Ideally what we'd do is shift from polluting to non-polluting forms of consumption - such as by switching from coal and natural gas to renewables. Some would claim this is "economy shrinking" because we'd be pushing people away from one and towards the other by artificial means like taxes and subsidies.

But what these arguments fail to recognize is that we're already doing that. We can't pretend that the government has nothing to do with setting incentives when it lets coal plants pollute for free, and also gives them free police and military protection to stop any citizens or foreign countries that may be on the less beneficial end of that pollution from doing anything about it. So in essence discouraging and eventually ending the burning of fossil fuels is putting an end to the tax we all already pay in the form of bad health outcomes and lost current and future land value from pollution.

I think there's essentially no limit to what the shooter's motives could be. What was the Las Vegas shooter's motive? What was the motive at Columbine? There's a million possibilities. Narcissism, delusions, non-specific rage.

Sure, there's one conclusion that seems simplest, which is that he shot at Trump but missed. And if he grazed Trump's ear, that's almost certainly true. But what if it comes out that the FBI finds that the closest shot was over 10 feet away from Trump? If that happens, I think we'd be fools to continue to assume it was an assassination attempt.

The smartest thing anyone could say at this point is "I don't know".

I have a theory where Trump actually can't really read, he can maybe vaguely tell what 100 or so words look like and has been faking it ever since he was a small child, to the point where he's very good at fake reading. This would explain why he does so terribly with teleprompters.

"cop/prosecutor"

Or as most people say, "prosecutor"

If you haven't deleted your X account already, do it now.

Except he was failing at the most important job - stopping another 4 years of Trump. And yes, that's partly the media's fault, but it's mostly Biden's fault. Trump's debate performance matched what could've been predicted pretty closely, and Biden failed to rebut Trump effectively and often seemed to help Trump argue against himself. For example, they should've easily foreseen that Trump would do the weird brag about his cognitive test scores. Why was there no response to that? Why not demand that Trump produce the results instead of just brag about them, or point out that nobody asked or is impressed by his ability to read a clock? There were like 50 opportunities during that debate for Biden to end Trump's whole campaign, he missed each one.

Clearly this was unacceptable, and I hope the next candidate dispenses with the vast majority of Biden's election team.

Correction: a new era of mass incarceration of poor people. Trump pardoned many wealthy people in his first administration, no doubt that will continue.

There will be kickbacks

Peter Thiel, one of the top GOP funders (and likely reason for JD Vance pick) is openly gay. Of course for him the reasoning is simple: he has a lot of money and wants policies that favor people with a lot of money. I've known a number of rich people in my life, and many (not all) have bought into a sort of wealthy identity, thinking of wealthy people as superior to non-wealthy people, and that the ideal social structure is a rigid hierarchy where the "deserving" are rewarded with luxuries and the "inferior" working class deserves a life of cheap labor. Psychological incentives strongly encourage this, because otherwise these people would have to believe they are getting more than they deserve, and that they themselves are too weakened by a life of luxury to be as supportive of the as fortunate than they should be. Accordingly, this identity can be more powerful than something like gay identity.

Yeah in the US we pride ourselves on having equal*** voting power, but our vastly unequal purchasing power can be used to override that.

Prod update on a friday morning? Non-malicious my ass.

"The real cause of poverty is too much labor regulation!"

Well no doubt that will be key. But I think that'll actually work against Republicans. They think they're being clever by dogwhistling racism and sexism, but people see through it and don't want to be associated with it. Besides, it's near-certain loss with Biden vs risky bet on Kamala.

There are many reasons why this isn't even good:

1. There's no federal power to control rent
2. Congress would have to approve. They won't.
3. While making rent cheaper for existing tenants, capping rent increases actually makes it harder for new tenants to find affordable apartments because it entrenches people in existing living situations (see: New York).

Wanna actually make stuff cheaper? Raise taxes on the wealthy. Wealthy people buy and build big residences, pricing out people who want small ones.

Except all those people will also be fine if Kamala Harris wins the presidency. And they won't be if Biden loses it.

That's extremely simplistic. The complicated truth is:

1. It's a law of political science (Duverger's specifically) that a first-past-the-post system leads large, mass-appeal parties, and parties that don't go for mass appeal will fail.
2. In the US, the political balance is further pushed to the right by a) unequal representation that typically favors rural states and districts, most egregiously in the Senate, and b) denial of representation to particularly blue parts of the country like PR and DC. This means that relative to the country, Democrats cannot be as far left as Republicans are far right and still hold power. This can be observed in the simple fact that in the 21st century, Democrats have won 5/6 national popular votes, but have only controlled the Senate in 4/12 sessions.
3. From 1 and 2, it follows that Democrats would effectively lose what little political power they have by taking a firm leftist stance, leading to effectively a one-party far right state.

I'm surprised everyone focuses on insider trading. To me the much bigger risk is: shouldn't your decisions affecting the country be unaffected by stocks you own? If you own $10 million of Apple stock for example, how does that affect your vote on an antitrust law? This is a problem even if there's no inside information.

There were 2 things:

1. Over time it became obvious the site was promoting mass market fluff over the unique content that made reddit what it used to be. In particular having r/all as a default sub and no option to remove it seemed particularly egregious. Seemed like an attempt to impose a monoculture on the user base, and I didn't like that culture which was mostly images of tweets which is a trend I especially hate.
2. The API pricing and going public was the last straw. I looked at reddit as a wikipedia-like place where information was shared freely, for whomever and even whatever wanted to see it. I even bought gold in my younger and more naive years. But if the officers were so keen on making profits for themselves on my shitposting, why am I not getting paid? Injecting greed ruined the whole thing.

How about do a better job of convincing people to adopt your ideology instead of making all of us put up with fascists until people figure it out for themselves.

The problem with making carbon into butter is it will just be released once someone eats it and burns off the calories. BUT, I think you can make soap from just about any oil. So you could turn carbon from the air into fake butter, turn that fake butter into soap, and then store the soap in caves, solving any potential soap shortages for the next several millennia while also solving the climate crisis.