DangitBobby

Everyone knows that the law is what really matters when it comes to prevailing in court. That's why there's no correlation between money spent on legal representation and the outcome of a ruling.

Depends on where you are. Defending against getting punched in the face by shooting them will get you thrown in prison a good portion of the time. Sometimes being a piece of shit should result in an ass whupping.

How does that work with courts that work to the letter of the law instead of the spirit of the law? That rule based on the exact text instead of the history of what went into the drafting and passing of the bill, and refuse to even ask legislators what the intent of the law would have been under certain conditions?

If voters can't understand ranked choice voting or similar, how could we possibly expect them to understand the impact of what they are voting on? It's a self-defeating argument.

Not sure we can get a nice clean definition that we'll all agree on. Maybe that's the goal? Make sure we never talk about it? But nah we're going to keep talking about it. Clearly the definition isn't a hurdle.

That doesn't mean money doesn't tip elections, it just means sometimes money isn't enough. Anyone who has played a pay to win game could have told you that for free.

No more sanewashing please. Thanks.

That's your big plan? Lol. Stop fucking lecturing me if you don't have any ideas. Sick of this kind of shit.

There's really no comparison. I use both languages extensively and JavaScript is by far the quirkier language.

Well I don't know _what_ to do! I think if people knew the truth it would help but anti-intellectualism has taken hold and backlash effects are real, and talking heads have spent decades poisoning the well. If we can't agree that Trump is a disaster and we need to protect the constitution from him and the SC then how are we going to accomplish anything? Genuinely don't know what I can do that would matter.

Even now when things have gone so far off the rails, the average American knows basically nothing about what's going on. There's a ton of information but no reliable way to split it from misinformation, so people just glom on to whatever aligns with their worldview. Our future feels pretty hopeless to me.

It sure is! I have an EV myself and it's way better than any ICE vehicle I've ever driven.

Uh huh and that's why people offered to buy their cars back and instead of selling them back GM destroyed them? Because they weren't viable?

Really? California represents the entirety of the US's technology R&D capacity? Ironic that I'm supposed to read that as an indictment of California's governance...

Being tired of contrarian bickering on literally every fucking comment section of this god forsaken website

Lol. If he included everything you'd claim he needs to sound honest you'd criticize him for being long winded instead.

You right. 50 years or so. I was trying going back far enough to include the discovery of man-made climate change and not necessarily starting right at the plugging our ears portion of the timeline.

Regarding the nuclear FUD, I'm not backing down. We'll never know how much the fear of nuclear was grassroots and how much was turf, but we can know for sure that someone didn't want Americans to have energy independence.

I agree the US isn't the only country but I believe at that time we had the resources and clout to make green energy research happen everywhere and export our successes. We were still a global leader at the time both politically and technologically, especially where energy was concerned. And the world certainly took notice and set back the movement when the largest polluter per capita repeatedly signalled it had no interest in joining the rest of the world in a green future.

To be totally clear, I'm not trying to absolve Americans of our responsibility. Americans are remarkably stupid and basically feral (I'm obviously exaggerating but that's how it feels living here). I have had shocking conversations about climate change and domestic energy policy. About half the country, especially older people, were very eager to hear comforting lies about how the lives to which we've grown accustomed need not be adjusted in any way. Despite it now being quite undeniably knocking on our front door, a solid portion of older Americans still don't think climate change is man made and still resist any hint of a green transition. It's fucking crazy town over here.

But if trusted leadership told everyone that we were roasting the planet instead of telling them we weren't and that roasting the planet is un-American, you can bet your sweet ass we'd have some green and nuclear energy going by now.

I try to explain this on every post that complains about software reinventors. Why should people from the 60s and 70s get to have all the fun? So far my efforts have been in vain.

Definitely true. But you see the blame placed on the public fearing nuclear from these events. There was some fear, but also astroturfing to make sure nuclear stayed dead.

Nuclear was also kneecapped by FUD and astroturfing, and we didn't properly fund renewables because Republican administrations were in the pockets of big oil. Did you know GM made a fully viable electric car that people loved back in the 90s? Setback after setback, all self-inflicted, people pretending we have these insurmountable hurdles all over the place. Pathetic for an empire that prides itself as a champion of industry.

The fertilizer thing is a perfect example. We don't need to extract, refine, and burn nearly as much fuel as we do to get the fertilizer we need. People make the same empty argument about the cheap plastic shit that dominates the economy as if the world didn't exist before cheap plastic shit and couldn't exist after.

It really was very achievable, the main reason we didn't was we had a bunch of people spreading lies about it for 100 years or so.

It literally says state spending. Federal and state funding don't have the same effects on costs, and they don't go to the same things or the same people. If you check out the graphs in the articles below you'll see without much effort that the money the federal government gives out for college education doesn't make college cheaper for normal students.

https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/20...

It would have been awesome if they provided a source other than just a link back to one of their own BS articles.

> From fiscal years 2003 through 2012, state funding for all public colleges decreased, while tuition rose. Specifically, state funding decreased by 12 percent overall while median tuition rose 55 percent across all public colleges. The decline in state funding for public colleges may have been due in part to the impact of the recent recession on state budgets. Colleges began receiving less of their total funding from states and increasingly relied on tuition revenue during this period. Tuition revenue for public colleges increased from 17 percent to 25 percent, surpassing state funding by fiscal year 2012, as shown below. Correspondingly, average net tuition, which is the estimated tuition after grant aid is deducted, also increased by 19 percent during this period. *These increases have contributed to the decline in college affordability as students and their families are bearing the cost of college as a larger portion of their total family budgets.*

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-15-151?hl=en-US

So using the statistic "overall government funding increased" to debunk the fully accurate finding that decreased state funding resulted in higher out of pocket costs for actual students is the most insidious and corrosive type of lie we have. Because the fact itself is technically true and if you let the reader use their "common sense" to reach a natural conclusion, you can lie without saying the words. And it takes 1 sentence to say the lie and 3 paragraphs and 2 original sources to dispel. It also has the positive byproduct of making the deceived feel very clever. All in all, it's a libertarian think tank wet dream.

The article has inaccuracies on "falsehoods". Bernie Sanders didn't claim "all government spending" for college education went down, as the "falsehood" frames it (you'll notice no attempt to quote where this happened). It was very precisely framed as states spending less. Do different funding sources impact college costs differently, I wonder? What other ideological leaps are hidden in the results?

Ah yes. In their "about" page.

> In other words, we are conservative/libertarian in our personal views — but unlike many policy and media organizations — Just Facts is devoted to objectivity, and we do not favor facts that support our viewpoints. Instead, we will report any fact that meets our Standards of Credibility, regardless of the implications.

I'm sure this has no impact whatsoever on how they construct a "factual" sentence.

You know the old joke?

> I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.

It's like when the bear can't catch the slow guy anymore so he starts setting up traps and finding ways to cut off legs. Now the faster guy actually has to deal with the bear.

It doesn't need to be a serious offense. The current playbook works fine. Anything the Constitution prevents you from doing, have a private company do it for you. In this case you lean on, pay, or give preference to private companies to install back doors. Have the SC rule that you can't sell devices with certain encryption guarantees anywhere on the planet because planetwide commerce affects interstate commerce. Things like that.

I don't typically decide things on the basis of whether it's a trillion dollar company. If it were a blog post about puppy slaughter I wouldn't be defending it.

"Common sense" is the new "think of the children."

> No

Oh, okay. We'll just pretend this makes any fucking sense. Glad that's all cleared up!