admiralteal

@admiralteal@kbin.social
0 Post – 898 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Boebert told reporters she was “not in middle school” when asked to respond.

If she were still a middle schooler, her husband might not have left her.

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They were told the other acceptable courtesy titles were Mrs., Ms., or Miss. Using "teacher" was also out of the question.

After being denied Teacher, Professor, or Dr. as the title (the last because they did not have a PhD even though evidently others in the school go by Dr. without a PhD without discipline). And note that "Mr." was apparently not an option?

The school's hands weren't tied. They appear enthusiastic.

All the other corruption and such aside, imagine how terrible this is for the urban development of your town.

The municipal government has no incentive to invest in forward-thinking policy that will lead to healthier and more economically sustainable communities. If they invest in any kind of maintenance or developments that increase road safety - and thus decrease fines - it hurts the government's ability to operate. Indeed, they have direct Financial incentive to make the roads less safe. Not to even mention that they have no incentive at all to do things that improved the city in ways that won't affect their traffic fines.

They've committed to giving up on good governance of their small town. They found a way to function by just parasitizing others. They've given up.

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Dark patterns.

All the big tech firms do this shit all over the place because the regulators are sound asleep at the wheel.

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In short: Joe Rogan is a crypto-fascist.

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*Conservatives.

It's the conservatives doing it. It always has been, it always will be. No need for enlightened centrism here. And don't pretend they don't do it outside the US because I follow world news.

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It goes without saying that this absolutely will not pass constitutional muster.

You can categorically try to ban pornography but the second you try to ban it based on its content and not based on it being pornography you no longer have a leg to stand on.

I wish there were some way to have criminal consequences for deliberately passing unconstitutional laws. It definitely feels like it's some kind of sedition, violating your implicit or explicit oath of office so profoundly.

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The purpose of those tests isn't even to test any general idea of "acuity". They're meant to monitor cognitive decline. With a good elder care GP, you start getting them regularly at 70.

You don't "ace" them. They aren't IQ tests or any shit like that. They don't measure your mind compared to anyone else's. The "best" result you should ever get is no change from baseline. They're compared to past performance. Anyone claiming to "ace" them just doesn't understand why they even took them.

To be clear, he wasn't "praying on the field". He was leading the whole team in prayer as part of the school event, at the 50 yard line, with the audience watching, inviting others to participate, apparently creating an atmosphere of pressure to participate, etc.. He was using his role as a coach and as faculty of the school to formally endorse and encourage his particular religion as part of the identity of the team.

And the stupid fucks at the SCOTUS thought this was not an establishment violation based on lies. Kavanaugh literally repeatedly lied in his opinion on it, claiming repeatedly that it was a private prayer instead of a giant, intentional public spectacle.

Anyone who looks at the photos of clips of the prayer will have ZERO illusion that this was a small private prayer on the field. It was a megachurch-inspired moment.

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Why do cops have the power to just routinely turn off their body cams?

That should be limited to using the bathroom. If it gets turned off during regular duty, it should be presumed to mean something is being covered up because that is exactly what it means. There should be paperwork triggered every time it is turned off.

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She didn't "shut him down". She tried to get in a point across and he barged right on along unimpeded by her and continued peddling more bullshit and conspiracy theory.

The truth means absolutely nothing to a conservative. Evidence means nothing when you never cared about reality in the first place.

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"Multiple properties" is SIX or more?! That is so many properties. In a housing shortage, rich fucks should have to sweat to keep even a single residence unoccupied, but consequences don't start until six. It's the right direction, but that is still so bad.

Every city should just pass big ol' pied-a-terre taxes. Property taxes for a property operated as a primary residence by the owner should be a low coefficient on the millage rate. Property taxes for places with long-term tenants who call it their primary residence should get a medium coefficient on their millage rate. Properties that are not a primary residence should get a huge multiplier on property taxes. And unoccupied homes should be so expensive as to force a nearly-immediate sale.

Rent payments up to some reasonable threshold based on prevailing rates should be tax deductible, ensuring most rents show up on the city ledge.
This helps make up for the fact that renting costs more than owning in a way that targets relief to renters instead of owners without creating crazy incentive structures where rich fucks start selling their own homes to an LLC they rent it back from or other nonsense. Individuals can declare their rent payments absent any action by the landlord; totally under-the-table rent should be very rare.

