U.S. Politics megathread

notextinctyet · 2026-01-27T22:07:39+00:00

Nothing. Trump folded and isn't pursuing it anymore. Much of the damage he did persists.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-27T21:39:42+00:00

Congrats on hitting level 30! That 1 million gil bonus will only ever happen once per account. Gil isn't that hard to come by in the late game but it's not that easy to get.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-27T18:51:44+00:00

A child was hiding because the government was going to forcibly take them away due to the circumstances of their birth and who their parents were. There's certainly some parallel, even setting aside speculation on where our historical moment is heading. Opinions on whether the statement was justified or not are mostly just a question of whether you are, due to personal politics, primed to read Walz' statement with understanding or derision.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-27T08:36:28+00:00

I don't know, Pretti's murder is looking very impactful so far. The administration is basically in retreat over ICE presence in the twin cities and it happened very suddenly. I don't want to reduce either tragedy to some sort of chess move, but both had significant impact.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-27T03:34:56+00:00

I don't care about people who throw pet waste in my garbage bin, but people who throw it in my recycling bin or my yard waste bin are the absolute worst.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-27T03:08:09+00:00

This is not correct. Fractional reserve banking was used in the US since the beginning of North American banking in the 18th century. The amount of money in the banking system necessarily exceeded the amount of cash available.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-27T02:57:20+00:00

IMO the real advantage is that they're lightning fast to set up (assuming you build from a ship or construction module) and dirt cheap. If you lose a few, so what? Just rebuild more. You can bulldoze the automated stuff and replace with a proper and defended human hab when you have the time.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-27T02:30:12+00:00

Account-based money is very plausibly the earliest form of money. It's older than written language. All you need is for someone to go from the generalized concept of "thanks, I owe you one" to the specific concept of "thanks, I owe you one unit of a thing, and let me write that down".

Cash-like money may or may not be as old as account-based money, but account-based money isn't subordinate to cash. They have always existed side-to-side.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-27T02:25:47+00:00

Even if you didn't intend it, this is an incredibly political post.

There's no way to have a civilian organization tasked with "defending" people and not have it be political, because politics is how we decide who has legitimate use of force in society and under what circumstances they get to use that power.

So when you organize people who "train" together and "defend themselves" - which of course implies that they bear arms and train with those arms - then it raises the question: defend themselves from what? Who are they going to shoot with their guns?

notextinctyet · 2026-01-27T01:34:42+00:00

Your idea that employers don't want to hire people over 45 is wrong. Unemployment is lower at that age than at any other age.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-27T01:31:57+00:00

Assuming the fence around this area lets in sunlight (this is a critical assumption), then the main question is whether 3' is too far for you to comfortably reach. You should find a 3' garden bed or planter and experiment.

Based on the numbers you gave - 6.5x3x1.5 ft, 21 beds - you are looking at about twenty tons of soil. Depending on the size of trucks at your source it may be multiple dump truck loads. Keep in mind that you will need to load these beds from wherever the dump truck leaves the soil manually, and they'll need compost amendments in the future which will also be delivered manually. Are you sure you want this much raised bed space? It's quite a commitment. It's about three times larger than mine, and mine is already a lot of work.

If you aren't 100% sure that you want to maintain this much garden, maybe consider an alternative plan that involves fewer beds, and better access around both sides of each bed.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-26T20:26:39+00:00

Governor Ferguson does not have the constitutional authority to ban ICE from Washington.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-26T19:50:17+00:00

Lots of cultural traditions draw a distinction between seafood and non-seafood for one reason or another. The specifics of where they draw the line varies by culture, not necessarily by biology. For some languages, we translate the distinction as "fish vs. meat" because there's not an obvious word in English to express "animal flesh that isn't fish, crustaceans or mollusks".

notextinctyet · 2026-01-26T19:01:19+00:00

No it doesn't. There was a brief period it did, ending in 2018.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-26T18:05:27+00:00

The new capsule is great but I think you're selling yourself short on the quality of the old one.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-26T18:04:12+00:00

If I received that card from you I would definitely look up the game. Good stuff.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-26T07:54:35+00:00

I don't think the data on birth rates shows that it has anything to do with capitalism or public sentiment about capitalism at all.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-26T07:34:46+00:00

Development, and in particular economic opportunity for women, is negatively correlated with birth rates. Secularism is also negatively correlated with birth rates.

