silence7 @ silence7 @slrpnk.net

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2 yr. ago

Every kid who dies of an untreated dental infection is one who couldn't grow up to vote for Democrats

Nah. Its that of any large group, there is a risk somebody is bought off. So having a few more legislators more than the minimum protects you from that.

Or...the actual problem is that every single republican is opposed to doing things that help Americans, so with a 50/50 Senate, it took buying off only one Democrat to force stuff out

The actual path to good policy is more and better Democrats. Enough that the failings of one or three can't sink legislation

Even there, Manchin was a major problem. Almost all the Democrats wanted stuff like an expanded child tax credit, but Manchin announced that if parents had money, they'd all go out and buy meth, so he insisted on its removal from the bill before he would vote for it.

It's more that their constituents are exposed to a constant stream of propaganda which favors fossil fuels and the destruction they cause.

There is no real left-wing messaging machine that compares and can tell people about the harm they're experiencing or the benefits of renewables.

It was far better than anything we got before in terms of environmental impact, even while not being enough:

The Republican effort to repeal it is (rightly) going to to be a real disaster, costing us not just a liveable future, but a lot of jobs in the near term.

BBB became the Inflation Reduction Act. Its what Manchin would vote for.

The most conservative Democrat is far more conservative than you or I.

For sure. But I'll appreciate seeing it happen now instead of never

Unfortunately gumming up the Senate is about the only tool a minority has

They couldn't during 2021-2022 when Democrats had 50 seats in the Senate plus the VP. You could pass what the most conservative Democrat was willing to vote for then, so long as it was a budget reconciliation bill.

A bribe is a bribe is a bribe, even if we can only see one of the quid and the quo.

There aren't enough Democrats in the Senate to actually stop them. Just slow things down so much that the Republicans need to pick and choose which ones they care enough to push through.

The magic here is that the Library of Congress has the Capitol Police backing them, and they answer to Congress, not the President.

So far as I can tell, no.

There really is about to be a major supply chain interruption

Context for those who dont know it:

The absence of sparrows, which traditionally kept locust populations in check, allowed swarms to ravage fields of grain and rice. The resulting agricultural failures, compounded by misguided policies of the Great Leap Forward, triggered a severe famine from 1958 to 1962. The death toll from starvation during this period reached 20 to 30 million people

A large part of what they do is research. Taking away a couple billion a year that the government spends on that at Harvard is a big deal, even if the institution can ultimately survive it

The concerns are big enough that Waltz is being shunted off to the UN instead of being allowed to stay where he is.

Signal makes it believable by providing source code and reproducible builds. It doesn't rule out the possibility that they've done something clever with the random number generator, or have the app store you use give you a compromised app, or provide any protection against endpoint compromise, but it's about as good as you can get.

Third party apps derived from theirs, which explicitly promise to log all your messages to a server somewhere, like TeleMessage, are, for obvious reasons, far less trustworthy.

Yes, but the stations in wealthier areas have enough donations that they'll likely stay alive. Just poor rural areas will lose public broadcasting

Even more to the point: every time we shutter a coal-fired power plant, the miscarriage rate downwind from it falls.

Most "pro-life" sentiment is about having an excuse to vote for racists, not actually trying to do anything to protect fetuses.