This may help

https://youtu.be/24ib5pMkprY?t=95

You know what’s really insane? Before the ACA was passed, there was no federal requirement for how much insurance companies had to pay out on healthcare costs. The ACA set a minimum of 85%, so no less than 85% of premiums has to actually go toward paying for medical services.

Before that, they could literally just pocket 75 cents for every premium dollar if they wanted to with zero legal repercussions. I guarantee we’d be on our way there if the ACA were never passed.

For-profit health insurance should be illegal. Same thing with for-profit hospitals. I’ve read stories about doctors whose hospitals were bought by for-profits or VCs and turned into patient mills where they’re forced to push unnecessary elective surgeries and provide the bare minimum of care to maximize profits.

A healthy population is good for society and it should be something we invest in. We shouldn’t make a business out of someone getting sick, and then another business out of charging then exorbitant amounts of money for getting treatment, and then ANOTHER business to harass them because they can’t pay that exorbitant amount.

I saw a comment on YouTube a few weeks ago that I think perfectly captures the mindset of the people who scream about the “woke mind virus”.

The comment was something like “I never had a problem trusting a minority surgeon, but now they’re all woke DEI hires and I can’t trust any of them.”

In other words, “I had no problem with minority surgeons when there were almost none of them because I had to accept that there were a handful of ‘good ones’ that worked hard and earned it. But now that I’m seeing more of them, I know lots of the ‘bad ones’ are getting in that could only get in because it was handed to them because of their skin color.”

In these people’s minds, 95% of white people are “good ones” and 95% of minorities are “bad ones”. So if any respectable job has more than a few percent of minorities, the only logical conclusion for them is that there are lots of “bad ones” getting jobs they aren’t qualified for and didn’t earn.

I’m partial to the War of Jenkins’ Ear myself

And the writing is SO much better than Voyager.

The technobabble on Voyager drove me crazy because there was no consistency and just constant deus ex machina solutions that popped into a character’s head that magically fixed everything.

All it took was realigning or remodulating or polarizing or rerouting the EPS relays or the dilithium matrix or the deflector dish. And one character would always first suggest one technobabble solution so the next character could explain why it won’t work and magically be inspired with a new technobabble solution that will work. Once I noticed that pattern, it honestly ruined Voyager for me because it happens constantly.

TNG had their share of technobabble, but it always felt like they tried to stay logically consistent. DS9 kept the technobabble pretty limited because the plot was way more important, and I think it really shines because of that.

If Trump wins, all these idiots that voted for him because “thuh conomee was better” are going to act all shocked when he actually does all the really insane stuff he’s promising to do and tried to do in his first term but the handful of rational Republicans around him stopped him from doing.

I saw interviews with voters recently that basically showed people don’t believe he’ll do all the crazy stuff he’s promising, that it’s just a negotiation tactic or to “keep the base onboard” or to “generate attention.”

When things really go to shit, I guarantee the people that voted for him will take no responsibility for it.

Byron Donalds, a black Republican Representative from Florida, said Democrats need to stop talking about Project 2025, a policy document created by hundreds of people who literally worked for Trump during his term, because it’s “dangerous.”

But he also thinks Trump calling Harris a communist dictator who literally wants to destroy America, take your guns, force everyone’s children to undergo surgical sex reassignment surgery against their will, flood the country with millions of noncitizens so they can vote, among hundreds of other extreme and completely false accusations, are all perfectly fine and fair game.

They all know it’s not consistent. They all know Trump’s rhetoric is worse, but they see a cynical opportunity to gain a political advantage and they take it. Assholes.

The pardon power is explicitly given to the president by the Constitution. Therefore it’s a core power with absolute immunity.

The president is also given the clear authority to direct his subordinates in the executive branch as the “chief Executive.” The SCOTUS has ruled that the president has almost unfettered power to hire/fire/order anyone in the federal government to do just about anything he wants with no restrictions.

So logically:

1. The president can order an agency head to issue a new rule that’s probably unconstitutional.
2. Someone sues in a district court to block it.
3. A court issues an injunction preventing its enforcement.
4. The agency head ignores the court order and enforces it anyway.
5. The court finds the agency head and/or other employees of the agency in contempt for violating the injunction.
6. The president pardons anyone subject to the injunction (and this pardon power is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution or investigation).
7. The rule goes into effect and gets enforced despite being enjoined by a federal court.
8. We now have a constitutional crisis because courts no longer have any way to check on the Executive because the president can simply neutralize any criminal penalties with a pardon even if that pardon is clearly issued as part of a conspiracy to violate a court order.

I guarantee this is not what the Framers envisioned or wanted, but this is what “conservative” judicial extremists on the SCOTUS have given us. Although I would be entirely unsurprised if they decided to roll this power back somehow if ever a Democratic president were to wield it.

They also like to complain about the “crime in blue cities,” but somehow never seem to acknowledge that if it’s a problem that’s so easy to solve, why do red states with red legislatures and red governors not just fix the issue in their blue cities?

5 of the top 10 cities with the highest violent crime rates are in red states with Republican legislatures and Republican governors. They sure as hell act like they know the simple solution to violent crime in cities, but for some reason they don’t seem to implement those obvious solutions in their own states. Instead, they blame the Democratic mayors.

