Finish the refit on our boat, move back aboard, and sail away. It’ll take another year to be ready to cross the Atlantic.

Kinda sad really, the trans acquaintance I hang out with thought it was funny. Looks like too many people taking themselves too seriously.

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Was the KGB agent Putin by any chance?

Misinformation campaigns are modern warfare. Killing your opponents from the inside is far more cost effective.

We could combine the Dakota’s, Montana and Idaho and almost have 1 state worth of population.

Red states have always been low population states. Over time every state grows, but the big states were already big. The smaller states have more room to grow, big pop states are more expensive because of the population so grow less.

It’s not some conspiracy, it’s just math. Now the Senate is another thing. There shouldn’t be two Dakota’s for one thing, and New Mexico didn’t have the population to join either.

Was it really a bunch of bored nerds, or did a PR agent make an anonymous post to start the rumor mill?

It’s two different problems. UBI helps with poverty, and a lot of other social spending. Give everyone enough money for rent and tomorrow the price of rent is higher than what you’re giving them. Housing is supply restricted, increasing the demand only makes it worse. What we need is a serious building spree.

The Pizzagate conspiracy was created to cover up any media coverage of the police reports from the early 90s when Trump was hanging with Epstein and dumping ‘used’ underage girls at a pizza parlor the next morning.

Under current legal interpretation absolutely not. Which is the problem that’s being looked at. It’s not legislation, it’s based on supreme court rulings, that could easily be overruled by congress. It’s going to be a very long debate before that happens sadly. Which is good on the side that setting a new anti-trust standard will absolutely rock the economy, so a snap decision isn’t in anyone’s interest. But at the same time, as we’ve seen from the pandemic inflation, without competition in the market, price gouging is getting out of hand. Market steering and manipulation by individual corporations is also getting out of hand, it just doesn’t generate the same level of public outrage.

The other side of it is that there is starting to be support for actually using the anti-trust laws that are on the books. Right now it’s mostly focused on Google and other tech companies, but there’s a huge problem in US markets with corporate consolidation.

Some of us have actually seen the world. Try it some time.

What makes you think I haven’t been in their position? Most of the guys in there, deserve to be there. The ones on labor detail aren’t just being worked, they’re earning good time, and learning to earn trust.

Good, make them protect the communities they hurt.

Past tense, you’ve already been judged, he’s deciding the consequences.

I dunno if you’ve tried, but I’m here to tell ya, cobble stone streets will absolutely stop speeding really quick.

You don’t want congress writing exacting laws in a lot of regulatory situations. Think if congress right now was setting interest rates. It wouldn’t get done until long after the economy had imploded. Even if they were listening to the same economists, political problems would create a disaster. The same is true in most cases concerning the EPA and other regulatory agencies. By the time congress would be able to respond to a situation, everyone would have died of whatever the problem was.

Accounting practices reflect exactly what is relevant to profits within the desired time frame. There are no laws that make employee seniority valuable within the business cycle, so it has no value to account for.

The investment that business sees is like you spending a thousand dollars a year for a century in order to make a million dollars. Sure it’s a 10 to 1 return on investment, but you’ll be dead, so is it really worth it?

Oh jobs are replaced by machines, it just has almost nothing to do with minimum wage. Machines cost pennies on the dollar for production value compared to humans. The human wage is pretty meaningless at that point, even forced labor is less profitable.