admiralteal

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.

Statistically not true. And even the retail industry lobbyists has started backtracking on the claims.

The only city that has seen an increase in shoplifting in the last ~4-5 years, as I have seen in actual data analysis, is NYC. Everywhere else has seen an overall trend downward.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/11/shoplifting-retail-data-moral-panic/676185/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/17/business/shoplifting-retail-crime-stores/index.html
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/us-retail-lobbyists-retract-key-claim-organized-retail-crime-2023-12-06/

These narratives are all about trying to make you sympathetic to stores, creating justifications to close poorly-performing locations without suffering PR consequences, and to get the public to invest in security for retail stores so that the stores can save some bottom-line cost. And just regular ol’ conservative love of the penal system.

In the raw numbers, shrink in general is not a major issue for retail and shoplifting only makes up a relatively small percent of shrink. It’s just a great story to point to and makes great viral videos.

If ads work, that means you’re manipulating minors. Not acceptable.

If ads don’t work, that means you’re wasting your money.

Either way, there’s no reason advertising targeted to to minors should be allowed.

The advertisers believe that targeting ads to kids is effective to manipulate kids to drive purchases of their products. That’s fucking diabolical. Anyone who’s in the industry and thinks this is OK needs to be taken to a farm.

Compelled speech is a first amendment violation. Telling a company they need to take positive political action to score a state contract is undoubtedly a violation of the 1st.

Imagine explaining to someone in 2016 that by mid 2021 the FBI wouldn’t be considered cops by the right.

GOP has been evil longer than Liz Cheny has been, though. Yet she still enthusiastically joined their ranks. ALL of her current actions are trying to clean and fix their reputation by aiming to expel the loudest and most obvious of their members because those most obvious members are revealing the true goals of the party instead of maintaining the kayfabe that keeps them civilly acceptable.

ALL of the GOP are correctly self-identifying conservatives. They want to maintain traditional values and power structures, even if those traditions stand in the way of fairness, progress, or justice. If they cared more about individual liberties than traditional values, they’d be liberals. If they cared more about the progress of society than traditional values, they’d be progressives. If they cared more about the social good of the nation, they’d be socialists. They tell you firmly and clearly they are none of these things, and they are right.

To be conservative MEANS you do not want a fair, just, sustainable, and successful society. It means you care more about tribe than anything else. To self-identify as conservative is no different than to say you hate and wish to make suffer anyone who doesn’t resemble and support you.

And yet, last I checked, she still refuses to stop identifying as a Republican.

The GOP is evil. If you identify as a member, you are also evil.

Honestly, this is a real discussion we do need to have.

So many municipalities have over-expanded things like their water systems beyond the point that communities can afford to maintain them using the tax revenue generated by those communities.

Is it really doing right by a place to saddle them with a massive, expensive system they cannot afford to maintain? The federal dollars are going to show up, replace the system with a state-of-the-art one of at least the same size if not bigger, and then what? 30, 40 years from now, who will be there to give them the critical fixes they will still need? And in the meantime, their community will need to devote even more of its revenues (tax dollars) to maintaining the water system – but that means neglecting other things that ALSO need spending.

The shit happening in Jackson and Flint isn’t MERELY idiot government incompetence. It’s also a sign of urban decay affecting so many municipalities. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better at the rate we’re going as a society because we keep build build build-ing while pretending cities don’t need to be productive or have balanced budgets. But they do. Cities aren’t national governments. They can’t print money. If they issue bonds, they need to pay those bondholders back using real money collected from taxes. If they don’t have the money to do city things, they just stop being able to do city things. And it doesn’t look like bankruptcy when they cease to be able to do city things – it looks like potholes and busted, toxic water systems.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t get these systems fixed so they aren’t poisoning people. Of course we can’t be poisoning people. But the discussion needs to be more sensitive than just “spend the money fix the shit no matter what it costs.” Every city needs to think very, very carefully about how they may fix their systems to make them more sustainable in the future. No matter what they do, it is going to be financially devastating on some time horizon, but cities need to stop buying more infrastructure than they can maintain on debt and just shrugging the problem off to the next generation because that’s how we got to this problem in the first place.

side-note:

My proposed solution is to get the richer areas of the city/state to help pay for the poorer areas. Everybody has skin in the game as far as the benefits, so why not the costs?

Backwards from reality. The richest parts of town, with the new, state-of-the-art infrastructure and the vastly inferior and less productive land uses typically generate a lower or even negative ROI compared to the poorer parts of the city. The poor neighborhoods more often subsidize the rich ones. Look at e.g., the case studies made by Urban3, which Strong Towns and other urbanist organizations often write up. The older developments are funding the spending on new infrastructure even while their own infrastructure is so neglected it is poisoning people. And just throwing federal dollars on it is not going to force a change in behavior in the cities.