All real estate transactions that aren't resulting in a property becoming a primary residence should have a HUGE sales tax.

Properties operated as a primary residence should have significant leniency on permitting for infill development -- owners living in their own property should have development-by-rights permission to do things like build an ADU. Development led by members of the community infilling in their own community should have a SUBSTANTIALLY lower bar for permitting than development by outsiders.

The new standard is based on cubic feet of air moved per minute per watt. It's honestly pretty thoughtful in its implementation. I was expecting to see it was just some watt cap on products, but that's not what it is at all; you can still make very powerful fans, they just need to actually be moving meaningful amounts of air.

The main people hurt by a rule change like this will be import brand piece of shit fans that don't blow air and prey on vulnerable consumers. I doubt there is even one single US firm that will be negatively affected by this rule change because the cost of US manufacturing is WAY too high to be selling these dollar store fan products.

https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2023-06/ceiling-fans-ecs-nopr.pdf

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We need Swedish day fine systems for all levels of government.

If a fine costs a month's wages for someone working minimum wage, it should scale up and still cost a month's wages for people who earn more.

That said, cash bail is an incredibly stupid system. If someone is a flight risk, put an anklet on them. If there's a sincere belief they may flee the jurisdiction, then they need to be deprived of their freedom to travel. And if they aren't any kind of flight risk get them the fuck out of jail. The punishment should not precede the trial.

Not just stepped up to the plate, but went pretty much all-in on a COMPLETELY pointless invasion against what was almost certainly the wrong country.

That's how committed they were to NATO.

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I mean, that IS moderate for a Republican. The more typical party view is Make America Handmaid's Tale.

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Employees are rated like Uber drivers -- 5 stars is good, 4 stars neutral, anything else is bad.

But the companies forbid giving 5-star reviews.

If they didn't, they'd have to admit their expectations are too high for the pay they are offering. Exceeding expectations is the expectation and therefore you cannot exceed expectations. And since you aren't exceeding expectations, minimum or no raise for you.

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If you put a TV in a Faraday cage that blocked the relevant radio spectrum, would there be no static on it? I expected the answer to be a quick Google, but it wasn't.

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The children do not yet know how much they yearn for the mines of listservs.

A new, novel solution to an already-solved problem that is worse in pretty much every way. But at least it is anathema to retention of institutional knowledge.

In short: just do a fucking PHPBB forum, it's better than this shit.

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Really resembles a bill of attainder, to me.

We'd ALL be much better off, and a similar outcome could be achieved, by putting to law strict data security and privacy rules. Plus it wouldn't inevitably be challenged on very reasonable 1A grounds. But that isn't as politically possible because so many -- especially conservatives -- don't believe in the liberty of privacy.

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One of its primary purposes was literally as a distraction to prevent investment in traditional transportation infrastructure like trains. When a car maker is suggesting some kind of strange new transportation technology, be skeptical always.

And it wasn't entirely unsuccessful. Vegas got duped on it (plus boring company) pretty badly, for example. Idiot suckers. But it wasn't successful enough for the auto mogul Elon Musk to continue throwing money at it I suppose.

Researchers concluded that the culprit behind the extremely unusual 2019 outbreak was the intestinal pathogen, Campylobacter jejuni. The gut-dwelling bacteria is well-known as one of the most common causes of food poisoning and diarrheal cases in the world. But, less well-known, it's also one of the leading triggers for GBS.

Adding this because I think it's pretty critical for your quotes. So this is something that has been (likely) foodborne in Peru before. But the article implies that only about 2/3 of their identified cases showed signs of the same infection.

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You should check out what happened to Chuck Marohn in Minnesota: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/5/23/lawsuit

A fully-qualified engineer discussing the politics of engineering -- not acting in any way as an engineer -- fined, censured, and defamed in the public record by the state board of engineers. Because of a pretty obtuse technicality that absolutely no reasonable person would have interpreted as an issue and which only exists in the record thanks to actual perjury. All because he expressed sincerely-held beliefs as part of his political advocacy that could be interpreted as very embarrassing to the (incredibly incompetent) board. Things that even the board acknowledged were not related to the practice of engineering but that didn't matter to them.

