sky-kedge0749

I don't know about this particular guy's opinions but usually what transphobes think is that there's no such thing as being transgender, trans men are actually women, trans women are actually men and in both cases they're either confused, misled, or, regarding trans women, predators planning to attack other women or outcompete them in sports or something like that.

I'm not sure what you're looking for. There's a lot of info out there about fossil fuel subsidies and fossil fuel lobbyists. If you have some particular subsidy in mind then you can research it yourself.

Your claim

> Capitalists never advocate for subsidies.

was very broad and absolute, going beyond any particular industry or even the present day. I'm really not sure but maybe you meant something like "advocating for subsidies is not a capitalist thing to do." In any case I'm not personally interested in whether there is a "capitalism problem" or "socialism problem" going on.

> Bathrooms are closed to non-customers because the burden of dealing with the occasional mentally ill drug addict isn't worth the risk or expense.

This can't be the whole story because a "mentally ill drug addict" is still the same person even if they buy something for $1 and become a customer.

Try searching for "fossil fuel subsidies", "fossil fuel lobby" and so on. There are many examples.

The "Reality's Last Stand" Etsy stuff in your Twitter link is hate speech, since it implies being trans isn't a real thing. In terms of Etsy's "Anti-Discrimination and Hate Speech Policy" https://www.etsy.com/legal/policy/anti-discrimination-and-ha... it's "demeaning language...directed at a person or group based on their one or more protected group attributes", in this case gender identity.

Gobbling down food is the correct mental image, along with someone in the middle of taking a bite being approached by an apologetic coworker, sighing, putting the food down and plastering a big smile on their face as they ask, "What's up?"

Oil companies routinely and vigorously advocate for subsidies. If oil company owners aren't capitalists then I don't know who is.

In some places this can develop into the expectation that everyone eats while working at their desk every day. You're not shifting the free time, you're just losing it. Then anyone who announces "okay, off to a cafe, see you in an hour" is seen as slacking.

A problem with biofuel is scaling it up, see: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7498153. According to that article the U.S. would need to devote "an area bigger than Texas and California and Pennsylvania combined" to crops specifically for its own jet biofuel needs. That's just for flying, not for food or fuel for ground transportation or anything else.

Your gasoline link talks about 2050. Gas is averaging $5/gallon in the U.S. Where's this $3-4/gallon gas? And that $5/gallon price is aggressively cheap, Biden couldn't even get a tiny carbon tax through a government his own party controlled. I made up $20 and $50 but what do you think a fair price is if we price in environmental externalities? What would that price be between now and 2050?

By "natural gas nonsense" I assume you mean supply issues related to the war in Ukraine. That disruption is exactly the sort of problem we can expect more of going forward, or do you think it's some kind of one-off aberration? Also from https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/22/fertilizer-prices-are-at-rec...: "The impact, Barclays suggested, will be 'extremely asymmetrical' with most emerging market economies disproportionately affected by food and fertilizer supply risks."

There are no viable replacements for fossil fuels for a tremendous number of uses. There is currently no plausible way that, for example, long-distance flights could run entirely off solar.

Your economic analysis of

> Oil is still used all over the place because it's cheaper than the alternative.

has no contradiction with prices skyrocketing. Fossil gasoline might get to $20/ or $50/gallon before it's more expensive than the alternative, and so on for everything else.

"Somewhat more expensive" fertilizer means more expensive food, which means starving people, which is horrible on its own, but which could also create a very dangerous political situation.

Also the risk isn't that we'll run out of fossil fuels, it's that continuing to use fossil fuels would cause so much environmental damage that restricting the supply, as horrible as that would be, would be better than the alternative.

Sentience as in "the capacity to experience feelings and sensations": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience. I don't want to be too philosophical, just consider that both chickens and cats will complain if you poke them with a stick. I'm allowing for something like cricket powder.

I think we agree about pets. Many people treat pets like people but when it comes down to it, they're not, and people won't treat them that way when it counts. Most people won't starve their family to pay for medical care for a pet. The pretense bothers me and feels hypocritical to an animal that trusts its owner so much.

I'm vegetarian in a one-animal-at-a-time sense. I sometimes think of it in terms of killing squirrels, since I see a lot of squirrels every day. For every burger you eat, imagine you have to go out and stomp a squirrel to death. I don't particularly care about squirrels but doing that would be pretty gross and traumatic, so if it's all the same I'll just eat some beans. The benefit to the environment is similarly incremental.

You raise an interesting point -- which you may not have intended, I don't want to put words in your mouth -- that once you treat sentient animals as disposable property, it becomes difficult to draw ethical lines. Surely a chicken and a cat have approximately the same moral worth, and in the U.S. you can buy whole cooked chickens at the store for $5. Buying a chicken and throwing away the meat is just as pointless as killing a cat, and a factory chicken's life is torture from beginning to end. So any difference between the chicken and the cat is sentimental at best.

Also lentils are filling and have a lot of protein. Boiled lentils with salt and other seasoning taste fine, are easy to make and as unprocessed as it gets.

Counterexample: I'm lacto-ovo vegetarian but not vegan partly because the anxiety and stress involved in checking ingredients for ethical purity, or worrying about honey or bone-bleached sugar or rennet in cheese, is not good for me.

Another angle on your and GP's comment is environmental. The most environmentally friendly meats come from the most mistreated animals, particularly broiler chickens in warehouses, but most veg*ns aren't going to say, well, if you absolutely have to eat meat, you should eat those.

Could it be someone else's business if you, say, killed a dog or cat every day, or are saying that you should be able to do literally anything you like to any animal in the privacy of your home?

It might be uncomfortable for the team to have a naive developer constantly bring up well-intentioned strategies to improve support for third-party ad-blocking in meetings.

