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  • It is not, in fact, cheaper to impose the death penalty.

    I was given the con side of the death penalty to argue once in forensics. I was actually pro death penalty and one reason was that I thought it was cheaper. I went to do research on this because it was certainly a point I’d have to contend with from the pro side.

    It is vastly more expensive to execute a prisoner than to imprison them for life. https://ejusa.org/resource/wasteful-inefficient/

    Now you might think, hey that’s a link to a group that wants to get rid of the death penalty, of course they are going to say it’s more expensive. Go read the studies, I did, and again and again it is far more expensive to execute.

    Why? Because we, pretty reasonably, put a high burden in front of the state before we allow them to kill a citizen. The legal process for both reaching the death penalty and then the numerous appeals to that decision is not cheap. It is a massive cost that the taxpayer has to bear to uphold the ruling and actually carry out the execution.

    So it is far cheaper to house a person for life, and this shouldn’t really be that shocking. The prisons are built, the daily care of a prisoner is minimal, we provide them with the barest living conditions and food. The number of people we even could execute is a tiny percent of the prison population, so it’s not like they are taking up some huge amount of space and require us to build huge facilities to house them. If you could thanos snap every prisoner that could reasonably be executed out of existence, you wouldn’t free up enough prison housing space to close even a single facility, even more so when you consider that these prisoners are a handful in each facility.

    The danger with “common sense” things that confirm our beliefs is that they can be wrong. The world is more complicated than it seems. I used to believe that it was cheaper to execute than to house. I was forced to argue the other side and because I’m competitive and want to win I did the research. I’m glad I did, it taught me an important lesson in not just believing something because it felt obviously correct.

    All told, I’m not really sure I’m even against the death penalty. Some people are irredeemable and their deaths don’t weigh heavy on me. On the other hand, the idea of making it any easier for the state to execute me if they want to is unsettling. The common arguments in favor of the death penalty don’t really hold up. I’m an atheist, so I don’t believe the person is going to some eternal torture, they simply cease to exist. And it’s more expensive. From a practical standpoint I see little benefit for imposing the death penalty, but I understand the point of view of people being so reprehensible they don’t deserve to live even if it’s a high cost on society.

    If you would like to continue arguing in favor of the death penalty though, you’ll do yourself a favor to go research the subject. It is more complicated and nuanced than you might think at first glance. And at the end of the day, if the thing you care about is cost, you’d never execute another person. It is far far more expensive to execute a prison than to house them.

  • Let’s say he was dictator for one day only, just as a fun thought experiment.

    That is also awful

    Imagine someone walking into your house and saying, “I’m only going to ignore the law for 15 minutes while I’m here tonight.” Sorry, what the absolute fuck. Even if they kept their word that’s a monstrous thing to say, what the fuck are you going to do for those 15 minutes?!

    That’s when you kick that fucker out of your house. So America, let’s kick that fucker out of this house.

  • I heard from the woman that broke Jewish space lasers that “they” have the ability to move hurricanes. And so I guess “they” wanted to protect trumps orange house because “they” are secretly working for project 2025 and there’s probably a level Q drop coming soon to explain how this is all part of the plan but also is part of a different plan that true Americans have to fight like hell against…

    God even play acting one of the brainwormed people for a paragraph is exhausting

  • Seems an effective government would have organized taking this stuff to a landfill that was operating properly and would correctly store the debris.

    Sounds like he sent trucks to a non operating landfill, then decided “landfills are just big fields you dump stuff right? It can’t possibly be more complicated than that”

    Here’s a video about all the actual engineering that goes into proper waste management. Maybe the people that operated that landfill had roped it off because they knew no one would be there to correctly manage debris drop off

    https://youtu.be/HRx_dZawN44?si=cq-0sgZ6FO9CzTFe

  • More importantly, Anderson has eight vehicles. GEICO is only choosing to terminate the insurance coverage from Cybertruck and is actively pursuing renewal of his vehicle coverage for the rest.

