Laws against the "promotion of homosexuality" are how public support and education are suppressed, and could easily extend to transsexuality if that's not included already.
After the fight, the brawl was blamed on the other participants, all of whom were wearing emo clothing. Black shirts, band logos, jeans.
The local police went as far as enacting a local anti gang ordnace, identified the emo wear as gang colours, and with 2 hours notice, advised that those colours were not allowed in the city for 48 hours. The security guard who helped break things up was chatting to me about it, laughing at it like it was a common consequence.
A local taxi company was cleaning up, as they accepted each emo kid, in groups of 1 - 4 and took them home to the suburbs. 20 taxis lined up, picking up kids.
Probably my first political WOW moment. I had never seen ~120 people pay for the consequences of the actions of a few.
True to their word, was 48 hours or more until I spotted them in the city again.
Governments can make any law they wish, cops tend to enforce any law they wish. Courts and appeals take time. There is nothing preventing that same city from declaring pride flags or trans icons as gang symbols.
This wasnt even in the US.
Same shit could happen anywhere, Trump could declare them terrorists identified by their symbols and tattoos, he could enforce inspections of their social media at airport checkpoints. Considering what was legal and enforced in the US in its history there's really nothing off the table going forward for persecuting anyone.
I mean, clearly it shouldn't be how it works, and is not how it works in sensible countries, but, as people have noted, it does seem to be what ol' minihands is going for in the US.
> Auto insurers don't face a "catastrophic liability" bankrupting scenario like home insurers might in the case of a natural disaster or fire.
This changes with self-driving. Push a buggy update and potentially all the same model cars could crash on the same day.
This is not a threat model regular car insurers need to deal with since it'll never happen that all of their customers decide to drive drunk the same day, but that's effectively what a buggy software update would be like.
Far be it from me to tell automakers how to roll out software but I would expect them to have relatively slow and gradual rollouts, segmented by region and environment (e.g., Phoenix might be first while downtown London might be last).
This is true, we had a bad hail storm come through in 2010 that dimpled an appreciable fraction of the cars in the city like golf balls. Most were deemed repairable write-offs. Went right over a couple of luxury car yards. A bunch of people at my work moved our cars undercover 10 minutes before it hit, and felt kind of silly… for 10 minutes, until it hit.
Car insurance premiums jumped by quite a lot that day, as far as I can tell permanently.
US had highest per capita GDP in the world in 1913, before Europe's first, and second, self destructions. The US would have been on top in the in 1950s and 1960s no matter what. Just by scale, resources, and economic system.
Nice work! I wish more WordPress plugins took a Unix like approach of just doing one thing well. Wat too common for good plugins to grow into a bloated mess over time.
This is actually not true, the amount of forest land has been stable for about 100 years. Most of the decline is in the 19th century as population expanded west.
Land dedicated to farming has also declined for the last ~75 years. Peak was 1954 with about 1.16 billion acres. It is down to about 875 million acres.
We need manufacturing in the US. The service economy can't survive long term; you have to make things. Tariffs are not fun, but they are an important part of making that happen.
But, tariffs on used cameras or vintage electronics does not help bring manufacturing back. Let's just bring back the de minimis exemption for things like this. More industry targeted tariffs, fewer blanket tariffs.
No sure why you are being down-voted. Your argument is coherent and correct.
Targeted tariffs on specific goods leads to the development of local production of that good. Lots and lots of countries have these in place.
Blanket tariffs are, of course, useless. The US doesn't have the climate to grown coffee, so tarifing Brazil serves no purpose other than taxing coffee consumption.
A surgeon uses a scalpel, not an axe. Used well, tariffs are a very powerful tool. Used badly they create more harm, and don't achieve the goal of promoting local production.
Tariffs which are here today, but gone tomorrow, don't created the stable environment which long-term investment in local production requires.
Scale of the country matters. If Argentina (or any other small to medium size country) require extra work, businesses can just walk away - size of market does not justify extra efforts. Bet is that US market size is big enough that no global business can afford to walk away. At 20% of global GDP, US markets is also big enough to make scaled production feasible.
I'm not a coffee drinker normally, I have never acquired the taste, but I had some hand-picked perfectly roasted coffee on our last visit to Kona and it was divine. Completely straight, nothing added. I have some appreciation now of why some people like coffee, as I could drink that every day. I probably couldn't handle that much caffeine, however.
Hawaii would even have mountaineous and that island climate that's good for growing coffee. But labor costs probably mean they couldn't compete even if they tried
While tariffs on coffee do not incentivize coffee growing in US they do two things that are very beneficial for US economy
1) People replace coffee with hot cider, infusion tea or some other local substitute good.
2) Tariff on coffee as set up by Trump incentivize coffee producing countries to buy US goods whether it’s oil or cars to make trade balance more equal.
The only question is the scale of above but tariff on coffee is unquestionably help US producers.
Yes, tarifs can change behavior. I'm not sure that's the goal here, and I'm not convinced there's a local alternative to coffee (at the scale Americans drink coffee.)
>> Tariff on coffee as set up by Trump incentivize coffee producing countries to buy US goods whether it’s oil or cars to make trade balance more equal.
Countries don't buy goods, people do. Apparently insulting Canada didn't make them decide to consume more made-in-America goods. I'm not sure that random acts of insulting leads yo the effects you are proposing.
Overall there is a lot of manufacturing in the US. What the US doesn't have are manufacturing jobs because labor is more expensive than automation.
Maybe you meant the US should make sure to have some certain types of manufacturing like chips. In that case, targeted programs are a better approach than any sort of tariffs. See the CHIPS act for example.
Or targeted investment in relevant industries, similar to what the previous administration was doing before voters were suckered by the New York con man whose entire campaign was bemoaning everything about our country while apparently having some pretty spicy long-term kompromat hanging over him.
You're not very good at it though. You're too aristocratic in your thinking - let the coolies make the stuff, we'll consume it.
The reason services are such a big part of your economy is because you can sit in an air conditioned office, send some emails, push some numbers around on a spreadsheet, and call it work.
How many people do you feel liek you are personally responsible for killing because you haven't given 100% of your disposal income to food relief? Hundreds? Thousands?
This isn't "I could use my money to acquire food for the poor." It's "I'm going to prevent anyone else from selling food, and that will let me charge 100x as much for food."
Good point, maybe researching drugs and treatments shouldn't be done primarily by for-profit companies, and governments should take this on themselves.
How exactly could trans sympathy be "criminalized"?
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