The Haitians in Springfield who got accused of eating geese in the park are currently all there to revitalize Ohio’s automotive industry. Republicans love their car culture and hate their car manufacturing workforce.

Free time helps. But also, finding other people in the hobby/trade to work with helps. Being in a book club is nice, because talking about the book you read can be as much fun as reading the book. Same with art.

I feel like watching new movies is a no-brainer, though. I might suggest pulling from the Criterion Collection on random, maybe by genre. But it’s often fun to watch this stuff with other people.

Got my wife into old movies for a minute. “Bringing up Baby” and “One Two Three” managed to hold up after over 60 years. Give those two a shot.

You need to pretend you live in a democracy or the administrators will take away the illusion.

He will be exempt. The areas that he lives in and the things that he does will not be tagged as “criminal” on the data system that he has the contract to administer.

That’s always how these systems work. You don’t worry about getting dragged into the Saudi Consulate and bonesawed to death by intelligence officers when you’re MBS, because you’re the boss and the guy getting bonesawed is your employee.

For the same reason, you don’t worry about getting spied on when you’re the one who owns and operates the big surveillance infrastructure because it exists for your benefit.

RIP the future of high end computer graphics. 1972 to 2024. You had a good run.

We’re talking about rentals, dude.

We just had a major rental catrelization scandal, by which landlords collaborated to keep vacant units prices above the clearing rate to deny their tenants anywhere cheaper to move.

Someone can afford the home you’re in.

I’ve got half a dozen units on my block that are selling above the clearing price. They’ve been vacant for years. This is speculative real estate. The only people who can afford it are the developers and investors looking to accumulate housing stock on the gamble that someone will be able to pay the markup at some point in the future.

no money spent

Well… electricity.

you’re just missing the point purposely or trying to strawman and move goalposts

Reads like a Ben Shapiro rant.

Obviously people can afford these homes

Why would states need to implement a vacancy tax on speculative properties if people could afford them?

Seems to be an increasingly popular strategy for reducing homelessness. San Francisco could get 90% of its homeless off the streets with the country’s fiercest housing speculation tax, but landlords are already fighting it tooth and nail

a family of 3 is going to take your house if they can afford it

Why do you think anyone can afford these homes?

Great theory until you get removed from your home trying to make a point

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_strike

When you get the whole building involve, it can be surprisingly effective.

the family of 3 with nowhere else to go doesn’t have the luxury of caring about things like this

You don’t think a family of 3 cares when their rents double over five years while their wages barely budge?

Who forecloses on the tenant? The landlord

Who forecloses on the landlord? The bank

Who actually performs the eviction? The sheriff’s office

Who therefore truly controls the property?

I’ve been at companies with generic PTO and companies with explicit sick leave which is considered additional to PTO.

The theory of sick leave is that people with serious or chronic illnesses need that additional time and shouldn’t be compelled to come in at the expense of their long term well being. Also, if you’ve got the flu, don’t show up and spread it around just have some extra days to get better.

If you want to get ideological about it, this is the nut of the whole “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need” thing the 19th century leftists were talking about. I do get the broader argument that we should just have more PTO generally speaking, shorter work days and work weeks, and more time for ourselves and our loved ones. But I think segregating out “sick leave” specifically for people who need additional time to recover form illness is generally better policy than handing someone a (often smaller and stingier) set of generic PTO and telling them to spend it on the worst days of their life.

Try eating raw grain.

Well… if you want to get really into anthropology, there’s an argument that outsourcing our digestion (via early agriculture) actually made us a lot weaker and dumber. It was social pressure (often explicit enslavement) that forced people into the agricultural lifestyle. But that a booming population powered by cheap, reliable agriculture allowed multitudes to outperform by volume what exceptionally smart and strong but scarce individuals achieved in small tribes.

More advanced forms of sterilization became necessary as populations hit certain critical levels of risk for pathogens and other hygiene problems. And so modern techniques, like vaccination and pasteurization, are really just extensions of this ten-thousand year trend towards urbanization that require health and safety precautions as a condition of our dense population centers.

This wasn’t just biological evolution. Our ability to process, transmit, and record information made our species heavily dependent on these technological techniques and the passing down of the instructions to perform them. The health risks are now bound up in our ability to maintain a working, useful library of information and to perform the rituals necessary to keep our food and water sufficiently sterile.

It’s to start the break down of food.

That too. But killing parasites in meat and fish is another big benefit.

We evolved to outsource our digestion to cooking.

To a degree. But we also just died more often to infection and disease. Cooking reduced mortality rates, which spurred a larger population, whose members transmitted the knowledge of how and what to cook before eating.

Primitive forms of innoculation, antiseptic, and pasteurizing go back centuries if not millennia. The very idea of the small pox vaccine came out of the recognition that cow pox mitigated the risk of contagion. Milk maids were (unwittingly) vaccinating themselves for some time.

And pasteurization is just cooking your food. Hell, the whole reason primitive people started baking bread, roasting meat, and brewing beer came down to the benefits of sterilization.

These aren’t even new ideas, per say. They’re advances in technique, understanding of consequence, and means of distribution.

The best time to join a union was ten years ago.

The second best time is now.

I asked who stands a chance.

The people who collect the most corporate PAC money, obviously. So these are the only people it is reasonable to support.

Who stands a chance.

First they came for the Palestinians and I said nothing, because I didn’t want to ruin anyone’s electoral chances.