BraveSirZaphod @ BraveSirZaphod @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Special elections don't necessarily have any clear trend in and of themselves. The larger trend, and where this is significant, is that elections that occur within a presidential term tend to swing quite hard to the opposite party of that President. This is the main reason why the Republicans currently lead the House, but this effect has been much much smaller than it usually is, and so they have an exceedingly slim majority.

It generally bodes very well for Biden in 2024, because unlike polls, this is a test of the exact demographic, moderately wealthy suburbanites that value boring stability above all else, that he needs to do well with in order to win.

Yes, I'm aware, which is why I specifically highlighted that and mentioned how if you do the analysis with a European level of spending, the outcome isn't fundamentally different.

Admittedly, the US is extraordinarily inefficient with health care spending, but if you adjust per capita spending to the levels of France, you still completely run out of money in 15-20 years.

It should also be noted that with fewer carers available, they'll become much more expensive, so either the wealthy elderly will pay them and the poor elderly simply languish until death, or the government pays them, which ultimately means taxes that will be incurred by the fewer amount of working people, which means they'll have to be relatively high.

At population level scales, "the rich" do not have the unlimited money pot that people think they do. The US spends 4.5 trillion dollars just on health care each year. If you completely liquidated all the wealth of the top 1% (ignoring that the fact that this is functionally impossible without massively decreasing its value; a stock is much less valuable if you know you can't hold onto it to collect future returns because the government is going to seize it), then the top 1% could fund American health expenses for ten years at the absolute most. Admittedly, the US is extraordinarily inefficient with health care spending, but if you adjust per capita spending to the levels of France, you still completely run out of money in 15-20 years.

This is a bit of an exaggeration, since you're obviously talking about a more limited problem then all medical expenses, but because the vast majority of medical expenses are incurred by the elderly, it's not as inapplicable as it might seem. Ultimately, funding sources need to be sustainable and not self-depleting, and for population-level spending, you pretty much always need to expand your funding beyond the ultra-rich. There's a reason why the excellent social services in Europe also come with a much higher tax burden for all people, not just the wealthy.

To quote your quotes:

as the signatures of an absolute majority of House members are required

to an absolute majority (218 votes)

An absolute majority is one half, not two-thirds.

This is true in a sense, but also a bit misleading. The Speaker is essentially acting in the name of a House majority, and they can be removed by that majority at any time; it just provides them a degree of separation from accountability. If the Speaker is doing something that a majority of the House doesn't want, they can always remove him or use tools like discharge petitions.

That said, there are very complicated power dynamics at play there, and you're right that leadership does have too much power. But it does need to be reminded that this is only done with the consent of the majority.

The House doesn't have filibuster rules like the Senate; nothing in the House requires two-thirds.

No matter what happens, both parties keep drifting right.

Go back 20 years and the Democrats had a significant anti-abortion faction, formally opposed gay marriage, even acknowledging trans people was taboo, the core of John Kerry's health care plan was some minor government subsidies for employer-based plans, any acknowledgment of police racism was absolutely not done, Kerry voted for the Iraq war with no regrets, and I could go on.

To say that the Democratic party is more right-wing today doesn't hold up to a second of actual scrutiny.

The idea was that Biden was rigging the game and then Kelce would propose to Swift after winning, who would funnel the insane amount of media hype into a Biden endorsement. Kelce wins the Super Bowl, Swift gets attention and a happy boyfriend, and Biden gets a big endorsement.

They probably don't know that they've been dating for less than a year.

$ per actual measurement unit

I've already seen this in essentially every supermarket ever, usually per ounce. Sure, you have to have some vague intuition about what that is relative to the product, but you can still make standardized comparisons across, say, different kinds of chips, very easily.

It'd be nice to include taxes, I agree.

All of these things would have to be done by Congress. The President is really not the dictator that the internet thinks he is (outside of some particular domains). But just to go through those:

Make it expensive to change the weight of a product.

How? Make the government track the size of ever possible consumable product and mandate a fee when changed? Beyond the enormous logistical effort for no obvious purpose, this would also make it costly for a company to add more product. Perhaps you only apply the fee when a size decreases, but then,, how do you handle the case where a company intentionally launches a smaller sized version for a different market, eg individual or snack sized portions? What if they launch a new size and then discontinue the older, larger one, so it technically didn't change? Does that have a fine? Sure, you can try to track all of this stuff carefully and determine what the net effect is, but that costs time and money all for no significant benefit.

Standardize the size and weight of a given type of product

Who determines the standard, and why? Why should it be illegal to sell a smaller or larger bag of chips or soda?