    Oh won’t somebody please help the guy with EIGHT FUCKING CARS one of which is a big dumb refrigerator on wheels.

    Seriously fuck this guy anyways just for the sheer overconsumption

  • We had a bunch of stalls in the 90s without doors, but the janitors told us it was just because asshole kids would break the doors for fun and the school would run out of money to repair them.

    Even just partially damaging a door can make it a dangerous enough that the school would rather take it down than risk a lawsuit.

    Made more sense to me than some sort of anti masturbation strategy. High school kids are fucking dumb as shit and I can definitely imagine them breaking stall doors for fun

  • I suppose you might get to kill people but that doesn’t mean that the law is going to be ok with that. Proportionality of force is a thing. Stand your ground states are doing their best to change that, but that’s a very mixed bag.

    If you shoot and kill someone for blocking your waymo and being a creep, in most places you are going to have to convince a district attorney and a jury that you were justified in ending their life. Even if you do that and escape criminal liability, you’ll then have to convince more people not to hold you liable in civil court.

    Sounds pretty cool to go “I got a shooty bang bang so if I feel threatened in any way I can come out blasting.” It is true in the moment, but if you place any value on your future liberty, money, and time you might want to consider the ramifications of killing another human being.

    Finally, even if society decides you shouldn’t face any criminal or civil penalty for killing someone, you will have to face yourself. Sitting behind a keyboard it sounds badass to shoot someone that’s pissing you off. In the moment you will probably feel justified. Many a young man sent to war or employed as a police officer didn’t think that taking a life would change them, only to find the reality of taking a life is not what the action movies promised. Self doubt, self loathing, ptsd, depression, these are all common reactions to reckoning with the fact that you are the cause of another persons death.

    It is hard to feel like a righteous badass as you watch a grieving widow mourn someone that may have even done something stupid or wrong, knowing that their child has no father now and their wife no partner. Are these people jerks and creeps, sure, is the punishment for being a jerk or creep death, rarely. It is a heavy burden to carry to end another.

  • Yea that’s fair. I agree, it’s shitty to work someone until they are about to get overtime and then swap them out to avoid paying overtime.

    I would agree that to “stiff” someone of something is to deprive them of something they’ve earned, like not paying out overtime once someone has worked it.

    I wonder why they bother, it’s not like the thing he said isn’t already shitty.

    Thanks for the example, have a cool day

  • I remember when I first heard the “we will build the wall and Mexico will pay for it”. I thought, “oh they must be taking him out of context that makes no sense”. Nope

    He is pretty consistently advancing absolutely batshit insane things. I don’t think he actually gets taken out of context that often, not because the media is fair, but because the shit he says is so goddamn insane there’s no need.

    Is there something in recent memory where you think there was a headline that misconstrued what he said?

  • Yea it’s a shame that so many of our fellow countrymen say this seriously.

  • Exactly right. Honestly at this point I think the Dems should just drop gun control entirely as an issue.

    Let me preface this next section with the fact that I’ve been largely supportive of common sense gun control laws and think they would be a net positive. But give me a minute because this is a slightly more nuance point (the danger of bringing nuance to gun issues in America is apparent to me)

    Why? Let’s say they were successful and made it harder to purchase guns that we categorize as especially dangerous.

    1. This country is already awash in guns. Unlike other nations that have disarmed, there is no appetite for any kind of gun but back or gun seizure program, those dangerous guns will get into the hands of people that want to do dangerous things with them.
    2. The less dangerous guns are still quite dangerous. Humans are creative, bump stocks, self modification of less dangerous guns, having a couple loaded guns, all ways to make less dangerous guns equally dangerous.
    3. There are enough pro gun Americans and money in the gun industry that every change will have loopholes you could drive a semi truck through

    So the cost benefit just makes no sense. As a political issue the cost is enormous and the realistic potential benefit is basically nothing. I wish we had a population that cared more about this, but from a pragmatic point of view we simply don’t.