Personally, I’d like to see any fixes for these old water systems attached to e.g., adding land use taxes (that would affect large lot R1A single family homes FAR worse than traditional (poor) communities) or dis-incorporating unproductive (wealthy) suburban areas from the city to fend for themselves (since they can afford it, unlike the productive, poor neighborhoods).

The country is ABSOLUTELY broken.

Even now there are people who look at a close election between Biden and Trump and genuinely think “Well, I don’t like Biden, so I won’t vote / will throw my vote away instead of voting against Trump.”

You have racists, morons, and fascists voting for Trump.

You have irrational moron progressives who will refuse to ever vote for anyone with a D no matter how bad the alternative and no matter how much good that democrat has provably done.

And you have dispirited progressives just trying to get their peers to show up to the polls and do the minimum possible effort. We’re seriously fucked because of this.

It’s not a lie. There’s no malicious intent. It’s just not even wrong. It so fundamentally lacks understanding of the underlying bureaucracy, technology, product lifecycle, and surrounding politics politics that it amounts to nothing.

And the overall point still stands. We should be skeptical of these kinds of intrusions into our devices from the state. We should resist them as a default posture.

You legitimately do not understand that there are alternatives to YouTube. It’s fucking embarrassing.

Give me quality service for what I pay, or I go elsewhere.
Apparently not. You’ll keep going there no matter how much you claim to hate them.

And that’s no small part of why Google has such market control. Because people like you give it to them enthusiastically.

PS: it’s Rumble. That’s the actual alternative (with a HEAVY emphasis on the “alt” in “alternative”) you could use to watch Rossmann if you really are so passionate about how bad Google is. Plus Rossmann also is one of the cofounders of GrayJay.

I don’t believe you do because you would’ve linked to it instead of YouTube. You claim to hate that business, yet you direct people to engage on it.

You’re getting on a moral high horse about how it’s fair and right to pirate from YouTube because of their bad behavior, yet when given a free alternative platform to view the videos from a creator you respect enough to link, you don’t. You go to YouTube.

Let’s give an example:

I think you underestimate how much pirates and the opposition truly hate google and their practices and the lengths they will go to in order to get the content they want.

Apparently not very hard at all, since there was a totally Google-free way to get the content you want that supports the creator even better and is free and yet here you are not using it.

So you could be using and supporting alternate platforms, but YouTube is so valuable to you that you don’t bother.

What other video platforms does Louis Rossmann upload his stuff to, by the way?

He does, you know. But I notice you aren’t watching him there.

I mean, I’m a happy, paying subscriber to Nebula. Any content where I have a choice to watch it there, I do. It’s stupidly cheap, too. Usually you can find a promo to get it for under $20/yr.

But I am also not pretending that Google owes me free & ad-free YouTube on my terms. They don’t. Nor do the creators owe me uploading their videos to my platform of choice. I’d prefer both these things to be true, but I at least can understand that it is not reasonable. YouTube, frankly, is probably the ONLY killer product I couldn’t do without made by Google, other than some open source software.

People should pirate all they want. I don’t really give a fuck. I don’t consider it some great moral evil. But pirating from YouTube is not some symbolic, ethical stand for your values. If you really think what they’re doing is bad, stop using the service and pressure the YouTubers to upload elsewhere (which they pretty much ALL could do without consequences from Google). The entire platform only exists because of advertising. Period. If you hate ads as much as I do, pay for the ad-free versions.

But YouTube Premium is incredibly reliable, unlimited, famously has very little content moderation, and is full of enjoyable content? (i.e., all of YouTube)

I think you just don’t want to pay.

You think Google pays “shitloads for ad revenue to creators”? Is that why it’s so rare for major creators to rely on sponsorship deals to be their primary stable income?

I don’t think there’s much for consumer single heat pump systems that do both. I’ve seen a few, especially with geothermal systems, but mostly it’s just a tiny heat pump built into the cap of a traditional water heater.

Worth pointing out that the nature of a heat pump is that the housewide heat pump is first pumping warm air into the house to make it available for the water heater, which then pumps that warm air into the water. So it is just one big machine, fundamentally. Or, if your air conditioner is running, the water heater heat pump is adding some cooling to the space.

The criticism of the heat pump water heater: they’re loud. A high frequency compressor buzz while operating. If you are switching to one, make sure it is located somewhere where the noise won’t bother you. Mine is in a mechanical room in the middle of my house and it is annoying when operating – I program it to run at night and close doors when going to bed. If I could do it over again, I’d put in in the (insulated) attic in spite of all the risks involved in that. More hot air available for it to use up there anyway.

No one wants a more intrusive and powerful government than the modern Republicans.

They just don’t want it involved in any form of governance. They want it to be used to murder trans people, enforce evangelical christian dogma, and make them rich. They want it to look like Hungary or Russia.

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