Alcohol is pretty unique as a drug in causing car accidents. Most other drugs will either relax/sedate you enough so you don’t want to go out (opiates, ketamine), make you anxious enough so you won’t want to drive (cannabis, hallucinogens), or stimulate you enough so that if you do drive you probably won’t be that bad (coke, meth). Only alcohol will keep you up enough to socialize, confident enough to drive, and impaired enough to crash. Even if you were to legalize all drugs alcohol would still probably be the largest cause by far for impaired driving accidents.
The EU will impose additional tariffs of 17.4% to 38.1% on electric cars produced in China, the European Commission announced on Wednesday (12 June), as preliminary results from its anti-subsidy investigation confirmed prices are being distorted by Chinese state support....
Zionism and white nationalist anti-Semitism go quite well together actually. Even Hitler thought Zionism was a good idea for a while, get all the Jews out of Europe and the u.s. and onto the one barren patch of land in the Middle East without any oil so they can fight with the brown people they also hate is a pretty good “solution to the Jewish question” if you buy into all of that shit.
A poll was just released saying a majority of Democrats characterize what’s happening as a genocide, and 30% said it was a top issue. 40% of likely voters in general call it a genocide and 70% want a permanent ceasefire. Where are you getting your idea of the American electorate from? Cause poll after poll has shown a majority of Americans and a large majority of Democrats, even if they won’t call it a genocide, disapprove of what’s happening in Palestine.
Even so if it was a fringe issue this election is looking to be incredibly close and may be decided by 10,000 of those “fringe” voters in Dearborn Michigan deciding not to vote for Biden.
the financial parasites that have gotten used to getting free money from the government for so long.
Actually the government is giving out free money now as opposed to 0 interest rates where it wasn’t. The fed rate is the overnight rate you get for depositing money into the fed, not borrowing money from it. If I’m a bank and I have $1,000 at the end of the day and didn’t find anything to invest it in then I’ll deposit it at the fed and get say 5% apy as interest from the fed. If you did that every night for a year you’d get $50 from the fed while taking almost no risk, about as close to free as a capital gain can be called free. This has the effect of pushing up interest rates across the board because why would I invest in some risky business venture for 5% when I can get 5% with no risk from the government. The government is basically paying capital owners to not invest in riskier loans and bonds, cooling the market.
If you want to see financial parasites there are plenty of people right now with millions in Treasury bonds collecting even more interest from the government while doing nothing.
Don’t get me wrong their are plenty of parasites and con men that show up in the highly speculative world of 0% interest rates, *cough crypto *cough, but it’s not a matter of low interest rates good for capitalists and high interest rates bad.
This may be true if your working with two assumptions. One society is a meritocracy, which isnt true in most cases success is determined by birth and luck rather than merit, other comments have mentioned this so I won’t get too deep into it.
The other is that politics and government are just about getting the smartest most credentialed people in the room and then they will solve all the issues. While we do want smart capable people in office this view ignores the other qualification a representative needs, to identify with and understand the people they’re representing. If Congress is just a bunch of lawyers from Harvard they don’t understand what it’s like to be a single mom working on minimum wage and are unlikely to increase that wage. If there only talking to people in the successful upper middle class that they inhabit they’re less likely to see the struggles of the common worker. This is why we need working class representatives to give a voice to those struggles.
On the meritocracy argument if you think of it like economic success = merit = hard work and determination, I think that’s wrong because there are two things required, that are matters of luck, to turn that hard work into economic success.
One you have to be talented, or have some innate ability that others may not have. Just like some people will never be a top basketball player no matter how hard they work because they just don’t have the body for it many people just dont have the brain to understand medicine or law or business at high levels. There’s nothing wrong with not being able to do that though and people shouldn’t be punished by having a lower standard of living because of it. Hard work !=merit
The second is you have to be talented in a field that the market values. The classic example of this is the starving artist but even if you’re talented at child care you may not be payed well unless you “advance” to becoming a manager which you may not be good at. This also goes into how we value work as a society since that childcare worker is doing more good for society then a Google engineer figuring out ways to click ads, but the latter is payed far more and is deemed worthy of merit. Merit != Economic success
If you’d like to know more about this perspective I’d recommend reading “the tyranny of merit” by Michael sandel. It’s written by a Harvard philosophy professor on the reality and the moral and political implications of the “meritocracy” as it exists in the U.S. today.
Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly...
The tech company life is great until they fire you and 10% of your colleagues in pursuit of even bigger profits. Then when your on the streets you’ll probably prefer the current liberal city government over whatever these fascists have planned for the homeless
Profits are gained often times at the expense of the workers, as seen in the recent push for profitability in the wake of interest rate hikes which has resulted in mass layoffs across the industry. These layoffs also have a double effect of flooding the job market depressing wages and allowing employers to further exploit their workers with the threat of casting them into the quagmire of unemployment. In this sense companies thrive off the economic insecurity of there workers as the more your afraid to lose your job, the less you’ll complain about ungodly hours or not getting a raise to keep up with inflation.
This threat is less scary for higher paid wealthier workers like yourself who may have the savings to sustain a bout of unemployment, but for lower paid, poorer or even higher paid people with higher obligations like a mortgage, child care, medical expenses etc. this threat is big.
This is why this techno-fascist ideology is so horrible, its stability relies on casting out the undesirables and unproductive and using the threat of being pushed out to enforce conformity. Like all fascism it sounds great if your part of the in group, but once the new bar is set and your cast out you’ll realize the tyranny that the system perpetuates.
They talk a big game but they aren’t actually that unfriendly in practice. They haven’t funded terrorist organizations or tried to engineer coups in other countries, mostly because they don’t have the money or power to but still there are way worse actors on the world stage that the world happily deals with. Just look at Israel which has almost no international sanctions, and Russia with only about a quarter of the world doing some half assed sanctions for a blatant war of aggression.
They’re the hermit kingdom and the leadership is mostly concerned with the brutal subjugation of there own citizens and not international affairs.
They have been making nukes but that’s more of a defensive response to the loaded gun the u.s. has been pointing at them since there inception rather than some crazy plot to carry out a suicidal offensive nuclear assault on the u.s. or the south.
The north did invade but this wasn’t some evil communist dictator attacking an innocent southern democracy. Both sides at the time the war broke out were repressive dictatorships who understood that unification was going to take violence, the north made the first big move but there had been skirmishes prompted by both sides leading up to it. If the south had their military ready Rhee would not have hesitated to invade first if he thought he could win.
After the initial success of the north the U.S. rescued the south and even after recapturing the south continued on to invade the north and carry out a brutal, near genocidal, bombing campaign of the north destroying up to 85% of buildings. Like Israel and Hamas the north did strike “first” but the south and the u.s. hit back disproportionately harder. It is with the memory of that atrocity that the north despises the u.s. and seeks any means of protection against it happening again. They aren’t dumb, they know they stand no chance of winning an offensive war while the u.s. is on the peninsula and have given up on doing so, now they’re just trying to survive.
None of this is to excuse the kim government for there many domestic atrocities, while the South has opened up since the war the north has remained one of, if not the most , repressive and abusive states out there. Just saying there foreign policy isn’t as crazy and aggressive as the west likes to make them out to be.
I think I paid attention pretty well in my senior seminar on the Korean war but if you want I can link you my final paper on it if you want to make sure.
Assuming you have the American high school understanding of the war where the evil north invaded the free south and the benevolent u.s. came to the rescue, I’d recommend you read Bruce Cummings book on the subject to give some insight into what really happened. If you want a more condensed version refer to the comment I gave for the other guy.
There’s already laws against using someone’s likeness for commercial purposes without their consent, I’m guessing this will require the same fuzzy cutoff and basically just be up to the jury to decide or the judge to dismiss.
Could be very lucrative if you are already in porn and want to make some money from your likeness. This guy’s gonna pay me $500 to make a video and I don’t even have to do anything?
Could also be very good for porn stars who have “aged out” but can still make videos using their younger bodies as weird as that may be.