    I think it was sandy hook that really cemented this for me. If a grade school full of children gets shot up and the reaction from a significant portion of the population is apathy or to double down on gun rights, that’s not an issue you are winning.

  • The guy that privately owns twitter claimed to be some sort of free speech absolutist.

    For once this is not someone getting confused about the first amendment but simply calling out musk’s hypocrisy.

    Here’s an article from a year ago that covers the same idea and includes a bunch of direct quotes from musk about his free speech views that his fans love to idolize while his actions bear no resemblance

    https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-promised-free-speech-twitter-hes-betrayed-it-again-again-opinion-1794478

    I’ll save you a click with one pull quote

    This time, it's after he clashed with a BBC reporter over the prevelance of "hate speech" on Twitter. "Free speech is meaningless unless you allow people you don't like to say things you don't like," Musk said in a clip since shared across the internet, including by mega-stars like Joe Rogan.

    So musk using “free speech” to defend hate speech and then censoring this because it doesn’t align with his politics is of course legal, but hypocritical, and logically implies that hate speech does align with his political views or at least isn’t as offensive to him as this dossier.

  • Board of Directors shocked, absolutely shocked, that they were supposed to be directing the company. When reached for comment several wealthy looking people were seen with dictionaries in hand looking up the word “director” looking absolutely aghast

  • A hacker, who has been quite active recently and goes by the alias ‘grep,’ has leaked over 12,000 (11,802) call records with audio, which they claim belong to Twilio customers.

    11,802 is not, in fact, over 12,000.

    The article goes on to assess this is 3.37% of all Twilio accounts because there are 350,000 accounts.

    As of 2024, the company has over 350,000 active customer accounts, which means the latest alleged leak is approximately 3.37% of the total accounts.

    Let’s say despite their struggle with math earlier that this 350,000 figure is correct, they seem to think that each account does exactly one phone call.

    Further, the image posted makes it pretty clear that the guy hacked someone using twilio and that 3rd party that got hacked had simply recorded their own call information. So this article should be something like “person using twilio got hacked, had made ~12k phone calls with twilio service”

    This articles analysis is extremely sloppy and nonsense to the point of seeming like it’s AI generated

  • It’s true that consultants seem to love these “extremely clever” plays. I imagine if Harris wins, you’ll see a lot more “let’s switch the candidate out and get an excitement bump like that thing that worked that one time.”

    I looked for data to try to quantify the demographics of Green Party voters and couldn’t find much, if you’ve got some I’d love to see it.

    I suppose the thing that stands out to me is how Republican and Democratic programming works. Both parties enforce norms and spend a lot of time programming at their constituencies. I believe that trump was able to take over the Republican Party against the wishes of the party leadership because he intuitively understood this. He sorta hijacked this programming because he knew the dog whistles and catch phrases and was willing to shamelessly iterate and say whatever would work. Here’s a fun article about him thinking “drain the swamp” was a bad line and then embracing it wholeheartedly when it worked https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/2016-trump-explains-why-he-didnt-like-the-phrase-drain-the-swamp-but-now-does/2016/10/26/4a2f257a-9be0-11e6-b552-b1f85e484086_video.html

    This programming is where we get political tropes from. It’s why if you see a thumbnail about “woke dei bullshit” you can be pretty sure that’s going to be a conservative complaint video.

    When I look at the Green Party messaging, if they are trying to attract republicans as much as democrats, it’s weird. The comms are full of Republican third rails like social justice, the carousel says that the Green Party is the birthplace of the green new deal, the rail against corporate power. Now this isn’t to say there wouldn’t be anyone on the right that wouldn’t be cool with these ideas, but to frame it in these terms goes against decades of Republican talking points and programming.

    It’s not like support for the green new deal is something of a question on the right. They have been upset about the non-green new deal since FDR passed it, and I’ve never seen a single Republican politician or talking head have anything but disdain for the green new deal. As you point out, they didn’t promote it because they like it, but as a way to knee cap AOC which backfired.

