I’ve stopped giving USA republicans the benefit of doubt years ago, Trump’s first year in office was enough to convince me. I’ve accepted that they are comically evil and that they have no redeeming qualities. So if I see something that is comically evil, then I’m not going to invent possibilities of why it might not be as bad, because in my experience it will turn out that after a little digging, it’s actually worse.

Also the administration was given the opportunity to justify or explain their actions by the reporter, and they chose not to, most likely not because they didn’t want to, but because they couldn’t do so in a matter that did not make them appear like spiteful bigots. There’s no point in inventing possible defenses for them if they could not provide them themselves.

They have already created gender neutral restrooms, according to the article these windows are not in those.

There’s 2 stalls visible in the picture. The walls are not floor to ceiling, the doors have larger gaps above and though it isn’t visible, I expect also a gap below. It’s not clear if there are vertical visibility slits on the sides of the doors. But they’re clearly just stalls really.

But it doesn’t really matter how the stalls are, the way that we know that this is targeted spite and bullying, is that windows are being cut only in a specific subset of the restrooms. They’re trying to shame and intimidate the kids that are in those restrooms.

This seemed like such an arbitrary law that I went looking for it and apparently it’s a small committee (4 persons*) rule that was poorly substantiated. The rule itself has been shot down by an appeals court in 2023, but the industry obviously had already set plans in motion to change their product line ups.

“On September 13, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals vacated the CPSC’s rule on custom window coverings. The court agreed with WCMA that CPSC failed to provide an opportunity to comment on the underlying incident data, conducted a flawed cost-benefit analysis that ignored the enormous harm that the rule would have caused the multibillion-dollar custom window coverings industry, and selected an arbitrary effective date for the rule. The CPSC acknowledges that the industry will need at least 2 years to develop completely new products. So the six-month effective date would make it impossible for the window covering industry to create proven safe replacement products.”

https://suncoastblinds.com/understanding-the-cpsc-rule-on-window-coverings-and-the-appeal/

• I’m not from the USA, so to me it seems very weird that this is how decisions with far reaching consequences are taken. In the eu legislation like this gets putten through the wringer in the eu Commission, probably also voted on by the eu Parliament, and then still given years preparation time and back and forth between industry/lobby groups/government. But instead this was: 4 non elected people take a vote and those 4 see no issue with a 6 month deadline. Wth, what a rugpull this would have been for the industry.

Edit to add: that rule that lost in appeal in 2023, was from November 2022, so maybe it does go in effect in november 2024, since it seems like that timetable was the biggest issue for the industry. Just speculating though, can’t look it up atm.

The people who vote for her seem like the useful idiots to me, she herself more seems like a traitor to the old values of her country and the purported causes of her party. She loves foreign autocrat dictatorships and there’s nothing green about helping republicans win elections.

Reporting what questionable government sources say without enough due diligence is not the same as supporting the actions of that government. If I say that Davy was beating up Mark because Mark stole his cookie according to him, but then it turns out that there never was a cookie, then me wrongly reporting about the cookie does not mean that I ever approved of Davy beating up Mark.

I found that the NYT editorial board opposed the war in an opinion piece that was released just prior to that war, so I’m of the opinion that they opposed it. Probably as one of the few media outlets in the USA.

And I find it funny that the first and most prominent article in the pbs link is the NYT criticizing the reporting of the nyt, that’s promising at least. The smh article reads like it’s written to lay the blame for being dragged into the war with someone else, a narrative of “we were all duped, if only we could have known beforehand and we would have acted differently”, conveniently ignoring that there were enough other international sources that called out and demonstrated that the wmd evidence was very flimsy.

Do you have examples of that support? Or an article/report that lays it out.

When I looked for it, I only found the opposite; https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/opinion/saying-no-to-war.html

So I’m thinking out loud here and this is probably going to be controversial … But what if Harris took on a comedian (or an oaf) as communications director, to purposely do gaffes and create controversies, so maybe the for profit media might like her more. Basically a modern court jester.

I always thought things like Sean Spicer hiding in the bushes were very funny. A bit embarrassing for sure, but also pretty funny.

Apart from that 1 diner, she is also openly supportive of several talking points of Russia, such as saying that … nato expansion is to blame for Russia invading countries; the USA shouldn’t support Ukraine; after the euromaidan revolution neo-nazis came to power in Ukraine …

And she also has geopolitical goals of Russia that she thinks are good ideas, which she basically shares with Trump: supporting Brexit, disbanding NATO and saying that the USA should abandon smaller nations to Russian and Chinese aggression for appeasement. Worded differently of course, but that’s what it comes down too.

And she must also know that Russian agencies have massively promoted and aided her in the past. She’s more than a useful idiot for Russia imo.

Imo it’s much more likely to have never been an actual piece of fruit. The story is probably an allegoric warning for some taboo subject and now we can only speculate on what was originally meant.

My theory: Adam and Eve were convinced by Adam’s one eyed snake to fornicate, but then their dad found out and kicked them out.

In 2022 there were some stories of how people on work visas were unable to jump ship while others were fleeing en masse. And now after all the tech layoffs in the USA, I imagine that finding another company to sponsor their visa, has become a lot harder still. So that’s one group still working there: people who will be deported if they lose their job.

The statewide efficiency gap is when you look at wasted votes across all districts of that state, it is not applicable to any single district. It is not correct to state that aoc was elected despite a state efficiency gap, because that gap is not applicable to the single district that she was elected in.

