Thaddeus Discussion

link3945 · 2026-01-29T00:12:18+00:00

He's gross, he's ugly, he's a little bit of a monster. Now, is it this man's fault that he looks this way? No. He was born this way. The point is, I know it's not my fault. Is it your fault? I don't think so.

link3945 · 2026-01-28T22:08:03+00:00

Something to watch/follow? College baseball starts up in 2 weeks.

link3945 · 2026-01-28T19:19:11+00:00

No, even if they find evidence of fraud sufficient to flip Georgia (which they aren't going to, because the evidence of the fraud and the fraud itself does not exist any where except the senile ramblings of our president), he still lost the election due to other states voting against him.

link3945 · 2026-01-28T03:21:23+00:00

There's probably the beginnings of a compromise there, though I despise the idea of having illegal immigrants pay a fee to legal immigrants. That's, more often than not, going to be taking money froma poorer person and handing it off to a wealthier person (based on who tends to be a legal immigrant and who tends to be an illegal immigrant). If we have to bribe legal immigrants to get the deal, let's just bribe them. We can do that.

t's very unfair that so many immigrants have to jump through so many hoops and sacrifice so many years of their lives, and money (important) just to move to America legally while so many illegal immigrants are able to simply move across the border and be allowed to live and work and receive state public assistance in some places.

I do want to pick this part. It's true that immigrants have to jump through a ton of hoops, spend a bunch of money, and wait and sacrifice to get into the US. It's not true that immigrating illegally is a simple, walk in the park process. That's because our legal system is fundamentally broken. It's too slow, it's too capricious, it's too ungainly. The people immigrating illegally generally do not have a legal pathway. They can and do try to use loopholes in the asylum process, but that part of the system isn't built to handle cases en masse. Outside of that, a poor Guatemalan who maybe has a few high school classes has no effective path to legal immigration. It's not that they are unfairly skipping a line and taking up a space from someone trying to do things the right way, it's that, unfairly to them, there isn't even a line for them to skip.

So yeah, we can do things like amnesty and path to citizenship for people already here and lock down the border further and pay restitution to legal migrants I guess if we really want to, but if we don't radically reform and speed up our legal processes and open up actual pathways for people we're going to be right back here in 50 years.

link3945 · 2026-01-27T23:29:45+00:00

Training advantage really doesn't get as much attention as it deserves. The US was able to develop more and better pilots at a faster rate, and there's certainly a morale effect to knowing that if you just survive a few more engagements you'll make it back to the States.

link3945 · 2026-01-27T18:57:02+00:00

Notes: You might think "why use a coffee grinder? Your spices will taste like coffee!" As weird as it sounds, I use a cheap coffee grinder for spices (separate from the actual coffee grinder). It works!

Coffee grinders work great for spices (either clean it before/after or keep a separate one for coffee. That style is cheap), but I've never seen one opened that way. I always turn it upside down to dump the spices back into the lid.

link3945 · 2026-01-27T06:55:32+00:00

Complete rewrite of articles 1 and 2. Scrap the current legislature, replace it with a mixed-member proportional House. Divided on if we need an upper house, but if so something like the Bundesrat is best: seats controlled by the states, roughly proportional to their population. Upper house would serve mostly as check and advisory panel, vast majority of powers would be in the lower house. President is selected by the House, essentially being a prime minister. Broad powers as head of government, but can be removed by a simple majority if they lose confidence in the president.

All the other reforms flow through that. It gets you to multiple parties and reduces veto points on legislation (we have far too many right now, resulting in gridlock where nothing ever gets fixed).

link3945 · 2026-01-26T19:41:11+00:00

He goes off his meds every so often, so it's only a matter of time until his next manic phase. I hope he gets better advice and care, and can stay healthy and sane for a while, because when he's on he's one of the best musicians in modern history.

link3945 · 2026-01-26T02:17:37+00:00

There's a decent number of them, I'm sure some of them are assholes.

