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HelixDab2

@ HelixDab2 @lemm.ee

Posts
3
Comments
1222
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Instead of Orange Man doing Tariffs would it not have been better for him to talk about shopping locally and so forth. And giving more tax breaks to companies that stay and sell in the US?

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  • Weeelllllll...

    We're violating trade agreements with our tariffs. But giving tax breaks to companies that re-shore industry would also likely violate trade agreements, because it would create 'unfair competition'. Kinda like the way that China has given subsidies to certain industries--such as solar panel producers--has created unfair competition, since they have far lower costs than other solar panel producers. As such, tax breaks and incentives would probably also hurt our trade relations, because we would essentially be taking jobs out of other countries. ...But that would probably hurt out relations with other countries far, far less than what we're doing now.

    Honestly, there's not a great way to bring manufacturing jobs back in a way that doesn't harm our relationships with other countries, or our national interests in some way. By purchasing shit from companies with lower labor costs/standards of living/higher levels of labor abuse/etc., we've undercut our ability to produce the same goods at a competitive price while also keeping our own standards. Even if we went back to pay ratios between workers and executives that existed 50 years ago (I think that lowest to highest ratio in large companies was about 150:1 in the late 60s), that wouldn't be enough to keep our living standards, avoid labor abuses, and still be competitive with shit we get from China.

    This is compounded by the fact that we do have some of this manufacturing in the US, because it's more-or-less required by the Barry Amendment (USC 10 §2533(a)). But the costs are astronomical. Take a backpack made by Mystery Ranch. Their Black Jack 80--identical to the USSOCOM SPEAR Patrol bag they make, just with another name--is $1200. The version that's made in Vietnam and is not Barry-compliant, was about $400. The materials and craftsmanship were substantially identical, but the fabrics were sourced from outside the US, and the manufacturing was done outside the US. There's no reasonable way that the US gov't can subsidize those kinds of costs.

  • Instant rotten milk

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  • So what's happening here is that the carbonic acid in the carbonated water is curdling the milk. You can get the same effect by adding any acid to milk. If you're cooking, your recipe calls for buttermilk, and you don't have any, you can substitute regular milk that you've added a tablespoon of vinegar to (stir, wait about five minutes before adding).

  • Sometimes we create our own problems.

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  • Then what you’re asking for is a more fractured human society.

    No, I'm saying I want energy independence. I don't want to be dependent on the vagaries of service providers, or politicians that decide one day that renewables are great, and then the next day fuck it all drill baby drill, or a utility--or government--that refuses to invest the necessary capital into infrastructure to maintain capability. I'll pay my taxes so that shit can get done IF that ends up being the will of the people, but I don't see the point of being dependent on a system that I both need and have no control over.

  • Sometimes we create our own problems.

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  • It doesn’t take advantage of economies of scale very well.

    You missed my point; I was talking about being entirely off-grid there. So unless the homeowner in question also has a large industrial building with a flat roof, we're back to where I said that they didn't have enough generative capacity to not be reliant on a power grid, at least in part.

    If what you want is energy independence from your local power utility,

    No, I want energy independence period. Not just from the local utility, I want independence from a co-op as well. I want to have my own well so I'm not relying on someone else to deliver water. I want enough arable land to grow most, or all, of my own food. This isn't compatible with living in a city. (And part of the reason I want to generate my own power is so that I can use all electric vehicles.)

  • Unfortunately happens too often I think

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  • ...Shouldn't that be the other way around...?

  • Sometimes we create our own problems.

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  • Without reading the article, I could already see what the problem was.

    Unless you have capital to invest, you can't expand or improve the power grid. That capital can either come from the gov't--through taxation--or from private industry. If you, personally, have enough capital to do so, you can build a fully off-grid system, so that you aren't dependent on anyone else. But then if shit happens, you also can't get help from anyone else. (Also, most houses in urban areas do not have enough square feet of exposure to the sun to generate all of their own power.)

    Fundamentally, this is a problem that can only be solved by regulation, and regulation is being gutted across the board in the US.

  • Who is generally recognized as the greatest of all time criminal defense lawyer?

