This is exactly backwards. People in cities consume fewer resources per capital than people in rural areas, who can't take advantage of the same economies of scale when it comes to transportation infrastructure, energy infrastructure, public utilities, physical supply chains, and all sorts of services in modern life, from seeing a doctor to repairing a broken window to borrowing a library book to getting a babysitter.
It's rural areas that destroy more land, consume more water, generate more pollution, and emit more greenhouse gases, on a per capita basis, than dense areas.
I don't see why the distance between them isn't growing at a constant speed.
At any given time t seconds after separation, the boy is 5t north, and the girl is 1t east. The distance between them is defined by the square root of ((5t)2 + (t)2 ), or about 5.099t.
In other words, the distance between them is simply a function defined as 5.099t, whose first derivative with respect to time is just 5.099.
I think you're right. The line blurring between corporate sponsorship and community support is pretty difficult to determine. If someone wants to build a community around a particular video game or movie or television show, of course the corporation that publishes it benefits from a bunch of positive discussion about it. But at the same time, that corporate-owned product is part of our shared culture, and a legitimate topic to discuss in a forum like this.
And it's not even necessarily pure corporate stuff, either. There are nonprofit and trade and governmental organizations that rely on advertising for public messaging: a tourism board promoting their location as a good vacation spot, an agricultural trade group promoting recipes using their specific product, a government health department drive encouraging vaccinations, etc. They pay for ads through conventional outlets while also promoting their interests on social media.
It's just an ecosystem. We should be aware that there are those who would seek to influence us here, whether for money or politics or other motivation, and navigate these spaces with that in mind.
Realistically, a lot of it could just be continuation of existing Biden policy:
Aggressive antitrust enforcement from the FTC and DOJ, slowly changing the inertia of the last 40 years of allowing consolidation and the neutering of century-old antitrust laws.
Continued pro-labor rulings from the NLRB to give workers more bargaining power as we unionize at Starbucks, Amazon, and other major workforces. Big union wins at automakers, airlines, logistics companies have emboldened new unionization drives at places like VW provide the momentum that need to be backed by government. Even places where unions have seen setbacks, like Mercedes Benz in Alabama, management has been running scared and trying to stave off unions with promises of unprecedented raises (which they've since reneged on after the union vote failed). We need to keep the pressure on, especially as the business cycle potentially turns to a tougher job market.
Marijuana rescheduling is proceeding along, and hopefully will be complete by the end of Biden's term. The next administration will need to defend it in court, and implement the details for things like banking and medical research and licensing.
Some Biden policies need to be bolstered with a combination of both continued executive action and new laws passed through Congress:
Many of Biden's environmental regulations have been rolled back in the courts. A Harris admin should keep pushing on these fronts, but with coverage from Congress where possible.
Same with economic/workplace regs. The Department of Labor's minimum wage exemption guidelines are being challenged in the courts right now, with Biden trying to push for the minimum salary of overtime-exempt workers to be at least $58k next year (the $44k minimum took effect on July 1, 2024). The FTC's noncompete regulation, which would prohibit noncompete agreements for almost all workers, is tied up in the courts now.
Biden's Department of Education has tried to implement student loan forgiveness, and lost at the Supreme Court. Now their watered down measures (easier repayment plans, interest forgiveness for certain borrowers) are in the courts, too. New legislation could fix this.
Abortion, contraception, and family planning in general needs a combination of both strong executive action and new legislation:
Biden's administration has fought, with mixed success, to make sure that state bans on abortion don't interfere with federal priorities. DoD has official policy that pays for servicemembers and their families to travel to states where abortions are legal, if necessary to get care. DOJ and HHS are fighting to make sure that states can't prevent life saving care that some extremists believe constitute abortion. The FDA has expanded access and availability of abortion medication through telehealth and prescriptions by mail.
Legislative areas worth fighting for include bolstering the authority of Medicare and FDA to preserve access to abortion and contraceptive care, including across state lines, removing the ban on federal funding for abortions, etc.
These are all pretty modest, but very important. The actual machinery of government is immensely important, and we need people who are effective at making sure everything is working for the people.
The a few accusations that make this worse, and probably illegal if proven:
This software doesn't just use public data. It uses the private data of multiple landlords who submit their private/proprietary data to be used by all the competitors.
The software, and the company's contracts, prevent the landlords from actually deviating from the formula, through a combination of a hostile interface and contractual requirements.
The software encourages landlords to do non-pricing activity, like taking units off the market, to feed into the algorithm for everyone else.
Everything I know about dinosaur fur I learned from the Tim Meadows sketch on I Think You Should Leave:
Fuck! I should've been Barney!
How?
Could've been like Barney's hair. Hey look at me, I'm Barney. Like Barney's hair.
Barney doesn't have hair.
Will you shut the fuck up, he's like a cloth! Cloth is hairs, just little tiny hairs. Even his mouth has little hairs. I mean it's cloth, cloth is little hairs!
It's an article about the stats of vaccination rates, and a lot of structural explanations for why those rates have dropped (mostly loss of funding for covering the uninsured or paying for getting the vaccines to nursing homes or the disabled). It's an important discussion.
That's confusing cause and effect. Howard Dean's speech was supposed to be a concession speech after losing the only early primary/caucus he was trying to win. He poured in all of his resources in the hopes of winning Iowa, underperformed expectations against a backdrop of dropping in the polls for weeks, and coming in third (with no real prospects for New Hampshire or South Carolina) basically made it impossible for him to have the volunteers, money, or press coverage to survive into the next stage of competing in bigger states with primaries clumped up together.
He showed everyone his plan of winning Iowa or going home, lost Iowa, and then gave some kind of rallying speech as if he had a plan to recover from that loss. He never did, and it wasn't the scream that killed his campaign. His campaign was dead before the scream happened. It's just that the scream was a particularly memorable way for a campaign to die.
No such thing as an NDA that allows a spouse to work in the same room, and allows the spouse to actually be on video while blurred, but draws the line at not being able to unblur the video.
There's that one game that censored "Nasser" to "Ner" which made it much worse.