These conservative organizations do not care about your civil rights. They only care about not being embarrassed. They will wield the powers of the state to silence anyone seen as a dissenter without shame or remorse. The guy in this article was very lucky indeed a federal court was willing to take the appeal. If they get any power over you, they will use it to get you to get you to bend to knee.

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The one thing Reddit is great for, and for which substitutes do not yet exist, is its crowdsourced information. Especially product reviews. And finding those from within Reddit is impossible because their search simply does not work.

Appending "Reddit" to a Google search remains the best first-past method for making certain kinds of decisions where you need concrete, good-quality answers. Even for that, it's a bit of a minefield. Especially post-mod-purge, a lot of the once-great enthusiast subs have gotten pretty blase. Still better than all those consumer advertorial "BEST OF 2024" lists that you find everywhere full of extremely mediocre and likely corrupt reviews, but nothing compared to the straightforward buying guides you used to find.

On top of that, the "new" sight is a million times less usable than old.reddit.com and search engines shoot you in through that terrifically terrible gateway to experience confusingly-organized and incomplete content. Orders of magnitude worse on mobile, too.

If Reddit is de-indexed, I'll simply never be there at this point. Though I admit, I'm already there extremely rarely.

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The guy's talking about concentration clamps for migrants as part of his final solution.

Be scared. Vote.

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Also 14th and 19th, plus the Civil Rights Act. A non-corrupt SCOTUS would toss the Florida law immediately, but absent a couple minutes under Warren we have never had one of those.

What should bother you is not the particularities of the pricing. It's the overtly dirty dealing. Even the Apollo dev said he might have been able to make the pricing work, but certainly not in just 30 days. Admins said there would be time -- months of it -- and only gave 30 days. They said pricing would be based on reality, but no sensible analysis indicates that it is. Admins told the users they were worthless and literally defamed devs that were trying to work with them.

There were tons of ways they could've gotten ads in front of people. This wasn't about ads. This wasn't about some particular price point. This is about getting users onto their official app or website, presumably to mine data and control conversations.

The infinite free VC ran out when interest rates went up. Suddenly, real financial pressures they had plenty of time to address and never bothered worrying about were at the door. So they revved up the enshitification engine and got to the hard work of destroying the only source of value the site had.

If they came out tomorrow and declared they would keep the API free and that Spez was fired, it oughtn't change how you feel. It's time to be off that site.

After winning on Prop 22, Uber/Lyft guaranteed drivers $13/hr. I'm not sure where the likes of Uber Eats/Grubhub stand in comparison, but even if we assume they're also at $13/hr, that's a full 'federal minimum wage' less than the Pizza Hut drivers would need to be paid. For doing literally the same job but with way, way worse benefits (e.g., having to provide your own insurance).

It's actually insane. Prop 22 is a travesty.

$20/hr isn't even what I would consider a living wage in California, and Pizza Hut is here proudly admitting they were paying their drivers substantially less than that. But the deliveries will still happen, just to even worse-paid people. It's a crazy cycle of abuse of labor.

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They claim it's "parental rights", but these same people will not even hesitate for a MOMENT to dismiss the rights of the parents if it means interfering with conservative values. They'll ban books the parents want their kids to access, refuse to use pronouns/identities requested by parents, proselytize children against the faith of the family (because the SCOTUS has all but abandoned the establishment clause as a limit on state-sanctioned religious activity), forbid teaching subjects like black history that parents want their children to know about, and anything else that is part of their culture war.

Conservatism is a cancer on society.

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Someone with Reagan's exact politics in this day and age would be considered a left-wing woke monster by most of the modern right.

Dude did a lot of tax hikes and was against having capital gains taxes be separate from income taxes.

He did try to genocide the gays though and modern conservatives do like to genocide the gays.

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People really seem to forget that prior to October 7th, Bibi was facing regular mass protests. Accusations of full authoritarianism. He was being condemned for the fact that he was building the most ultra-conservative government Israel had ever seen. Facing multiple political corruption and bribery accusations and MAYBE even looking at future jail time, at least if he didn't maintain the PM seat and the relative immunity it offers.

