My spirit is willing, but my wallet is spongy and bruised.

Same here, and I am hoping that as battery density increases I may be able to extend the range on mine when the car gets old enough for a rebuild.

This was a problem with government owned Volts, they reimbursed for gas as this was already happening for the rest of the ICE fleet but had no way to reimburse for charging. Would not be surprised if this trend is the same for many company fleets too. Fix that and you would probably see similar numbers to private ownership.

To be fair, any American at least 35 years old can run for president. Criminal status or history isn’t a block to that, to prevent pulling a Putin and jailing political rivals to clear the field. The media is also a cesspool of ragebait and train wrecks due to the 24 hour news cycle and “ratings”.

I don’t think those are inherently opposed, the whole point of libertarianism being about liberty. Power gained through free market principles is no different than any other power, and thus can and should be opposed through competing ideas/services. If I don’t like your service being provided, I or anyone should be free to provide a competing service that matches my needs/values.

Being a libertarian doesn’t require keeping Fountainhead as your Bible and worshipping at the feet of oligarchs instead of politicians/the State, and I would argue selling your soul to the company store is as antithetical to liberty as selling your soul to a centralized State. But as you’ve indirectly mentioned, there is a rather huge spectrum under the libertarian umbrella.

I won’t speak for other libertarians, as I know there are those that think do worship the oligarchy, and many of my views do probably put me on the left side of libertarianism. If I didn’t believe that government has a role is keeping free markets free and providing stability and peace for liberty to exist (most fiscally conservatively paid for by collapsing all social safety nets into an actual UBI requiring miniscule overhead, Universal Healthcare, and more Georgist tax codes), I’d probably be closer to the anarcho-capitalists maybe? Maybe some offshoot or flavor of Minarchist?

It only needs to be solved if the country is going to survive, so if that doesn’t matter then it doesn’t. There will be knock on results from that, because countries usually fall a grade or two when they fail, and with decreased affluence the number of children will increase again.

The reality is that if you do not have at least a replacement rate, retirement and social safety nets will fail as they become overwhelmed which leads to social unrest and upheaval. Immigration can help, but this comes with its own trade-offs. 8 billion people is also nowhere near an overstressor for the planet if fossil fuels and pollutants can be curbed, and even dropping the numbers of humans substantially will not help with unfettered greed continues to drive dirty industrialization

You are correct, as quality of life increases overall fertility rates decrease. That does need to be solved, and immigration is part of that solution. Unlimited/unregulated immigration is not.

Difficulty with legal immigration is generally the case for almost every first world country, the US is not abnormal or exclusive there. I do not meet qualifications to immigrate to Canada, or anywhere in Europe right now even as a tech sector worker, except possibly by having family history through my ancestors. I am not arguing that US immigration policy needs a lot of work, but it’s not fair how much the US gets singled out for it as if it’s the outlier here.

The invisible hand of the market is not all powerful, which is why regulation and safeguards are needed for a “free” market to function. Anti-monopoly laws, labor laws, etc. I lean libertarian, but do not embrace 100% laissez-faire economics. Immigration falls under this same framework.

The West has eliminated their manufacturing and blue collar base by outsourcing it overseas, which hurt large swaths of the working class. Outsourcing labor by importing labor from overseas to do the job cheaper here has similar results. See the agricultural sector in the US for this example. Everyone always says that the reason immigrants are needed is because Americans don’t want to do those jobs, but leave out “for the wages paid”.

Some regulation is needed, and we have had wholesale failure of meaningful regulation and complete regulatory capture by the oligarchy which started under Reagan and snowballed out of control since. Proper support networks and social safety nets have also failed, for the same reasons. Unrestricted immigration does not solve these issues, and with these holes in place does indeed hurt.

Things that aren’t a problem when everything is healthy and working as intended can definitely hurt when things aren’t healthy. Obviously the “health issues” need to be addressed to actually fix the problem, but ignoring symptoms while doing so doesn’t help.

https://www.theonion.com/gays-too-precious-to-risk-in-combat-says-general-1819594658

You are correct, everyone is a villain at that point. The problem with that, as horrible this is, is it incentivizes the action. For the same reason countries don’t negotiate with terrorists. If you prove that committing terrorist acts, or taking hostages, or using children as human shields works, you positively reinforce those acts. Its fucked up beyond belief, and all alternatives need to be exhausted, but at some level someone takes the responsibility for where the lines are drawn for the least damage in the long run.

Is it actually preferable to just give money to anyone who hijacks a bus load of people, or a plane, or a bank, etc, so that no hostages are possibly injured when that happens? It might be, and could be argued for. Is such acts becoming more frequent or commonplace because it works an acceptable price weight against innocent human life? Again, it very well might be. It’s only money. I am glad I am not the one making those decisions, but we can’t pretend that the calculus doesn’t happen and/or doesn’t matter.

This may only be within the range of human hearing, and you can and do still suffer damage from excessive amplitude by frequencies above and below what is human detectable. ANC is not a protective technology for this reason, it is a quality of life technology.

Obligate. You keep on using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

In all seriousness, pandas are still bears and can/do eat meat on occasion. Gorillas regularly eat insects and larva, digging up termite and ant nests. Our closest cousins the chimps are not only fully omnivorous, but are accomplished predators. Most herbivores (like ungulates, bovines, etc) will not pass up the opportunity to eat carrion, baby birds, small rodents, and the like.

I’ve been wanting that since 1994. Jawsome!

No, but it’s equivalent to the $180-280 most of the current JNCOs are actually priced at. I think the $2000 comment was exaggerating for effect, because I can’t even find anything on their website over $300.

They were $80-100 jeans in '90s dollars back then, so about the same price with inflation really. They were always a niche corner of the market when compared to regular jeans, they were just a popular niche for a while.

So it is the level of “privilege” that does or does not allow the commission of -isms then. The better off the target is, the more acceptable discrimination is? That is also a very Western perspective. It would be ok to tell Muslims in the Middle East that terrorism is their responsibility because their country’s power structure does put Islam firmly above others?

This “some animals are more equal than others” stuff is moral equivocating. If something is wrong if done to a group that isn’t “in power”, then it is also wrong to do it to the group “in power”. This isn’t a zero sum game. We don’t have to weight the guilt by association for a black man when compared with a white man because systemic racism competes with systemic patriarchy. If you do think that the immutable characteristics a person is born with are the most important things about them, I would encourage you to self interrogate how messed up that is.

Are we also going to tolerate the same with Islam and terrorism? POC and safety because “crime statistics”? If those are not acceptable because it’s not anyone’s individual responsibility for others in an involuntarily assigned group, why is this ok?

That is because the “well regulated militia” part is neither the subject of the sentence, nor a qualifier for the rest of the sentence. It’s pretty straight forward English sentence structure. It explains a primary reason why the individual right to keep and bear arms “shall not be infringed” is important, and like a comment line in computer code it doesn’t “do” anything to the rest of the program.

The federalist papers and the militia acts back up that “originalist” interpretation.

Yes, but he won’t tell you because it’s none of your business.

America is a power bottom, and proud of it.