Require the packaging to alert consumers that the weight have changed in the last year and how much it has changed

This would just be one more tiny disclaimer line on the back that nobody would read. Not to mention, the size and weight is already on the package. Consumers are already perfectly capable of seeing the weight and deciding if the value for that price is good. I somewhat doubt most people would actually change their behavior by learning that there were ten more chips in the bag a year ago, and at any rate, companies know that consumers would rather pay the same price for less than pay a higher price for the same amount.

Tie the trademark of a given product to a certain weight.

That is categorically not how trademarks work.

Violent revolution because of an operating system is genuinely one of the most terminally online ideas I think I've ever read in my life.

In 2021, the Armenian patriarch of Jerusalem, Nourhan Manougian, agreed a 98-year lease over part of the Armenian quarter with the developers.

There are plenty of critical ways to describe this agreement, but I really don't think "theft" is an accurate one.

I think it's more that Fahrenheit captures the range of temperatures that humans experience from "very cold" to "very hot" in a rough 0-100 scale, whereas Celsius's 0-100 is instead based on the phase changes of water, which doesn't actually overlap with weather temperatures very well, being "decently cold" to "you are basically a burning corpse".

The single major obstacle here is the Republicans in the House who are opposed to any aid to Ukraine because they're bankrolled by Putin they're deeply concerned about sending money abroad when there are homeless veterans that they can talk about without ever bothering to support.

If you think that funding to Israel is a significant controversy in Congress outside of a handful of progressive Democrats, you don't actually know Congress.

To put it more diplomatically, yes, 1948 is a way too late of a starting year if you're seeking to examine the full historical context of the conflict. Jewish immigration into post-Ottoman Palestine started significantly earlier and was explicitly supported by the British during the aftermath of World War I (some limited immigration happened even earlier). It should be noted that Britain's actions here were directly contradictory to promises that they had made to their Arab allies during WWI, when they'd promised the Hashemite family (now the ruling royal family of Jordan, then ruling from Mecca) an Arab state from Mecca to Damascus in exchange for their military assistance against the Ottomans. My general understanding is that most of that immigration was generally legal, in that Jewish immigrants legally purchased land that they moved in to, but a lot of those landowners were Ottomans and their claim to the land can certainly be criticized. At any rate, as the number of Jews increased, tensions quickly emerged, Jews and Arabs rapidly started fighting, both sides commit terrible acts, and the moment the British leave, true war breaks out as all of Israel's neighbors invade, with the Israelis ultimately being successful and roughly establishing the modern borders of the West Bank and Gaza.

I personally would argue that we're long past the point where who started what is a particularly useful question towards finding a path to peace, since both sides have done terrible things and have next to no trust for one another, but if you want to explore the history, you really do need to go back to Ottoman Palestine, the beginnings of Zionism in the late 1800s, and World War I.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JewishlandpurchaseinPalestine

For some interesting context, I'd point you to the main image of this article, which shows land in British Palestine that was legally owned by Jews. The vast vast majority of Israel's Jewish population still lives in these same areas. Now again, most of this land was purchased from non-Palestinian land owners who had acquired it during the Ottoman era, and you can certainly criticize that as unfair or unjust, but I honestly don't think "steal" accurately describes the situation. You might say that the establishment of the Israeli state was a theft, but I don't see how that's meaningfully different than the establishment of British Mandatory Palestine, or Ottoman Palestine before that. You might say that modern Israel is the result of western imperialism, and I can somewhat understand that argument, but given that it was earlier under the Ottoman Empire, who were certainly not loved by the local Arab population, the difference feels almost more aesthetic than anything else.

For what it's worth, I do fully support an independent Palestine and think Netanyahu is a horror with zero interest in peace, though I also can understand that Israel has legitimate security concerns, though the retaliation in Gaza has absolutely been excessive.

This is far past the point of mattering, but the actual thing I was targeting was the statement "seems pretty weird" by stating that in the context of human history, hunting is objectively not weird, that is to say, unusual or abnormal, at all.

And I mean, if we're trying to entertain logical rigor, I don't think the original "appeal to vibes" is exactly a good start.

Or just rant on niche forums I guess; you do you mate.

Nothing says Israeli asset like blindly publishing a headline "Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital" to describe a situation that was not done by Israel, not a strike at all but rather a failed Palestinian rocket launch, and that did not kill hundreds.

Everybody said they’d cancel Netflix over it

What's probably more likely is that the "everybody" that you heard from was an incredibly unrepresentative sample of people from a bubble of nerdy tech enthusiasts.