Broadly speaking? For the same reason every other state does. Continental unity opens up trade and travel, exploits economies of scale, and simplifies the legal system for interstate business and for civil rights purposes.

Specifically? Because federal coordination helps manage natural disasters (like wildfires) and centralize big programs life Medicare/SS and secures national defense (which California profits from handsomely).

Conservatives would actually call this a win for their side IMO.

Abstractly. But as soon as they see it happening in person, they begin frantically dialing the police.

That’s why Houston Food Not Bombs needed to get a court order forbidding the police for repeatedly ticketing them for no reason.

it’s really hard to argue with the research EA has done.

It’s not.

Effective altruism distills all of ethics into an overriding variable: suffering. And that fatally oversimplifies the many ways in which the living world can be valuable. Effective altruism discounts the ethical dimensions of relationships, the rich braid of elements that make up a “good life,” and the moral worth of a species or a wetland.

But setting that aside, the idea of charity is rooted in the theory that you need a popular buy-in before you can achieve significant lasting change.

That’s not wrong on its face. But the modern incarnations of charity are so heavily focused on the populism (flashy PR campaigns, obnoxious and invasive marketing strategies, charity as spectacle to drive more engagement) that they often fail to deliver their states goals.

The issue isn’t merely of one’s moral circle, it is of one’s visual range and economic heft. When you’re relying on a few plutocrats to dictate philanthropic social policy, you’re banking heavily on their omniscience.

I mean, its still a shit policy and it makes BlueSky worse.

Just not bad enough to do another platform migration, particularly to a platform nobody I know actually uses.

You’re not thinking enough like a grifter

I mean, its obviously a shit post. But I imagine spending a whole day doing fake interviews - 50 a day, five days a week, for a month - to make around $6k gross, and then tell yourself you can scale this up passively.

There’s no compelling reason why a state a big and wealthy as Texas can’t afford to manage natural disasters on this scale.

Their state leadership simply chooses not to do so. And the state media saturated the airwaves with “Nothing to be done, government would only make things worse” which… given the leadership of the state, isn’t even an unfair critique.

That’s all red states.

From California to Mississippi, the anti-tax era got everybody. Now states don’t have domestic revenue to pay for shit, so they have to go through the Feds for everything.

Ironic, in a way, since the core of anti-tax Republicanism was supposed to be about shrinking the size of government. But here we are, beholden to whichever idiot or asshole happens to be running the executive branch at a given moment

I mean, firstly, this appears to only affect UK users (atm). And secondly

Users who don’t verify their age will have certain content and features, like direct messages, restricted

So, features I don’t use or want, for the time being. Which will be a problem when I run into it, I guess. As it stands, BlueSky remains the least worst option. When that changes, I’ll change with it.

It’s a good joke

But half because the logic is so terrible. That’s not passive income. It’s retail

Yeltsin was such a drunk idiot

Backed by the US in a coup against the Russian government

Putin wouldn’t be President of Russia if the US and the USSR had been able to settle their differences without a 60 year long series of proxy wars and regime changes. Neither would Trump, for that matter.

You played yourselves.

Doesn’t seem like years of sanctions on Russia, Iran, or North Korea had a sufficient impact to cause any change.

Seems like it made them more insular, more self-sufficient, and more hostile to future diplomatic entreties.

Change by force can have negative results, and change by economic means can have positive ones

What if, instead of trying to extort or kill a nation’s residents in order to force them to adopt your preferred foreign policy, you simply afforded them an opportunity for peaceful coexistence?

Left: “We should have socialized healthcare, education, and housing.”

I mean, there’s The Left[Hakeem Jefferies/Gavin Newsom] and The Left[Bernie Sanders/JD Pritsker/Jeremy Corbyn] and then The Left[the DSA kids distributing food and fresh clothing to my nearby homeless encampment]. These are three very different flavors of Left.

You: “Both sides are the same.”

A big part of the problem with liberal democratic politics is how deeply co-opted all these parties have become. At the end of the day, John Thune and Chuck Schumer, Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer, Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre all bend the knee to Jamie Diamon and Jeff Bezos and Muhammad bin Salmon.

Wish it weren’t so, but that’s the world we live in.

Don’t forget the $1.4T/year they took out of the economy to squander on elaborate, invasive, predatory mass surveillance, serial racialized harassment, and overseas mass murder, in the name of peace and security.

It’s hardly a one-time thing. Kehoe came up through a rich Catholic School, owned an auto dealership, became a bagman within the State Senate, and eventually climbed up to the governor’s mansion by iteratively taking bribes and doing favors over the last 30 years.

Where do you think he raised the $13M war chest to run for governor in the first place? He’ll never stop supporting these reactionaries because he never wants them to stop shoveling money into his pockets. And if he wants to continue climbing? (And every governor secretly has an eye on the White House) He’s going to need those millions to become billions. That means he’s got to prove his loyalty. Go above and beyond. Really stand out as the kind of guy who will shove a few thousand babies into a wood chipper if his bosses demand it of him.

…made in 2018 by a Russian team. Way before the whole Ukraine war thing, you understand

Flipping through a history book on Russian/Ukrainian relations in the 21st century

Closing the book, putting it back on the shelf, whistling, and walking away

More seriously, I’ll never understand folks who hear “So-and-so is from Nationality X, so now I must/must not purchase products from them because of their bloodline.”

A cunt who is getting crazy kickbacks from the Chamber of Commerce.

Business groups lobbied heavily to overturn the measure passed by 58% of voters, arguing it would cost jobs. The bill also repeals annual inflation adjustments for the minimum wage, in effect since 2006.

The action followed a pattern established over the past 15 years where conservative Republicans have used their majorities in the legislature to roll back or repeal measures that became law through initiatives pushed to the ballot by progressive groups.

…

In a news release Thursday, Kara Corches, president and CEO of the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry, called the mandated paid sick leave a “job killer.”

“Missouri employers value their employees and recognize the importance of offering competitive wages and benefits, but one-size-fits-all mandates threaten growth,” Corches said in the release.

…

The action on sick leave is similar to a bill in 2011 weakening provisions of a ballot measure from 2010 called the “Puppy Mill Cruelty and Prevention Act,” that specified appropriate living conditions for breeding operations and including action this year to overturn the abortion rights amendment approved in November.

Incidentally, Missouri’s abysmal animal rights laws had, up until that ballot measure passed, made it the national leader in breeding (and killing of surplus) designer puppies.

Billionaires thought they could bury Mamdani.

Too bad. He’s made of seeds.

Death to America

I mean, Gavin Newsom is a feckless parasitic POS who has made “Becoming President” his singular goal behind which he will sell out any conceivable virtue or ounce of integrity. He’s done far more to emiserate the state’s homeless population and inhibit its ability to develop mass transit or cheap housing than oppose any Republican initiative. Meanwhile, he’s shamelessly pandering to Silicon Valley, the Real Estate Lobby, and his best friends at Getty Mansion.

But I’m not going to listen to a guy who took time off planting a burning cross in front of a black church to tell me they don’t like him either.

Have a friend who was a sort-of perpetual grad student - bouncing from Sweden to Italy to Australia - over about ten years, pursuing a degree in marine biology. Along the way, she contributed thousands of hours of labor to various research teams. Eventually, she got burned out, married a neurologist, and moved to a small house in Queensland. Now she mostly just gardens and raises bunnies, which she is extraordinarily good at thanks to her education.

Was this money wasted or did the universities get exactly what they paid her for? Idk. But it seems a far better way to employ people than what we’ve done with The Pentagon or ICE.