The Bibi administration NEEDS Hamas. Without them, they're just screwed. Only the threat of violent attack from across the border is able to maintain his power. And indeed, he'd even been facing accusations that he was directly sending support to Hamas.

Really, nothing good will happen on the region until the Israeli people follow through on their political duty and vote all these fuckers out, then immediately become partners with Gaza and the West Bank to build Palestine into a functional, modern democracy where its citizens have a chance to thrive. THAT is their recipe for long-term peace and stability. No amount of smart bombs, iron domes, blockades, and border walls will get them there, at least shy of completing the genocide so many in the Bibi administration have said publicly they want.

I sure hope you are right, that this is finally the tide turning... but I've seen that tide fail to turn before.

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A big part of this is also that the auto industry is increasingly steering people to buy big, expensive, profitable trucks over smaller, saner, more reasonable vehicles (that they earn less profit on).

It's not just that consumers "want" these vehicles. Consumers are being pushed to want them.

There's a reason Kei-style trucks basically do not exist in the US -- because they're cheap and useful and the automakers thus dare not allow them.

That's not totally true. It probably worsened our military readiness and caused all kinds of knock-on effects fucking with the already terrible bureaucracy of the armed forces.

It also sent a CLEAR message to all enlisted members with uteruses that they need to be aware that their body autonomy may be revoked at any second.

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Not to be all the way "that guy", but in a capitalist framework, its death was inevitable.

Their only hope of staying that great platform long-term is the Jimmy Wales route, which they were not remotely prepared to go down.

If you are running it as a business, enshitification is inevitable. Sooner or later.

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You cannot hope to teach any kind of literature without teaching important context around it. You are wrong.

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Good answers here, but ignoring probably the most realistic and practical truth of the matter in my opinion.

You won't immediately be sent to the stocks for saying "I don't want to answer", the worst case scenario is that some officer of the court informs you that you must answer the question even if you don't want to. And even that is only going to happen if the attorney asking the question insists. And I struggle to imagine a situation where a competent attorney would do so.

Being hostile towards your prospective jurors, making them feel exposed and uncomfortable, is not a way to march to victory in a trial. They want to ensure you aren't prejudiced against their client/case. Making you dislike them personally IS prejudice. Causing prejudice is a bad way to eliminate prejudice.

They will ask questions, mostly yes/no ones, that you need to answer honestly. They may ask for clarification. If you don't want to answer and say so, it's unlikely anyone will press you because that unnwillingness to answer is just as clear an indication of who you are as anything else.

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Sadly, the idea that any Republican is informed about the Democratic candidate's record and policies is flatly preposterous.

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Just in case anyone reading this thread has ever been flummoxed by this "we're not a democracy, we're a republic" bullshit...

"Republic" and "Democracy" are two among many adjectives that describe the US governmental system. Here's some other ones: "constitutional", "bicameral", "presidential", "liberal", "federal".

None of these words fully and accurately describe our system. None of these words are mutually exclusive of each other. They're just adjectives. Words that can be used to get you closer to the truth.

We have a system of government that relies on elections because it believes fundamental sovereignty flows from the will of the people. That defines us a democracy, regardless of whether votes are direct or indirect.

We have a system of government in which power sits in the hands of the public -- in our case via selected representatives selected through elections. We do not have a king or similar formal nobility. We fit the definition of a republic.

Most people who make this stupid argument are just being trolly, disingenuous twerps that get off on sounding clever. Ignore them if you don't have the will to clearly correct them. But a few of the people making this argument legitimately dislike democracy and want it done away with -- they are authoritarians and they are the enemy of the people.

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"ISIS could come in and want to display one, the IRA…basically anybody. You’d have to be content neutral and let everybody." He then went off-topic to accuse schools of trying to indoctrinate students with 'transgender ideology.'

Yep, that sounds like a typical conservative. Mind is just a jumble of terrified nightmare-fantasies about the big bad de jour that wanders off into total nonsense without any notice.

Might be a valuable thing to do if not for the fact that Amazon reviews have basically zero quality control. If Amazon themselves didn't have corrupt motivations to host illegitimate reviews that mislead their own consumers into buying low-quality products.

But if you listen to Amazon reviews at this point, I have an off-brand bridge to sell you.

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