How could the leadership have handled this better? Actually hitting Israel hard and escalating the war? Do nothing and set a precedent that Iranian embassies can be bombed with impunity?
Iranian leadership sucks in a lot of other ways but they played this about as well as they could. They had to ride a fine line between a response tough enough to match the aggression of Israel and save face, but not enough that the u.s. would give Israel a blank check in escalation.
The u.s. could easily enforce a no-fly zone over gaza and implement an iron dome to intercept missiles going either way instead of just protecting israel.
If the u.s wanted this to stop they could, it’s not a matter of ability, it’s a matter of will.
I feel like trump never really supported Israel. It’s never been one of his big campaign issues and his isolationist tendencies push him away from it. He likes netanyahu like he likes the Saudis because they kiss his ass, but like all the sycophants who surround him he’ll abandon them as soon as they start being a liability, and this war, even with his base, is starting to become a liability.
He’s the opposite of Biden in that way, Trump had no particular attachment to Israel and would probably be fine if it stopped but his party is pulling him into a hard-line approach. Meanwhile Biden has been a passionate Zionist his whole political career and is being pulled by the left in the party to a call for ceasefire.
The French National Assembly on Thursday unanimously adopted a bill aimed at restricting the manufacture and sale of products containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — also known as PFAS or “forever chemicals.” The MPs, backed by the government, voted to exclude kitchen utensils from the scope of the text....
It’s on the non stick coating for a lot of pans and can easily flake off and be ingested if you damage it by using metal utensils. This is why you should never use metal on nonstick.
Certain elements of rail shipping were nationalized under Conrail when the railroads were going under in the 70s. Basically they were losing money at that point and were net liabilities so the government bought them out and operated them until they were profitable, at which point they were privatized and sold off.
U.S will nationalize industries if it follows the golden rule of capitalism, socialize losses and privatize profits.
DeSantis Claims Florida Marijuana Legalization Ballot Measure Will Let People 'Bring 20 Joints To An Elementary School' (www.marijuanamoment.net)
BREAKING NEWS: EU Commission announces preliminary tariffs up to 38% on Chinese EVs (www.euractiv.com)
The EU will impose additional tariffs of 17.4% to 38.1% on electric cars produced in China, the European Commission announced on Wednesday (12 June), as preliminary results from its anti-subsidy investigation confirmed prices are being distorted by Chinese state support....
well shoot (fedia.io)
Trump: Jews should be ‘ashamed’ if they vote for Biden (www.politico.com)
Biden hits Trump with major Microsoft announcement in Wisconsin (www.axios.com)
Fed keeps interest rates at 23-year high (www.npr.org)
The Price We Pay for Having Upper-Class Legislators (www.nytimes.com)
The Tech Robber Baron who wants to take over San Francisco (newrepublic.com)
Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly...
Documents found on a North Korean server suggest US studios may have unknowingly outsourced animation work (www.cnn.com)
Making deepfake porn without consent could soon be a crime in England (www.cnn.com)
U.S., Not Israel, Shot Down Most Iran Drones and Missiles (theintercept.com)
The United States shot down more drones and missiles than Israel did on Saturday night during Iran’s attack, The Intercept can report....
Beijing half marathon organizers investigate Chinese runner's controversial win (www.nbcnews.com)
Video of the race appeared to show three African runners slowing down to let home athlete He Jie finish first, confusing Chinese viewers....
Trump’s Call for Israel to ‘Finish Up’ War Alarms Some on the Right (www.nytimes.com)
NY Tizzimes Archive
France votes to ban ‘forever chemicals,’ exempting frying pans (www.politico.eu)
The French National Assembly on Thursday unanimously adopted a bill aimed at restricting the manufacture and sale of products containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — also known as PFAS or “forever chemicals.” The MPs, backed by the government, voted to exclude kitchen utensils from the scope of the text....
Canada’s equal funding to help Israeli and Palestinian victims of sexual violence draws Israeli fire. (www.nytimes.com)
Biden is coming out in opposition to plans to sell US Steel to a Japanese company (apnews.com)