Late-diagnosed autistic, special interest-haver, dad, cyclist, software professional
At what point does this sort of thing stop being politics and start being organized crime? So now I halfway-hope the vigilantes that try to do this will end up facing criminal charges for it
But, I also halfway-expect cops and prosecutors to look the other way if the victims of this kind of crime ends up being the kind of people they’d be disproportionately policing and convicting anyhow
OK, so now I halfway-hope the vigilantes that try to do this will end up facing criminal charges for it
But, I also halfway-expect cops and prosecutors to look the other way if the victims of this kind of crime ends up being the kind of people they’d be disproportionately policing and convicting anyhow
While on the one hand I can agree there’s a place and time to be present and participate appropriately, on the other hand it’s so goddamned tiring to see politics that in situations of nuance zoom in on ‘control them’ as a thing everyone can rally to as if the solution of phone control was really going to be simple and accomplish its objectives.
I mean, criminalizing drugs seemed on its face to be a simple-enough thing to do, and a good idea- who could object to that, right? Who favors addiction, right? What could go wrong? Fundamentally, the ask for enough power to ban anything isn’t a trivial ask, and it shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.
Its consistently worse than home cooking. But not everyone has the luxury of a functional kitchen or a stocked fridge or the time to prepare the meal.
You’re not wrong here. It’s not good food, but it’s easy and touches the makes-me-crave-it neurons, it’s often available in food deserts (where it’s legitimately difficult to really stock a kitchen) and sometimes it’s only cheap in the context of whether or not you have that home infra and time to use it or not.
I just use my privilege (I have a pretty functional kitchen and the ability to stock it mightily) to not fund a business model that looks to me like it’s hostile to labor (yeah you, McDonalds and most of the rest), tends to give money to politics I can’t abide (looking at you, chick-fil-a), and I really prefer to patronize businesses whose employees don’t have the energy of beaten animals. I get that it’s my privilege to do that, but being someone with that to work with, using it appropriately seems the right thing to do.
If inflation isn’t based on most prices increasing… What is it based on?
It’s the devaluation of currency that happens when too much of it chases too few goods in the marketplace. It’s purely a monetary thing, you get that when the supply of money grows more quickly than the value of real goods in the economy does.
Ideally, we print money (and take it out of circulation) at a pace that keeps the money supply more or less balanced to the value of available goods and services in the economy. If we were to print too much money, or not take enough out of circulation (note: paying taxes does this; when you pay taxes the money doesn’t go into some account somewhere, it’s used to zero out the bonds issued to create it), the amount of money in circulation would become greater than the amount of real valuable goods in the economy. When that happens, the resulting bidding contest to secure those goods (after all, money doesn’t have intrinsic value, it’s only good for buying things that do) drives up the price of those goods in monetary terms.
…thus showing that the “Law and Order” party was never about law, they just want a particular kind of order- that is, a hierarchy wherein people below them on the status-ladder know not to try to hold them accountable to anything, including the law or even plain decency.
To them, the law is the cudgel to keep the poors and plebes in their place- low in the order- never to be applied to them.
It’s been maddening to watch people call price-gouging “inflation”, honestly.
That’s not fucking inflation when someone in the supply chain made things more expensive and pocketed the difference as a wider profit margin; it’s the symptom of non-enforcement of antitrust laws.
I mean, most foodstuffs markets (in the supply chain between farm and grocer or farm -> restaurant) are controlled by very few people or corporations; when the farmers get less for their products but the grocer must pay more for them, that’s not inflation. It’s price-gouging, the symptom of the kinds of market failures that follow regulatory failures to prevent corporate mergers that would reduce competition in those markets.
When you look at food, fuel, housing, the enshittification of basically everything, the acquisition of yesterday’s hot-fresh-streaming services and re-packaging them to be just as predatory as the cable was when you cut the cord and went to streaming- it’s all what we get when private equity owns a piece of everything and they’re running it all to squeeze more out of everyone they can, and they also ensure regulators don’t do a damned thing about it.
There was once a time when regulators had the will to block corporate mergers, and they had the will to tax windfall profits at 100%.
Welp. It’s time for Tesla workers to unionize, and hard
They’re not the ones being affected by the boomers.
My dude, they’ve been riding us our whole lives
Y’know, the only reason the Democrats struggle to win at all is that sometime in the post-Nixon era they collectively decided to stop standing up for labor’s buying power. When they did this, (which helped them a lot in terms of their ability to get corporate donors to finance their elections), it meant that working people would go from having 1 party represent labor to 0 parties doing that.
In the 50s an entry-level job that a high-school graduate could get would support a family, buy a home and a couple of cars, and pay out a retirement. Today, that job won’t even pay for an apartment without roommates.
That right there is the whole reason the GOP is a viable political party at the federal level- with both parties beholden to corporate donors, winning elections is more or less a matter of spending money on campaign ads attacking the other party because neither party has to do anything that voters want
I enjoy the schadenfreude as much as the next guy, but there is a frame in which this kind of confusion does actually make sense.
It’s the frame in which you acknowledge that our system of justice isn’t about holding everyone equally accountable to the law, it’s instead been an institution to keep the poor and marginal in their places- that is, it’s about enforcing an unspoken social, class, gender, and racial hierarchy that a lot of the MAGA folks take for granted and really want to defend and uphold.
That is the order they’re talking about when they say ‘Law and Order’. The order is a social, racial, gender, and class hierarchy, and the law is the means by which the hoi polloi are kept in whatever the powerful in it regard to be their ‘rightful places’.
For these people, the idea that the law might actually apply to everyone is an attack on the basis of order as they understand it. Of course they’re mad.