Wooster

Reminds me of cigarette companies burying research on lung disease.

He amplified his crackdown on soaring prescription drug costs, hidden fees for cable and air travel and corporate “price-gouging.” He also promised to “keep fighting to bring down costs.”

Following the links the above quote, the CNBC articles suggests we can expect progress on the first two items (prescription drug costs and hidden fees), but there's nothing I read in the linked article about dealing with price gouging other than some stern words. Maybe something is indeed in the works, but it wasn't obvious to me at the least.

Instead of taking a routine victory lap, the president doubled down on the war, pledging to do himself what the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes have not: Make things cheaper.

[…]

It is a marked tone shift from the president’s typical reactions to positive inflation data.

I do appreciate this narrative shift—transitioning from tone-deaf/gaslighting to acknowledging that key issues still aren't addressed.

Mmm. Malicious compliance.

Honestly, it’s pretty ingenious. If they can get their publishers to help push for appeal, then it’ll be worth it in the long run.

Is this a Russian style self inflicted wound…?

The boy was stabbed 26 times and succumbed to his injuries, the sheriff’s office said.

The 32-year-old woman, who had more than a dozen stab wounds, is recovering at the hospital and is expected to survive, the office said.

While governments can't directly manipulate Lemmy, you should still operate on the assumption that nothing you do here is anonymous.

It warms my cold black heart hearing that his stalling tactics aren’t working anymore.

I swear, Texas’s grid is the sort of thing that would’ve been written out of a dystopian novel for being too cartoonishly evil.

Covid vaccination is at an all time low since roll out, we have new strains, and everyone is back from sharing bugs with relatives at Thanksgiving.

Christmas is up soon.

I’m not gonna shed any tears on that, but this is peripheral to the root issue and why that commission is out of control.

Solve why homes cost a ransom in this first place, and that 6% commission should drop proportionally.

Article mentions nothing with regards to holding corporations accountable nor any plan or threat of action on the president’s part.

Nah.

That isn’t an oversight in their mind. The objective is to ban all forms of abortion. Legally, it’s a form of compromise, but in their view it’s a loophole.

The next crusade is that already limited window.

Utilities have also been on the rise, and this year Ortigoza isn’t planning on turning on the home’s heater, even with temperatures dipping into the 30s at night. Instead, she plans to wear extra clothes around the house and bundle her daughter in blankets.

I just want to say… Don't do that.

If you want burst water pipes, then that is how you do it.

Instead, let your house drop to uncomfortably cold temperatures, but with still a buffer above freezing. The thermostat is only accurate for wherever it's placed in the house. It's not able to tell you what temperature your pipes are at the distant ends of the house.

If you're going to turn the heat off at below freezing, then you need to empty your pipes first, and no one is going to do that.

But yeah… I felt I needed to get that out of the way first.

Anyway, wages and unemployment are getting 'better', but that means very little if it's still not a living wage.

That and the biggest donors, on both political sides, have everything to lose from following through on stopping price gouging.

Feels like something I’d read about in WWII.

Gotta love those distant goals that allow the current administration to say they've done something… and allowing the next to undo it.

I just read the joint legal brief, and, I have to say up front that I am not remotely a lawyer… but the document specifies how and where to identify price fixing, and that motions to dismiss those charges are to be dismissed.

So it doesn't dictate the penalties for price fixing (I assume that's on a trial by trial basis—but again, not a lawyer), but it makes it impossible(?) to ignore, and suggests that (to me), users of 'RENTMaximizer' will be in the crosshairs… while not actually stating that.

I mean, everyone’s back from Thanksgiving with family. Next up is Christmas.

Damn… Alabama of all places. That’s about as Bible Belt as you get.

I read the article, but it fails to elaborate on how it’s a worst case scenario for Trump.

How does Colorado finding Trump guilty of insurrection, but not barring him from the ballot, hinder him in any meaningful way?

I have to admit, my gut reaction was to ponder if this rule would be enforced if it was to raise money for Israeli children instead… but I know diddly squat about Girl Scouts and did about 5 minutes of research.

What I learned was that money raised by Girl Scouts is intended to be spent on local community projects. So helping local kids would be cool, but not foreign. Girl Scouts doesn’t forbid one from aiding foreign needy, but you can’t do that under the Girl Scout banner/as a Girl Scout project.

So, at the moment, I’m inclined to side with Girl Scouts on this issue. But, again, I don’t know squat about how Girl Scouts is run in practice, and if this project is being singled out or not.