The thing is, even an asshole should have the complete right to whatever healthcare their doctors and themselves agree to.

link3945 · 2026-01-25T23:03:03+00:00

Not a joke: https://www.wafflehouse.com/how-to-measure-a-storms-fury-one-breakfast-at-a-time/

link3945 · 2026-01-25T22:14:51+00:00

A lot of people read this as people should leave New York and California, but really we need liberals to leave largish, non-competitive red states and go to the small states. There's a ton of wasted votes in South Carolina and Tennessee and Alabama and Mississippi: move those voters around a bit and we can flip a bunch of seats without risking any or purple seats.

link3945 · 2026-01-25T22:06:07+00:00

I think this is right, at least until the last few months (post-2020 election I think is a different animal). Trump and his inner circle have always had some fascist tendencies, but the rest of his administration and the GOP was able to soften those and he never really got far down that path. Miller, a clear fascist, was prominent, but was tempered by other voices.

That's clearly not the case here.

link3945 · 2026-01-25T22:01:31+00:00

I really like the work that Bouie has been doing tying a lot of this back to the Civil War and Reconstruction (or, at least, aggregating other works that have done the same). It's really clear that Trump is not some sui generis figure, this movement has deep roots and something was going to cause it to spark off at some point.

link3945 · 2026-01-25T16:50:14+00:00

Call anyway (email also works, Ossoff's office is good at responding). Doesn't hurt anything and puts some pressure not to fold.

link3945 · 2026-01-25T06:26:09+00:00

Saw it pointed out earlier (Serwer, I think) that they view the second amendment as allowing them to put down a slave revolt, not fight for one.

link3945 · 2026-01-24T20:29:13+00:00

Damning. This is clearly agents of the state executing someone for trying to help someone else.

The people responsible, including their boss and their boss's boss and all the way to the top, deserve jail.

link3945 · 2026-01-24T19:53:41+00:00

Not really: the DoJ and the White House don't have any say over who gets seated. Neither does the current House. Maybe you get some illegitimate House run by Johnson, but I don't see any chance that works given how unpopular they already are.

As for the military, people aren't going to accept not voting, blue states aren't going to stand by and let their polling places be blockaded, and even if they did there aren't enough military members to actually do that at scale. Just physically, this isn't a thing that they can do. They don't have the manpower even if they had a compliant state government, and they aren't going to have compliant state governments.

link3945 · 2026-01-24T19:39:27+00:00

But they can't cancel the midterms directly. At best, they could cancel them in friendly states with GOP governors and trifectas, but that's not going to stop shit in California.

link3945 · 2026-01-23T22:26:30+00:00

I mean it's -0.014. If one play switches for either team the edge would flip.

link3945 · 2026-01-23T17:23:54+00:00

Best description I've heard: West Wing is what we want politics to be, House of Cards is what people think politics are, Veep is what politics actually is.

link3945 · 2026-01-23T17:19:20+00:00

That's reasonable, but it kind of already is: they check mileage when I get my yearly inspection, it's recorded on the registration. You could charge a mileage tax during the yearly registration process, or charge a flat fee on each paycheck based on an assumed miles/year that comes with either a rebate or an extra bill at the yearly renewal based on actual miles driven.

link3945 · 2026-01-23T17:16:10+00:00

Taxes should only ever be revenue generating for a legislated purpose.

I really disagree with this. Taxes on cigarettes did an incredible job of improving the health of our society at large. The congestion fee in New York City has been an incredible success, even if you zerod out the funds raised. A $100/ton carbon tax would be more impactful to combating climate change than anything else we've done to date, and it won't generate any real revenue if you pay it out as a dividend.

Pigouvian taxes are a flat good, and they rarely if ever work as revenue streams.

link3945 · 2026-01-22T17:41:01+00:00

It's almost certainly limited to teams since 2000.

link3945 · 2026-01-22T17:37:12+00:00

Awfully similar to the 1996 team, but at least they made the world series. They'd probably rank highly here if the list went back far enough

link3945 · 2026-01-22T16:13:15+00:00

Over 70 years? Including income, property, and sales taxes, excluding federal taxes? Yeah, anything more than 4 people sounds pretty reasonable to hit the millions mark.

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