    If you start with the belief that I hold that the Green Party has no chance of winning, which seems like a reasonable starting point. Every voter that would have voted for Harris and instead votes for stein is net 1 vote for trump and every voter that would have voted for trump and instead votes for stein is net 1 vote for Harris.

    I scroll around gp.org and it doesn’t have anything that looks like it’s aimed at attracting Republican voters. I do see a lot of stuff that seems like it could be aimed at attracting leftist and crunchy democratic voters. That’s not a criticism or anything, if that’s where their policy values are, that’s perfectly fine. But I just struggle to really think there are a ton of people about to vote for trump that are going to end up on that website and think “oh wow, finally a party that actually wants to work towards social justice.”

    As someone that is left of the Democratic Party I recognize a lot of the things on this website, it’s a lot of the things the democrats have been promising and failing to deliver for a long time. Perhaps because so many of the talking points and policies are so familiar and feel so comfortable to me as someone who is disappointed in the democratic party’s failure to deliver on these things I find it hard to believe that republicans are looking at this site and thinking “I’ve found my people”

  • The title in the image

  • If the republicans thought that the Green Party was going to be an attractive option for their voters in 2000 they certainly adopted an odd strategy

    https://web.archive.org/web/20050912163938/http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20001027/aponline115918_000.htm

    Hoping to boost Ralph Nader in states where he is threatening to hurt Al Gore, a Republican group is launching TV ads featuring Nader attacking the vice president.

    The ads by the Republican Leadership Council will begin airing Monday in Wisconsin, Oregon and Washington, all states that are part of Gore's base and where Nader is polling well. The group plans to spend more than $100,000 at first and hopes to raise more over the weekend.

    It’s not some crazy conspiracy either, the Republican Leadership Council explained the ad buys in this way

    The Republican Leadership Council, a centrist GOP group, has been helpful to Bush before, airing ads during the Republican primaries critical of challenger Steve Forbes. Several members of the RLC board were early Bush supporters.

    The RLC ads will run initially in four markets: Eugene and Portland, Ore.; Madison, Wis., and Seattle.

    Mark Miller, the group's executive director, said the ads are partly a response to commercials being run by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, which argue that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush.

    "Ralph Nader doesn't believe that," Miller said. "Ralph Nader and his supporters are not backing down because they believe Al Gore has had numerous broken promises."

    Miller added that some of Nader's supporters have bragged that Nader has never had help from "soft money," the unrestricted donations used by parties and interest groups.

    "We'll put an end to that," Miller said.

    You might notice how the answer doesn’t really make any sense, a pro Bush Republican PAC wanted to run ads in Gore strongholds promoting Nader with the argument that Gore broke numerous promises. Why? Because groups said that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush. It sounds like they are trying to counter this but then their actions fully support that idea.

    Maybe some republicans could be persuaded to join the greens, but I pay attention to how people spend their money because talk is cheap. If republicans spend money to promote Nader in states they want to win, they obviously think they’ll poach more gore voters than Bush voters, it just doesn’t make sense otherwise.

    I actually agree that the Green Party is staking out policy positions that both parties have abandoned, but I still think the abandoned policies they’ve picked up to champion are still more attractive to left leaning people than right leaning people.

    Unless the WSJ has been taken over by liberals, owned by famous liberal Rupert Murdoch, they seem to be following a similar path now https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/jill-stein-republican-support-harris-voters-5a194ebf

    So while I imagine some of these policy positions might be attractive to some disaffected republicans, republicans seem to think it will be useful to promote them. The only way that makes any kind of sense is if they think it will attract more potential Democratic Party voters than republican.

  • I thought we were just casting aspersions for fun 🤣

  • It’s a nice straw man you’ve erected and if I did any of those things you might have some kind of point.

    I didn’t attack anyone, I pointed out that this alternative plan is unlikely to bring about any substantive change either.

    So you keep telling people to sit at home and I’ll wait for the glorious revolution, maybe if you shout down people and tell them to read more theory that’ll help. The American people are super into reading political theory.