as junk fees? It for sure doesn't cost 2.9% of your grocery bill to facilitate the payment- it's all automated and there's little to no labor involved in the actual processing, it's just collecting economic rent

During his impeachment trials, the GOP argued that impeachments are not a criminal proceeding, they are a political one- so they acquitted on politics saying that this is for the courts to decide. Now that the matter is in the courts, they argue it's for congress only, not the courts.

With a justice system like this one, who needs torches and pitchforks? /s

It's so wild that the 'but the people have democratic rights to choose among candidates' crowd invoke that argument to make the candidate that's promised to end democracy and rights one of the options they can vote for

You know, because democracy

there are a lot of birthrights which are increasingly only available if you have money

This is the logical consequence of the anti-new-deal/anti-desegregation/anti-civil-rights jurisprudence that turns on capital supremacy and property rights trumping the notion that the state has an interest in protecting any other sort of right; it's something the capital supremacy folks have always wanted but which the desegregation crowd finally joined in on when they thought they could get segregation back by backing capital's ability to smuggle discrimination under the skirts of its property interests.

When you look at the White Flight phenomenon and correlate it to the widespread disappearance of public 3rd places, When you notice that state colleges and universities lost funding and started hiking tuition shortly after desegregation meant black and brown people could attend them, it sure looks like Americans were faced with the decision to have desegregated public wealth or no public wealth, they chose the latter

IMHO one of the biggest failings of the media for the last 50 years has been in the assumption that fundamental policy areas like antitrust (whether enforcement, or non-enforcement) isn't 'newsworthy'. The prosperity our reactionaries keep on going on about (that of the 1950s and 60s) owes a lot of its existence to successful antitrust enforcement, and a lot of our dissatisfaction with otherwise-favorable economies today owes itself to un-checked monopoly behavior.

Oh he knows what it actually does- it effectively criminalizes the sort of health care tangentially related to abortion, and when you've driven reproductive health care out of your state and made it illegal to travel to get it, you're that much closer to having total control over women's bodies. He doesn't give a shit about babies, he knows that defining embryos as babies will give reactionaries and jurists the ability to treat women of child-bearing age as presumptively criminal if they don't seem to know 'their place'.

The whole pretending-to-care-about-babies or life is just a pretext to make pursuit of the thing they really care about- controlling women- socially respectable.

Every time he says some out-of-touch dumb-as-shit thing like this I get hopeful that this will be the thing that's too absurd, too stupid, too off-the-rails... and then I realize there are so many people that eat this shit up and the real despair sets in

One wonders what will happen to these schools' accreditations, really.

I mean, if you're teaching something you call history and you don't teach students how to put the course content in its historical context and interrogate those sources critically, you're not teaching them history, you're indoctrinating them.

...tho to be fair, that's honestly what passes for US History in most US schools. The more history I learn, the more I realize most of us aren't taught