While I do try to buy direct on some items that I am confident I’ll keep. The return policy and ease of use are why I’m still with Amazon. I just don’t want to have to deal with thirty different companies and their return policies.
But if I’m buying something like replacement parts or something that I’m not sure about if there isn’t significant savings, then I’m going with Amazon for piece of mind that I can return the item at no cost to me.
Florida was a purple state until Obama started easing relations with Cuba. This set off Cuban Expats living in South Florida who are angered at the easing of relations a government associated with their exile and loss of property. This turned a region that leaned Democrat to solid Republican.
This is what flipped Florida red for the past few presidential cycles. Now no US politician will touch Cuba as long as the current government is in place.
More than likely Cubans will suffer until their current government is overthrown and the Cuban exiles in south Fl are appeased.
Killing corporations won’t get everyone those amenities.
I’m disappointed, you were doing so well.
Ohh well I’m going to go back to sitting in my house, enjoying my AC, while playing on my phone and eating a tasty breakfast burrito all of which were made by evil corporations.
If that pisses you off maybe you could move to somewhere that fits with your philosophy. Venezuela and Cuba would probably be a good fit for you. 👍
Careful, you might cut yourself with that edge.
Who said its the root of the problem?
Uhhh we are addressing right to repair not corporate influence on the state.
Pick the right tools for the job not everything needs a hammer.
Terrorists support terrorists.
Zelensky has to hedge his bets and play nice with Republicans.
Even if the Orange fuckwad looses you don’t want to appear to snub his base or give other Republicans a reason to oppose further aid legislation.
I mean they will oppose it because a third of the Republican Party are Putin’s shills, but don’t give them reasons to oppose it.
I never thought I’d have something in common with a Saudi Prince but here we are…
Orrrr and hear me out. We just pass a national right to repair law.
There, problem fixed and we don’t need to burn anything!
Not with that attitude.
Fuck this, feds need to keep their bullshit away from my truck.
He’s lost my vote then.
Removed by mod
The pace of technological change and innovation was always going to slow down this decade. But Covid, Ukraine and a decoupling from Russia/China has further slowed it.
You need three things in abundance to create tech. First an advanced economy, which narrows down most of the world. Second you need lots of capital to burn while you make said advances. Finally you need lots of 20 and thirty something’s who will invent and develop the tech.
For the last 20 years we’ve had all of those conditions in the Western world. Boomers were at the height of their earnings potential and their kids were leaving home in droves letting them pour money into investments. Low interest rates abound because capital was looking for places to be utilized. China was the workshop of the world building low to mid range stuff allowing the West to focus its excess Millennials age workforce on value added and tech work.
Now in the USA boomers are retiring and there aren’t enough GenX to make up the difference. Millennials and finally getting down to household creation or their oldest cohorts (Xennials) just now entering into their mid 40s and starting to move up in their careers but they probably still have kids to support. So it will be some time before capital becomes plentiful again. Gen Z is large but they aren’t enough to back fill the loss of Millennials.
Ohh I made a point to highlight that this was a US demographic phenomena. Europe and Japan do not have a large Millennial or GenZ populations to replace their aging boomers. We have no modern economic model to map out what will happen to them.
China is going through a demographic collapse worse than what you see in Europe or Japan. Only they aren’t rich to compensate add in the fact that they decided to antagonize their largest trading partners in the West causing the decoupling we are now seeing.
The loss of their labor means the West has to reshore or find alternative low wage markets for production and expend a lot of capital to build out the plant in those markets to do so.
Add on top geopolitical instability of the Ukraine and you have a recipe for slower tech growth.
Removed by mod
Obviously city budgets are a whole other can of worms, but to be clear, shelter beds are almost always cheaper than jail beds. The cheapest option would be not to put people in jail.
Sounds great, feel free to advocate for that solution within your community. Your keyboard warrior skills are sharp, I’m sure the community will rally around your idea of spending money on homeless over schools and other services!
This isn’t a question of legality or ability! Obviously in the US it is now legal to fine and imprison people for sleeping in public spaces. This is a question of morality: is that law moral? Should we fine and imprison people for not being able to afford a roof over their heads?
Moral? Yes, yes it is. We should not expect a handful of communities\states to bear the social and financial cost of housing homeless from other parts of the country just because they are attractive destinations. They have every right to dissuade further immigration of homeless to their community.
If the majority that you respect gets together and votes to, idk, enslave a group of people and have them work on sugar plantations. That doesn’t mean their laws aren’t violating basic human rights, just because it’s legal.
Classic example of a false equivalency fallacy. No one is violating the constitution or advocating for enslavement. Comparing the two is the same as when people start comparing modern groups in the US to WW2 Nazis. Sorry there is no comparison.
As stated before the community has a right to regulate the public commons. You don’t have a right to sleep, eat, litter and shit on the street in front of a families house for years on end. It is a public health and safety hazard.
What are you talking about? Unhoused people aren’t tourists. We’re talking about citizens of a country, the vast majority of whom were born and raised there.
You seemed to have missed or are being intentionally obtuse about the last part of that statement. I pointed out that this is an example of a precedent for similar laws at the state level.
How kind of you to respect the will of the people denying the humanity of their fellow citizens… Are you saying you personally don’t have an opinion on the matter? Does homelessness not affect you?
How elitist of you to ignore the will of the people. You seem to want to impose your morality at the cost of other people’s communities.
Yes homelessness affects me. My kids went to a school with the largest percentage of homeless children in attendance in the country. I’ve had to pull my kid out of a class because of a homeless child with mental issues who would violently attack teacher’s, students and even my own kid. In one class there wasn’t a day for two weeks straight when the class had to stand outside while the teachers and admins tried to deal with the kid.
I can sympathize with the homeless kid and hope they get help. But I will not put their welfare over the safety and education of my own.
There is a social cost to what you are proposing. Those communities and the people affected within them have found that cost to be too high.
Much of Russian oil production is going offline and is never coming back anyways. Since the fall of the USSR they haven’t been training engineers at a rate to maintain their own infrastructure. Many of the engineers they do have are nearing retirement age.
As a result don’t have the technical expertise to maintain their own infrastructure oil fields in Siberia. Those fields require oil to flow constantly otherwise the oil will freeze and expand and burst the pipes. The last time this happened was during the fall of the USSR and those well heads took 20 years to come back online and required Western expertise to repair.
They’ve depended on Western companies to build out and maintain those tracts ever since. When those go well heads go offline either through lack of maintenance or through Ukraine attacking storage centers where this oil is kept before its shipped, they won’t come back on again. They will still have tracts of oil fields in the Western part of the country that they can pump, but they will permanently loose a lot of capacity. Your likely to see a Venezuela style gradual drop off in production over the next ten years if they don’t change course and bring back Western expertise.
It doesn’t really matter to the US, we produce a ton of oil domestically and have been switching over our refineries to process it. Europe, China and India will be the ones to really feel the squeeze when Russian oil goes offline.