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  • Alan Dershowitz has turned into a right-wing hack, making ridiculous legal arguments to defend untenable positions.

  • Slate, a customizable EV pickup for $20k

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  • Unfortunately most commercial farms aren't putting in what they're taking out, even with the industrial fertilizers. Most of the industrial fertilizers are just nitrogen, potassium, and phosphates, often as a liquid. You are absolutely right that you can't take and never return; that's why in pre-industrial revolution times, people would rotate fields between crops, and lying fallow/being used for grazing (where sheep, cattle, etc. were leaving free fertilizer) You also ended up with fewer years where all your crops got wiped out by a single pest, because you weren't farming just one thing. Efficiency in farming--esp. monoculture--is great for profits, not so great for the land itself.

    Good news is that good water treatment plants will pull phosphate out of the waste water.

    Eh. High levels of phosphates end up running off fields into waterways, and then you get things like algae blooms. Waste water treatment plants will clean up runoff that goes into the sewers and storm drains, but it's not really cleaning up entire rivers. IIRC, that used to be a much more significant problem; I remember water in rivers near where I grew up--which was all surrounded by farms--often had white, sludgy scum anywhere that the current was forming eddies. If I remember correctly the high levels of that white shit was due to worse regulations governing agricultural run-off.

  • No issues here

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  • Under that criteria, there are a grand total of zero areas that can accommodate them. Same goes for dogs.

    But that's a stupid criteria, because cats are tamed, and thrive indoors.

    Hope that helps.

  • Yep...

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  • Fuck.

    Ouch, man. Why you gotta attack me like that?

  • No issues here

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  • If someone intentionally caused harm to any of my cats, I live near a large national forest, and once you get a few hundred yards off a trail, no one is going to find a body.

  • No issues here

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  • Who tf gets a pet cat and doesn’t let it outside?

    People that love their cats and don't want them to die young. Outdoor cats live an average of 2-5 years, indoor-only cats live an average of 10-15 years. By allowing cats outside, they're exposed to pathogens, parasites, and dangers that they wouldn't otherwise experience. In my area, there are coyotes, bobcats, rattlesnakes, hawks, and owls, all of which will quite happily make a meal of a cat. There are also cars; they don't tend to be able to stop on a dime.

  • Slate, a customizable EV pickup for $20k

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  • Slate, a customizable EV pickup for $20k

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  • Use some Rokset on all your fasteners; the only way to break the threadlocker is with heat, and heat would also destroy the bodywork. So you could still replace damaged panels, but you couldn't steal them.

  • An honest discussion about Tankies, from an Anarchists Perspective

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  • You’re trying to defend the point of a genocide denier, but hopefully you’ll agree with me on that, right [emphasis added]?

    First, that's a manipulative way of stating something; it's intended to force agreement. Although it's phrased as a question, it's not. This is a common tactic used by both high pressure salespeople, and by cults. It was one of the ways I was taught to pressure people into joining the Mormon church when I was a missionary. My suggestion is that, if you want to argue in good faith, then that's a rhetorical device that you should stop using entirely.

    You are confused and mix up country and state.

    You are correct. I am confusing them. However, in the context of Israel and their genocide against Palestinians, they're very nearly interchangeable. Hamas--and Iran, I believe--want to abolish Israel. Yes, the land itself would still be there, but it would not be a Jewish state/political entity. The country that Israel is would functionally cease to exist if Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran had their way.

    Do you believe the third reich had a right to exist?

    If you're limiting the question to existence, then yes, I do believe that the 3rd reich had the right to exist. However, I don't believe that they had the right to murder 6M+ Jews, Romani, LGBTQ+ people, and political dissidents, or to start a war of aggression. The force used to stop their murders and aggression also happened to be the same amount of force that ended the 3rd reich, but it's not necessarily that way.

    They’ve done nothing but ignore UN Sec Council resolutions.

    Well. Not exactly. I'm pretty sure that it's usually general assembly resolutions. I believe that the UN Security Council needs to be unanimous to pass a resolution, and the US--as a permanent member--always objects when it comes to condemning whatever atrocity Israel is currently committing. Which is pretty goddamn awful. And Russia does the same thing when one of their allies is doing awful shit. The ability of one member of the security council to hold up resolutions effectively de-fangs the council.

