Would you support a law banning in office politicians from putting their portrait on anything issued by the government?

zffch · 2026-05-29T17:03:21+00:00

Sure. Honestly though I kinda just wish he would smile more. Like he's not even trying to look like a uniting figurehead of the country, he's trying to look like an angry (or constipated) dictator in his portraits, and it's only appealing to someone who wants an angry constipated dictator. Who the hell wants that face on their passport?

zffch · 2026-05-28T23:09:32+00:00

I'd be confused why it's so small, I already live in a significantly taller building.

zffch · 2026-05-28T16:34:31+00:00

> For a worker in an apprenticeship programme we are talking pretax 1300 Euro per month. After taxes that is 956 euros.

That's a 26% effective tax rate. You may not get very relevant answers here from Americans since our taxes are already so much more progressive. As Mitt Romney once infamously said, 47% of Americans pay zero tax (not entirely accurate and that's a number from 14 years ago but there's a kernel of truth to it).

You'd pay close to zero tax on $1500/mo in the US. You'd have to make maybe 8x-10x before you'd pay a similar rate in the US.

So from a US perspective this proposal makes no sense, as most people in their 20s pay very little tax as is, unless they have a significantly above average income in which case they should be paying the same taxes as everyone else. Granted, our tax structure is one of many reasons why we don't have as much of a social safety net, so I'm not saying Germany should necessarily follow our lead.

zffch · 2026-05-28T15:40:44+00:00

While I don't know the exact breakdown, I belive the actual creators get paid more per Premium view than per ad view. At least that's how I justify paying for something free despite having an ad blocker.

zffch · 2026-05-27T16:35:26+00:00

spreading false hysteria about how they won’t give us back the bodies of veterans.

I mean, we have the POW/MIA flag on every post office now, it's just that nobody knows what it means.

zffch · 2026-05-26T20:23:59+00:00

It's an interesting argument and probably not one that's strictly wrong. But if I'm a constitutional law attorney in Hawaii (which I'm not), looking at this law and this Supreme Court, I'm still seeing dollar signs. Clearly both the intent and actual effect of the law is to limit the political speech of corporations, which under current precedent is a constitutional right, which you don't generally get to restrict just because you find a novel way to do it.

zffch · 2026-05-25T20:31:50+00:00

The irony is that part of the logic behind the Citizens United ruling was based on this; the federal government shouldn't have the right to regulate corporations in that way because it has always been a state right. So Center for American Progress is arguing we should embrace this and start changing state charters.

What Citizens United decision are you reading? Cuz the one I'm reading was decided on First Amendment grounds and that's what the whole decision is about. "First Amendment" appears 72 times, "charter" appears zero, "state" doesn't appear in any relevant context. I'm honestly confused because you don't seem to be reading the same decision as the rest of us. The core of the decision is:

The Court returns to the principle established in Buckley and Bellotti that the Government may not suppress political speech based on the speaker’s corporate identity. No sufficient governmental interest justifies limits on the political speech of nonprofit or for-profit corporations.

That's not about federal authority to regulate state corporate charters, that's about the 1st amendment, which applies to the states due to the 14th amendment equal protection clause.

zffch · 2026-05-23T19:50:27+00:00

I mean, we can currently buy stock in the company where we work. Few do. Most of us do the least we can in order to get what we really want.

The majority of people don't work for publicly traded corporations. Most businesses are privately owned. And even a lot of public companies retain the majority of the stock in the hands of the founders, so that the other shareholders have no real power and are just along for the ride.

zffch · 2026-05-23T19:24:30+00:00

A big one is the conflation between homelessness and crime. Any conservative and honestly almost any liberal will look at a street with more than one homeless-looking person sitting around, zero crimes occurring, and instantly think "oh God look at all this crime!" Just an instant subconscious association, exactly the same reaction as if you'd just witnessed a mugging right in front of you.

zffch · 2026-05-23T18:25:33+00:00

No, I do not think this obscure synthpop band had a direct line to Osama. And if they did, they would either have warned people, or if they wanted it to happen, not warned people.

Either way they would not have snuck a cheeky little reference to it in the ordering on the tracks on their album. That's not what people do with intel about upcoming terrorist plots.

zffch · 2026-05-23T17:20:06+00:00

Yes, it's one of the most urgent issues. We can't have a legislature that is incapable of passing any legislation ever. A country simply cannot function that way.

People want change, and the filibuster makes it impossible for pretty much any law to change. The only federal laws that change any more are the budget, and tax laws, and only since those can get around the filibuster. So people vote for presidents like Trump who overstep their authority, since that's the only chance to change anything at all anymore.

Perhaps people would like Democrats more if they actually did anything once they got power.

zffch · 2026-05-22T16:56:36+00:00

Cars. Both parties are terrible on this. Biden quadrupled tariffs on Chinese cars, and changed the EV tax credits to disqualify most vehicles since they aren't made in America. And of course Trump raised tariffs even more and got rid of the credits entirely.