I’m not with the tankies, but I do think you have a misunderstanding of how gerrymandering works, so I wanted to try explaining it.

Part of gerrymandering is packing:
The committee packs as many voters of the party they want to discriminate against, in as few districts as possible. This creates a lot of wasted votes in those packed (now safe) districts, which will benefit the other party in other more contested districts. So yes, the gerrymandering benefits the republican party when looking at ALL districts, but democrats within the packed districts have very safe general elections.

AOC is elected in one of those safe packed districts, so in that way she “benefitted” from the gerrymandering. I’m not going to hold that against her though, she didn’t make the map and the fpp voting system isn’t her fault either.

This picture shows it best imo: in one of the disproportiate examples there’s a majority of blue voters, but thanks to 2 packed blue districts, there are more yellow representatives. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#/media/File%3ADifferingApportionment.svg

Currently this post sits at 5 down votes, so it’s not just that some people are unable to learn from the past, it’s people who are unwilling to learn from the past.

If you’re presented with evidence that what you want to do, will not work and will have negative consequences and you still want it to go ahead, then I have to ask: Why?

Why insist on doing something again which has failed in the past and which will undoubtedly fail again in the future? What is this meant to accomplish?

Some people are unable to learn from the past. And the last time this happened isn’t even that long ago.

In 2012 then candidate president Hollande did a surprise announcement of a 75% tax on earners of 1m+. And it was such a surprise that even the fiscal expert on his team was surprised.

Before Hollande was even elected, rich people started responding by changing their domicile to outside France, often also actually (part time) emigrating.

After getting elected Hollande then tasked his government with implementing such a tax. And that whole lengthy process was a political disaster, ending with the implementation of a heavily watered down temporary tax.

The chronology: https://www.lesechos.fr/2015/01/chronologie-de-la-taxe-a-75-sur-les-tres-hauts-revenus-avant-disparition-197994

After implementation the tax failed to bring in the projected money, because well, people react to what they perceive as overtaxation + the overall economy wasn’t doing so great due to this and other policies of Hollande: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/france-s-75-percent-tax-rate-offers-lesson-revenue-estimating/

Half an article with a graph of the effect on wages, the rest is behind a paywall: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2019/06/28/quand-la-taxe-a-75-a-ete-supprimee-le-nombre-de-contribuables-declarant-plus-de-1-million-d-euros-par-an-a-augmente_5482849_3232.html

In 2017 Hollande was the most unpopular french president in history and he did not run for reelection. Not solely because of this tax, but it certainly didn’t help.

And that was 75%. So a 90% tax on the rich is just incredibly dumb populism.

I’m absolutely certain that it wasn’t ads that put a firm like TomTom on a downward slope. This was actually the first time that I’ve heard someone proclaim that ads are the reason.

If your business is to sell maps + navigation devices for money and then the times change and now nearly everyone already owns a smartphone with built in gps + some car manufacturers provide sat nav as a default + another company is giving access to a map away for free, well then your business is in trouble.

I’ve never even heard of ads in TomTom or Garmin, since I stopped using a dedicated sat nav once I had a smartphone, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was one of the things they tried to stay afloat after smartphones became ubiquitous.

"but also provided psychological protection by shading the face from close scrutiny. "

To me it feels like this was made up by some spoiled twat, who couldn’t stand that people that they thought were socially inferior, wouldn’t show the expected obeisance by removing their hat in front of their “betters”.

I consider as most effective, the system that is most effective for the whole market in the long term, not the system that only works best for a few in that market. And yes, I realize that authoritarian market intervention is great for maximizing short term profits for those few companies/persons, but if the rest of the market suffers in the long term because of it (and they are), then we’re dealing with rent seeking and that’s pretty commonly accepted to be bad in the long term. Bad for society, but also bad for wealth creation. And if it’s bad for wealth creation, then it’s definitely not effective capitalism. This is why I consider authoritarian capitalism to not be the most effective form of capitalism.

And yeah, I’m aware that the USA is on this trajectory. Other western democracies are too, but of those that are, I think it’s still mostly to a lesser extent than the USA.

About China: China’s competiveness has significantly regressed in the last few years. Xi Jinping’s authoritarian and imperialistic policies have not been good for business. Under Xi Jinping guanxi is also much more important again than it was under Hun Jintao: companies have no real rights, they too are dependant on maintaining relations and obeying the government. If they fail to maintain relations or if they bet on the wrong political horse, then the company leadership will be gone pretty fast.

Authoritarian capitalism is not the most effective form of capitalism. It is the most effective for those that are already on top, but for the market as a whole (and especially for the society around that market), it’s going to be worse in the long run.

Companies that are protected from competition by an authoritarian government will be able to extract higher profits in the short term, but their products and services will become worse in the long term, which not only harms their customers, but also the company’s chances of selling their products on actually competitive markets. The American car makers are a good example of this imo.

Companies that are protected from having to pay fair wages and/or providing good working conditions, will be faced with labor shortages if the workers have alternatives, or with a depressed consumer market because the people have less money/time to spend on consuming things.

I really like their pagewide xl printers, but those are purely aimed at businesses. Just to name one thing I like :D

And those xl printers are the only thing that I can think off. I won’t even consider buying a current HP computer/laptop/small printer/…

This is also something that many people outside of the USA don’t understand: 49% of the americans are not voting for the Trump/republican shit show that they see in their foreign media, but rather for a heavily editorialized image of the person and party.