You can always track further back to earlier causes, but I think that we took a real hard turn for the worse in this country when Ford pardoned Nixon and an angry mob didn't rend Richard the Treacherous limb from limb. If the powers that be can just dispense Get Out Of Jail Free cards to their buddies and the people are unwilling or unable to fight back and force there to be consequences, then nobody in a position of power ever really needs to worry about abusing their office.
I suspect that a party that ran a ranked choice primary to select a candidate for a FPTP election would have an advantage over an opposing party that didn't. I haven't got the math or statistics to back it up, but everything I've read about ranked choice discouraging scorched earth politics sounds like it would be healthy in a primary.
My uncle was a small-herd fairy farmer my entire life. Never had more than a couple dozen cows at a time, always knew all of them by name. He kept on getting squeezed out by larger and larger operations. He eventually went grass-fed organic to try and stay competitive. Then he told me that the large operations have organic mini-farms that they operate. The cows there are kept organic... but only so long as they remain in perfect health. The instant one gets sick, she gets moved over to the bigger factory operation and is pumped full of all the antibiotics that all the rest are kept on.
So, while my uncle is keeping a small herd and who has both financial and moral reasons for wanting to maintain his cows that way, a large factory farm can maintain a nominal organic operation, undercutting small fries like my uncle, but actually only keeping their cows organic for exactly as long as it's convenient, and not a moment longer.
My uncle is retired now, but it hurt me to hear him tell that story. We ought to care about small family farms, but we keep letting capitalist "efficiency" turn every aspect of life on Earth into a market-optimized hellscape.
I fucking loved him as Mr. Hand. When he gets the John Murdoch memory upload he starts doing Rufus Sewell's mannerisms and it's honestly a little uncanny. Great performance.
How many college educations could have been fully funded for $3 billion? How many elementary schools built? How many other worthwhile problems could have been solved, rather than building a bunch of worthless crumbling garbage out in the desert?
I haven't used AeroPress, but I appreciate that the French press is equally useful for making both hot and cold brew coffee. Mine is all-metal and you could just about beat someone to death with it.
"Mr. Franklin, of what use is this hot air balloon contraption?"
"You can take ladies up in it with a bottle of wine and a blanket and you know, they can’t refuse, because of the implication. Think about it. She's floating up in the middle of the sky with some dude she barely knows. You know, she looks around, and what does she see? Nothing but open air. 'Ahhhh! There’s nowhere for me to run. What am I gonna do, say ‘no?’"
Sounds like exactly what a king should be.