TBH, I would be surprised if Jones has those answers. Trump is SUPPOSED to be keeping Jones appraised of such happenings, but since when has he cared for protocol, and when has he ever been held accountable?

The article keeps mentioning a “glimmer of hope” but that glimmer is just surviving or getting married on schedule.

I don’t know what they’re smoking.

Second, Biden recently started to blame inflation on corporations that hiked prices when they saw an opportunity to improve their profits, bringing more prominence to an argument first used when gasoline prices spiked. The president's argument is suspicious to many economists, yet the intended message to voters is that Biden is fighting for them against those he blames for fueling inflation.

“Let me be clear: Any corporation that is not passing these savings on to the consumers needs to stop their price gouging,” Biden said recently in Pueblo, Colorado. “The American people are tired of being played for suckers.”

Wow. There's no question who's side the reporter is on.

Good point. I admittedly missed that part when I skimmed the article.

I found the Ukraine page on Girl Scouts’s website… it certainly paints a damning picture on Girl Scouts end.

12 hour shifts certainly isn’t helping any either.

Additionally, even though the copyright is expiring, the trademark is not.

“You can use the Mickey Mouse character as it was originally created to create your own Mickey Mouse stories or stories with this character,” Daniel Mayeda, associate director of the Documentary Film Legal Clinic at UCLA School of Law, told The Guardian. “But if you do so in a way that people will think of Disney — which is kind of likely because they have been investing in this character for so long — then in theory, Disney could say you violated my trademark.”

😕

Since 2021, a French company named Carbios has been running an operation that uses a bacterial enzyme to process about 250kg of PET plastic waste every day, breaking it down into its precursor molecules, which can then be made directly into new plastic. It’s not quite composting it back into the earth itself, but Carbios has achieved the holy grail of plastic recycling, bringing it much closer to an infinitely recyclable material like glass or aluminium.

That’s a significant step forward from when the last time I read up on the plastic eating bacteria. Granted, I’d prefer it if it was recycled into something other than more plastic… but I’ll still take it.

Curiously, the interview fails to address making money for employees.

And the consequences if he refuses to pay?

I miss when web searches gave us personal websites of people passionate about a topic.

I just read the entire article and I don’t see why Mozilla really wants in on the Fediverse. It covers a lot of how it wants in, but not the driving motivation.

My best guess is they want to be the next Facebook/Twitter. They see a window and think it’s not something to miss.

Never forget: “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”, even if it’s from a relatively liked company like Mozilla.

Only 13 states are participating in the roll out… still. That’s better than the 0 we’re currently experiencing.

One of the main criticisms of the program is that it the direct file pilot only covers individual federal tax returns and does not prepare state returns. However, IRS officials said they are working with Arizona, California, Massachusetts and New York for filing season 2024 to integrate state taxes into the pilot.

Taxpayers in nine other states that don’t have an income tax – Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming — may also be eligible to participate in the pilot, according to the IRS.

As an aside, the wording in the article makes me feel like the people putting this forward have a gun to their head and they’re trying really hard not to piss TurboTax off.

Why is this advertising considered news?

But even with those historic gains, they don't bring workers back to where they were before 2007, when wages and benefits were slashed amid tough economic times.

Headline makes the strikers sound greedy, but this context puts things into perspective.

Every year being the hottest year on record has been the norm for awhile now…

The researchers discovered that Chernobyl wolves are exposed to upwards of 11.28 millirem of radiation every day for their entire lives - which is more than six times the legal safety limit for a human.

Ms Love found the wolves have altered immune systems similar to cancer patients undergoing radiation treatment, but more significantly she also identified specific parts of the animals' genetic information that seemed resilient to increased cancer risk.

What would prevent them from arguing that was improper, and thus invalid?

"In the absence of that sorely-needed action, the Office of Gun Violence Prevention along with the rest of my Administration will continue to do everything it can…”

Isn’t that basically admitting that this new department can’t do anything and just posturing?

Or am I missing something?

Edit: In retrospect, the biggest value this department might have is having it be under Republican leadership down the line. An entire department explicitly against gun violence may cause some in-fighting about reasonable measures… as opposed to the current status quo.

That is of course assuming the entire department doesn’t just get tossed and establishes itself as having some teeth.

I question how much of this is a logistics issue, vs how much of this is because half the population is convinced that basic medical care causes Down syndrome .