    But - to your point, I agree entirely that the government of Israel, with the support of the majority of the Israelis, is committing and has committed war crimes against Palestinians.

    “does that mean that Russia has no right to exist”,

    Yes, sorry, I flipped Russia and Ukraine there. Me no type good sometimes.

    But, at that--it is true that Russia has been severely sanctioned (...although $10 says Trumps ends most/all of those sanctions; did you see that Russia was the only country that didn't get tariffs?). But should the state of Russia be entirely wiped out? Should Russia--as a state--cease to exist? (Russia certainly wants Ukraine to cease to exist as both a country and a state; Putin wants it to be part of Russia.) And no, Israel has not faced any consequences, and that is an utterly shameful failure of leadership in the US and in the rest of the world.

    ...But it's also not directly relevant to the narrow question of whether Israel should be allowed to exist.

    You’re trying to defend the point of a genocide denier

    How so? He lit. said that he thinks Palestinians should have the right to self-determination, and that he didn't support Israel's genocide. ("Palestinians have a right to self determination as well. I don’t support genocide.")

    Israel commission of genocide is independent of their right to exist; they DON'T have the right to commit genocide, and the world should be--should be--united in stopping it. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran want to wipe Israel out, and commit acts of terrorism in pursuit of that; despite their actions--which I can understand given the actions of Israel--Palestinians and a Palestinian state also have, or should have, a right to exist.

    I'm not sure where the disconnect is here.

    I think that a true 2-state solution is the only realistic option, with borders returning to the, what, 1947? borders. I think that the world probably needs to have UN Peacekeepers there for the next century or so, and those troops should be allowed and required to use force to stop aggression from any side. I think that it was probably a mistake to have shoehorned Israel into the middle east in the first place; we should have given them Florida instead. (...Except that hardline Zionist Jews really, really wanted Jerusalem, because that was the territory that the believed god have given to them.)

  • An honest discussion about Tankies, from an Anarchists Perspective

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  • But isn't that irrelevant to whether the country has a right to exist as a country? Does a country only have a right to exist when they do nothing wrong? Are all people in a country responsible for the actions of leadership?

    Trump is crashing the entire world's economy, because he's a fucking short-bus slack-jawed special-ed moron. Does the harm that Trump and his oligarchs are causing mean that the US as a whole has no right to exist? Does Putin's invasion of Ukraine mean that Ukraine has no right to exist?

    And let's flip that; Hamas attacks and kills civilians as a political stand-in for the Israeli government. That's the very definition of terrorism. Hamas is the government in Gaza. Does that mean that Palestinians have no right to a country of their own due to the actions of their gov't?

  • An honest discussion about Tankies, from an Anarchists Perspective

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  • Let’s face it, a lot of these people would absolutely hate to be part of real socialist organizing

    Oh yeah. I've worked with an anarcho-socialist group, and shit was rough. And I was just volunteering because I believed--and still believe--in their cause. But eventually I had to give it up, because it was so chaotic that I never knew what my schedule was going to be, and I was wasting tons of time waiting for them to decide whether or not I would be useful that week.

    I was a member of another group that was ostensibly anarchistic in theory that ended up being authoritarian in practice, and I quickly dipped.

    Shit's messy and complicated. Getting groups of people to point in the same direction can be hard without some degree of arbitrary authority. But when it all comes together, it's amazing.

  • Keep MAGA off my GUNS!

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  • My account has under 400 until I can find a new job that doesn’t have so much down time between contracts…

    Yikes. That's scary as shit. I'm sorry to hear that. I hope that you can find something soon. I've been there--it's been a while, thankfully--and there's just nothing good about it.

  • How did you become independent after living with parents all your life?

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  • They kicked me out. They were already unhappy that I had started getting piercings--conservative Christians that they are--and then they found out that I had a LOT more piercings than they were able to see. Like, about 2x as many. And I had a lot of visible piercings. That led to a long period that was very, very difficult, including being kind of homeless for a while.

    Bad times.