Someday I'd like to hear the inside story of how third-party ad-blocking discussions go inside Google. Do managers take new hires out to a one-on-one lunch and quietly tell them, "It's come from on high that we want to gradually shut down third-party ad-blocking. If you know what's good for your career, find reasons to interfere with ad-blocking and always nod along to the PR excuses."?

Legislators have to think about so many issues that no one science specialty could prepare them. What does it matter if some legislator has a PhD from Podunk University and wrote their dissertation on the mating habits of red-billed geese? If intelligence is the criterion let's just say that. AOC was a waitress before she was a representative, if we're talking about diverse backgrounds.

I'm not sure they understood it, for example people like pre-existing condition protections but not mandated coverage, but the latter was intended to support the former. Basically people wanted the benefit but not the cost, which we might say is good politics but bad understanding.

The law is pretty technical. Having people who don't understand law as legislators is like having a product manager or stakeholder for a tech product that doesn't understand tech. It's not impossible but requires some extra work and moves a lot of influence into the lawyer's/tech person's hands anyway. It happens where lobbyists sometimes literally write bills that gets passed into law.

You want lawyers writing, implementing and judging under the law if rule of law is important. They're the experts, by definition. My understanding of Chinese government is that the law as written is, let's say, more flexible.

It really seems like you're making the argument I said you were making, that Georgia Democrats are basically Republicans actually and that the Democrats ought to have run a Republican-lite Joe Manchin character (who would have gotten stomped), or, failing that, some wild-eyed left-coast radical (who would have gotten stomped), but instead the national and state parties colluded to run candidates who could actually win.

I'm struggling to understand how we go from that, to saying that there is even the remotest support in Georgia to secede even though every national candidate Georgians elected is in the party currently in power, or that after secession the elections would or should go back to Republican vs. Republican-lite. The only way any of that makes sense is if the actual goal is to separate the Georgia Democrats from the national apparatus to hopefully give state Republicans a chance to figuratively beat the newly-activated voters into submission. In fact if we're going strictly by the numbers then in any split Georgia should stay with the Democratic parts of the country.

Also I'm not sure what Pelosi has to do with any of this but at the moment, from the outside, the face of Georgia Democrats look like Ossoff, Warnock and Abrams all of whom are authentically local. I'm sure Trump and the Republican party would like people to think that Pelosi is the face of the Georgia Democrats, though.

I do feel bad for Georgian voters, not to mention the people counting the votes. It wasn't their fault that the balance of power came down to them in the end and I'm sure most of them didn't like being in the middle of that firestorm. However I suspect any acrimony was primarily due to the fact that the Democrats found a winning strategy in a formerly safe state.

The big benefit of the ACA is that anyone can buy real, solid health insurance just like they were ordering something off Amazon, and if they fall into certain categories the government will pay for it. That's huge. I don't know if you had experience buying insurance before the ACA but it was a lot worse, putting it mildly. If the insurance companies made out then it was a "take my money, please!" situation from the perspective of the buyers. People before the ACA paid a lot of money to even get to the point where they had an insurance card in hand and a number to call to argue about benefits, or they did without entirely and envied those who had that.

I still remember Obama having a televised meeting with Republicans from Congress and each of the Republicans had this big stack of papers next to them as a sort of prop to suggest to the folks at home that it was some bureaucratic government takeover. What nonsense. The U.S. government is a complicated thing, so is healthcare, and put it all together and yeah it might take a few pages. Bills like that get passed all the time. And even as careful as the authors were, Republicans were happy to read the law closely and take advantage of every loophole they could, with the Medicaid expansion nonsense and the endless lawsuits on technicalities.

When you say unnecessary training it's not clear to me whether you're making a general statement or talking about details.

For example if a servicemember volunteers for paratrooper school and gets badly hurt on a jump then I'm going to assume the training was necessary because that's what the school is for. The people at the school are experts and it's a waste of military resources to put a trained servicemember out of commission permanently and the school will be held responsible so everyone has a strong incentive to be careful. However it sounded sort of like you were saying a paratrooper unit doesn't need to practice jumping so much because they'll probably never need to do that.

On the other hand if you're saying that the military should more aggressively investigate safer training techniques where that can be done with no loss of quality then I'm all for that. Maybe some training can be done with VR simulations in a wind tunnel before you actually send people up in a plane, awesome.

Also I'm sure you support veteran care, I was just adding that if the military decides some unit is necessary, then they need to train that unit appropriately, and (here's my part) they need to bear the full cost of any potential injury. Given how badly veterans are sometimes treated I felt that should be said.

Because all of them are Americans and deserve protection under our common laws. All states are in the union with the understanding that the union will protect everyone, including unionists in a state with significant support for secession. It's not my idea of justice, it's our idea of justice, all of ours. Turning our back on them by letting a state leave illegally would be betraying that trust.

Also consider that before the U.S. civil war the southern states voted against Lincoln, the northern candidate, in fact he was not even on the ballot in many of them. If the enslaved people in those states had been able to vote things would have gone differently. So we have a unique and terrible history of states seceding based on a minority's wishes.

Having keenly paid attention while the ACA was debated and passed and implemented I would say a lot of those opposed were as clueless about it as they are about Glass-Steagall.

I agree with this and will add that the cost of the risk of having to pay to support a disabled veteran for life needs to be considered part of the whole deal. If you can't afford the servicemember, properly trained and properly insured, then don't "buy" them at all.

You think a significant portion of the population has strong feelings on separating commercial from investment banking?

If the situation is such that a mass of state residents is physically attempting to overwhelm a military base like at the end of "V for Vendetta", then the political situation will have long been obvious and preparations will have been made. Things will have gone way past some 60%/40%, gerrymandered state government making a declaration.