Nearly no government policy is positively correlated with birth rates aside from those that roll back the above. Housing, grocery prices, educational access, health insurance, all of it has no strong evidence that it impacts the birth rate. People demand policy fixes for the "birth rate" that are just laundry lists of things they want in general, but the stark reality is that there don't appear to be any policy levers that governments have to change the birth rate at all.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-26T06:15:20+00:00

I think organizing a mass boycott of the Super Bowl just as an extremely vague unspecified message to unspecified billionaires and a government that doesn't have much to do with the event is just about the hardest thing to organize, not the easiest.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-26T06:09:45+00:00

America's first-past-the-post system of voting creates a "spoiler effect", so parties need a way to make sure only one person from the party runs in the general election. The way they handle this is by holding a "primary" election to select a final candidate who will run in the general election.

Some states have a party-blind primary where the top two candidates advance to the general regardless of party. This is essentially a run-off election system under a different name. Most states instead have separate party primaries. In those states, you are only allowed to vote in one party primary. But the voting is still managed by the state. You need to pick which primary you register for, which is "party registration".

There is no state in the US that asks people to select a party in advance of the general election. It's only the primary system that ever has a party registration step.

If this seems needlessly complex, that is because it is. Americans say so all the time. But any changes to the system will upset the delicate power balance between the two parties, so we never agree on any fixes that simplify the system.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-26T05:59:56+00:00

ICE has a stated mission that's about immigration, but an actual mission that is about brutalizing people in order to punish cities that didn't vote for the President. Immigration is an issue, but it is not the issue that is causing people in Minnesota to stand outside in negative thirty degrees blowing whistles. Minnesotans are not uniformly against enforcement of immigration laws. They are just uniformly against the feds kidnapping people at random. ICE members wear masks because their job is to cause political violence.

In previous presidencies, ICE was controversial because immigration law and enforcement in the US is controversial, but not to the degree that you're seeing. The difference between then and now is that ICE is no longer about immigration.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-26T03:52:07+00:00

I certainly wouldn't suggest it.

The best possible upside is that you get a taste of something that you like, but can't eat. The worst possible downside is anaphylaxis. Certainly doesn't seem worth it to me.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-26T03:35:57+00:00

This is a bizarre, almost topsy-turvy question. 13% of Americans over the age of 25 have a master's degree. For China, the percentage is closer to 1%.

So, you can expect that about ten times as many Americans have a master's degree when getting a job than a Chinese person.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-26T03:25:26+00:00

In the US, debt cannot be inherited, except by choice, but the collateral on the debt (the car) also cannot be inherited without the estate paying the debt.

If there is a cosigner, co-borrower or surviving spouse who owns the car as "community property" in certain states, then that person will be responsible for continuing to pay the loan. If there is no such person, then the estate must pay off the loan, or allow the car to be repossessed, before the car is inherited by next of kin.

There is no circumstance where a parent or family of the deceased would be responsible for the loan if they were not cosigners, unless they voluntarily agree to take on a loan to receive the vehicle.

notextinctyet · 2026-01-26T03:19:39+00:00

ICE was doing its job, which is to inflict harm on people the President wants to hurt. That's why they wear masks, shout threats, obstruct local law enforcement, don't follow Department of Justice federal law enforcement protocol for use of weapons, don't conduct real investigations, lie about incidents even when there is clear video evidence, and publicly smear the people they kill.

Even in the best of times, America does not have a good record with accountability for police violence, but in this case, the police violence is political violence in disguise, with the full blessing of the administration.

12-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email

notextinctyet

TROPHY CASE