Any market where choosing not to participate is simply not a viable option should be prohibited from being for-profit.

If all smartphone makers start getting too greedy and charge too much, people will just not upgrade their phones and the smartphone makers will have to lower their prices or justify their higher prices with innovations. People can choose not to participate in the market and pressure the entire industry to lower their prices or create new features to encourage participation.

If insurance starts getting (read: gets even more) greedy, cancelling your insurance isn’t an option, especially if you’re sick. Foregoing insurance means either dying or accumulating extraordinary medical debt you can never repay. There is no pressure on insurance companies to lower their prices because you will always have to pick one of them. As long as they all increase their prices together, they all benefit and their profit keeps going up. Their only “innovations” in the industry are to minimize payments for medical services and maximize how much they shove in their pockets.

For-profit health insurance should be illegal.

The thing you have to keep reminding yourself is just how disconnected from politics the average voter is. We’ve seen 2 full months of every day bringing some new chaos, but for most Americans, the only major things that have happened are:

1. Elon Musk is firing lots of government workers
2. Trump is enacting tariffs

Everything else is just noise to them and they filter it out. Until things really start to affect them directly, apathetic Trump voters who thought voting for him would magically turn the economy back to what it was before Covid are going to assume things are improving (because they already were before the election, they were just in a sour mood and refused to admit it).

The short answer is basically Trump supporters are overrepresented in the watchers. Biden also got numbers in the high 60s.

Democrats don’t usually force shutdowns because the people most likely to suffer under a shutdown are federal, state, and local government employees, people who work in academia, and people in major metropolitan areas, all of whom make up a significant portion of the Democratic base. It doesn’t make sense to force a shutdown if your own voters are just going to blame you for the disruption it causes to their lives anyway.

Now there’s far more to lose, and Trump is going to get the blame for it. Shutdown for a few weeks to protect a few hundred thousand federal workers for at least a year is a pretty safe gamble when you’re not likely to get blamed for the short-term disruption anyway.

Absolutely. They can’t amend the Constitution through ordinary means. Which is why they’ve installed a bunch of extreme right-wing Supreme Court justices who can interpret the Constitution however they want to benefit right-wing extremists.

Here’s a completely plausible scenario: Donald Trump orders ICE to deport any child born here to non-citizen parents in complete defiance of the court order. The district court judge gets really annoyed and issues criminal contempt rulings against the head of DHS and ICE for disobeying an order of the court. Trump orders DHS and ICE to ignore the court and promises pardons to anyone facing criminal contempt charges.

Because the SCOTUS has ruled “core powers” are “absolutely immune” and the pardon is an explicit power granted to the president with no limitations, he can use the pardon power literally however he wants, including as part of a criminal conspiracy to break the law.

And bam, full blown constitutional crisis because the SCOTUS basically neutered the entire judicial branch and gave the president dictatorial powers.

Strategic tariffs can be useful for lots of reasons. Protecting a culturally important industry, supporting certain values in that industry that aren’t respected in other countries, maintaining an industry that is important to national security (e.g., domestic steel production) that would be difficult to ramp up in an emergency if the domestic industry collapses in the face of foreign competition.

The inherent tradeoff is that there will be retaliation by the tariff recipient on some other industry in your country; you basically accept a detriment for one domestic industry to gain a benefit for another.

But blanket tariffs are just stupid. There are lots of industries for which it will never be cheaper to produce locally than in low-wage countries in East or Southeast Asia and that are the kinds of jobs most industrialized nation workers just aren’t interested in doing. Companies will simply pass that tariff onto consumers instead of investing massive capital and spending much more on labor to relocate domestically.

People will buy less of everything because it’s suddenly way more expensive. Companies will sell less and have to lay people off. Blanket tariffs are effectively a regressive tax increase that directly impacts economic growth.

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.

Short answer: the Supreme Court

Longer answer: National emergencies are perfectly reasonable to the SCOTUS when declared by a Republican but ridiculous overreach when done by a Democrat and the SCOTUS will use any opportunity to neuter the power of the federal government where a Democrat is in charge.

“So why don’t they just try anyway?” you might ask. And the answer there is that the SCOTUS can do more than just say “you can’t do that one thing anymore.” They can use it as an excuse to block 100 other things that were either flying under the radar or were being challenged one-by-one previously and tied up in appeals.

Biden tried to regulate CO2 through the EPA. The Supreme Court not only said he couldn’t do that, but they concocted a brand new standard called the “Major Questions Doctrine” that basically says government agencies aren’t allowed to implement any significant new regulations unless Congress explicitly authorizes them. And now all those under-the-radar regulations are falling like dominoes in the district courts with no path for appeal.

Every family gathering with my conservative relatives starting on 1/20, I’m going to complain about prices and ask why Trump hasn’t brought them down yet like he said he would on day 1.

Any time gas prices go up, I’ll be sure to point it out. Airplane tickets, same thing. Any item that fluctuates in price, I’ll be sure to let them know it’s clearly Trump’s fault it’s gotten more expensive. It must be his policies.

When they inevitably bend over backwards to try to explain that it’s more complicated than that, I’m going to remind them just how often they complained about Biden being singlehandedly responsible as President for high prices and how easily they said he could bring them down if he just “changed his policies.”

I’m sure they’ll see no issue with their past positions, but it’ll be cathartic for me nonetheless having to listen to them for the last 4 years.

I’m using Firefox Focus on a VPN, so it’s not customized to me.

The top autocomplete for “can my wife” is “can my wife carry my gun” in case you were interested.

“Can my husband” is, in fact, the voting question.

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.

Other way around.

An acronym is a type of initialism, which is itself a type of abbreviation.

So acronyms are initialisms where you pronounce the letters like a word (e.g., RAM), initialisms are abbreviations made by taking the initial letters of multiple words and concatenating them regardless of how it’s spoken (e.g. FBI for Federal Bureau of Investigation), and an abbreviation is any shortening of a word or phrase into something shorter (e.g., “abbrev.” for abbreviation or “US” for United States).

Right now, it’s 50 R and 46 D with the 4 Independents (Sanders, King, Sinema, Manchin) caucusing with the Democrats to give it a 50/50 tie.

The Senate is currently 51-49. The Democratic Caucus has 51 members.

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.