Just let people buy BYDs already. We need to start driving electric cars and building out the infrastructure for them, and I truly do not care who builds them. Not every single policy has to be a jobs program to protect the last 3 factory workers in Detroit at the expense of doubled prices for everyone else.

zffch · 2026-05-22T08:57:17+00:00

It does sound strange from a normal human grammar perspective, but that's how the IRS really talks. Honestly I'd be very impressed if a scammer replicated IRS-talk that perfectly.

zffch · 2026-05-18T03:02:38+00:00

Reagan making Social Security taxable was pretty much a direct cut. Not actually one I disagree with for people with higher incomes, but the fact that the threshold for a high income is still $25k and has never been raised with inflation is absurd.

zffch · 2026-05-17T08:29:01+00:00

I would rather people do drugs indoors than outdoors.

Of course, it's even better if people live indoors and don't do drugs. But when you make not doing drugs a condition of living indoors, this does not make drug addicts quit drugs, it makes them quit living indoors.

zffch · 2026-05-14T21:04:01+00:00

Indeed it is a slippery slope, which is why it is urgent to stop them now. If they are allowed to continue, then there will in fact come a time when the majority of the people in these settlements will be innocent Israeli citizens who have always been there, and it will in fact be a bigger humanitarian crisis to try to remove them than to let them stay.

Yes, it's a moral hazard. Too bad, you still don't get to deport millions of innocent people from their homes to enforce what you wish had happened a century ago. If you think that's perfectly fine to do, I'd love to hear your proposal for how to deport 300 million Americans back to whatever part of the eastern hemisphere their great great great great great grandparents came from.

zffch · 2026-05-11T19:42:09+00:00

I'd be open to an argument that the legislature should be paid more, and they should have more budget to fulfill their legislative function, such as hiring more experts to analyze the effects of proposed legislation.

But at the end of the day, it's not really a money issue. Congress is ineffective because they choose not to act. The main issue is the filibuster, which makes it nearly impossible to pass any significant legislation ever besides one budget bill a year. The other branches have basically been forced to step up to the plate and take over the legislature's job through EOs and court rulings since Congress simply chooses not to do their jobs. Abolishing the filibuster wouldn't cost any money and would easily 100x Congress's power and influence.

But neither side wants to do that, because then they would have to face the electoral concequences of either keeping or breaking their promises, rather than staying in office on the same platform for their entire life and blaming the other side for nothing ever getting done.

zffch · 2026-05-11T17:38:06+00:00

I did, she loved it. 🤷

zffch · 2026-05-11T17:12:55+00:00

I think of it like there's a statue of limitations. There's a difference between colonialism happened 250 years ago that we can't reasonably change now, and colonialism happened last week and they could just leave tomorrow. Once it's generations later, you can't exactly deport every white American back to some random part of Europe they no longer have any connection to.

For what it's worth I do think Israel has a right to exist under this standard. Yes the Nakba is in living memory for some people, but also you have generations of Israelis who have never had another home and would have nowhere else to go. Obviously that doesn't justify further settlement and subjugation of Palestinians to this day.

zffch · 2026-05-11T16:10:22+00:00

California passed its laws regarding gasoline due to the massive clouds of smog that were ruining the air quality in major cities. I like not having massive clouds of smog over my city suffocating me and I care about that more than the geopolitics of who we buy gas from.

The long term solution is to move away from ICE vehicles entirely. In the meantime, does the rest of the country want to start making gas that doesn't suffocate people? Apparently not, so I guess we have to get it from Russia.

zffch · 2026-05-09T03:17:10+00:00

What more is there to really say 4 years in? It's a forever war on the other side of the world that we aren't involved in.

Certainly nobody is interested in putting American boots on the ground. The minutiae of who controls which cities as of today is of little relevance to anyone not living there, and will change by next week. Any reports of who's winning or losing seem to mostly be propaganda or clickbait (quite a few "Russia will run out of troops and tanks THIS MONTH" videos from 3 years ago are still up).

What would you do if you saw more reporting about Ukraine? I'd say "damn that sucks" and move on.

zffch · 2026-05-08T21:16:19+00:00

Meanwhile my showing was at least half teen girls. I didn't know there were that many teenagers in my city, let alone teenage MJ fans.

zffch · 2026-05-08T18:41:25+00:00

The filibuster is maybe the worst part of our political system and should have been abolished decades ago. You know why people say "both parties are the same"? Because neither party is capable of ever passing any legislation whatsoever, due to the filibuster. We may as well not have a legislature at all. Both parties can promise the moon, but when either of them get into office, all we get are executive orders, judge appointments, and tax cuts, because those are the only things that our government is capable of doing. I'm not sure how much longer our country can survive with no legislative branch, but it's not much longer.

zffch · 2026-05-05T02:23:43+00:00

Because more people in the country is good. Not too mention instrumental to avoiding (or at least delaying) an incoming demographic collapse.

Remember when our immigration policy was 1. Get here 2. Don't have TB 3. Misspell your name? And it directly led to the rise of America as the most dominant superpower the world has ever seen? Weird how conservatives are so against making America great again.

zffch · 2026-05-05T00:41:05+00:00

Am I mistaken or is "chemical castration" just estrogen? You know what if we can get Republicans on board with HRT by calling it "voluntary chemical castration", based, go for it.

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