It’s almost like it’s a lot harder of a problem to solve than Republicans let on and they’re being disingenuous about knowing how to fix it…

The vast majority of elected Republicans are opportunists willing to use any opportunity to advance their narrative even if it’s clearly blatant lies or bullshit.

Vance pushes the “eating pets” crap to anyone who will listen, and when he gets hard enough pushback from someone and can’t bullshit his way out of it, he falls back to the “okay, maybe it’s not true, but it represents real concerns people have so it’s valid for me to talk about it.”

Which is exactly what happened with the election results in 2020. They pushed the stolen election crap until it was pretty much irrefutably disproven, then went around saying they had to make it harder to vote because their voters, for some strange reason, thought the election wasn’t fair.

DeWine is one of the very few Republican politicians left that has any sense of principle and isn’t a cynical opportunist, even if most of those principles are pretty shitty.

True, it wouldn’t be ethical to conduct an experiment, but we can (and probably do) collect lots of observational data that can provide meaningful insight. People are arrested at all stages of CSAM related offenses from just possession, distribution, solicitation, and active abuse.

While observation and correlations are inherently weaker than experimental data, they can at least provide some insight. For example, “what percentage of those only in possession of artificially generated CSAM for at least one year go on to solicit minors” vs. “real” CSAM.

If it seems that artificial CSAM is associated with a lower rate of solicitation, or if it ends up decreasing overall demand for “real” CSAM, then keeping it legal might provide a real net benefit to society and its most vulnerable even if it’s pretty icky.

That said, I have a nagging suspicion that the thing many abusers like most about CSAM is that it’s a real person and that the artificial stuff won’t do it for them at all. There’s also the risk that artificial CSAM reduces the taboo of CSAM and can be an on-ramp to more harmful materials for those with pedophilic tendencies that they otherwise are able to suppress. But it’s still way too early to know either way.

I mostly agree with you, but a counterpoint:

Downloading and possession of CSAM seems to be a common first step in a person initiating communication with a minor with the intent to meet up and abuse them. I’ve read many articles over the years about men getting arrested for trying to meet up with minors, and one thing that shows up pretty often in these articles is the perpetrator admitting to downloading CSAM for years until deciding the fantasy wasn’t enough anymore. They become comfortable enough with it that it loses its taboo and they feel emboldened to take the next step.

CSAM possession is illegal because possession directly supports creation, and creation is inherently abusive and exploitative of real people, and generating it from a model that was trained on non-abusive content probably isn’t exploitative, but there’s a legitimate question as to whether we as a society decide it’s associated closely enough with real world harms that it should be banned.

Not an easy question for sure, and it’s one that deserves to be answered using empirical data, but I imagine the vast majority of Americans would flatly reject a nuanced view on this issue.

I don’t know about firstest, but he was definitely firster. That’s why they call him a founding father, not a founding fathest.

It’s a definition from a well-respected global standards organization. Can you name a source that would provide a more authoritative definition than the ISO?

There’s no universally correct definition for what the ≈ symbol means, and if you write a paper or a proof or whatever, you’re welcome to define it to mean whatever you want in that context, but citing a professional standards organization seems like a pretty reliable way to find a commonly-accepted and understood definition.

Sure! See ISO-80000-2

Here’s a link: https://cdn.standards.iteh.ai/samples/64973/329519100abd447ea0d49747258d1094/ISO-80000-2-2019.pdf

“Approximately equal” is just a superset of “equal” that also includes values “acceptably close” (using whatever definition you set for acceptable).

Unless you say something like:

a ≈ b ∧ a ≠ b

which implies a is close to b but not exactly equal to b, it’s safe to presume that a ≈ b includes the possibility that a = b.

I find it frankly hilarious that all these ships are apparently designed so that damage to just about any part of the ship has a high likelihood of causing a bridge panel, often used by the captain, commanders, and lieutenants, to explode right into the faces of the most important people on the ship.

You would think after reading the 20th captain’s log with variations of “Ensign Ricky died after a bridge panel exploded in his face following minor torpedo damage to Shuttle Bay 3,” Starfleet might consider some redesigns and retrofittings.

Coolant leak! We’ve got a coolant leak!

I was tilling my garden a month or two ago and got to one end, turned around, and casually strolling right through the middle of the plot, literally 10 feet in front of me and a very loud tiller, was a young buck. Completely unafraid of me or the tiller.

On another day, I was using a chainsaw to cut down some buckthorn and that same buck was within 5 feet of me eating the leaves on the trees I just cut down. Again completely unafraid.

I put up a small net around the perimeter a few days before I put my plants in and they knocked it over, tore the net, and bent the poles. There wasn’t even anything in the garden! And to top it all off, there were several fresh piles of poop.

So I put in 8 ft. T poles every 4 feet around the perimeter, doubled up the net, secured it at the top and the bottom, and they haven’t gotten in yet (although I watched one of them biting at it). Unfortunately the neighbors are feeding these deer, so they have almost no fear of people.

I have a pact with the spiders in my house. If I spot them running across the floor or on the ceiling or tucked away in a corner, they’re not bothering me, so I won’t bother them. If I see one in an inconvenient place like the dinner table or hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room, I gently relocate them outdoors.

But…if I’m lying in bed trying to go to sleep and I feel one crawling up my arm, it’s broken the pact, and it can’t be trusted to leave me alone anymore, so it gets a quick and painless death.