BraveSirZaphod

The First Amendment is pretty strong about how it's legal to be a dick.

Just as I can say that evangelicals are delusional children who never learned how to get over their daddy issues to the extent that they literally invent a daddy in the sky who just so happens to approve of every bias and bigotry they hold to.

The merger happened in 2010.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1335258/000119312510012287/dex991.htm

If you think Biden is only "slightly less extreme", you really need to take another look at the Republican party, given its leader is casually suggesting sending out secret police to round up undocumented immigrants into camps.

Even restricting the view to economic policy, the gap between the average Republican and Democrat in office has been growing much much larger compared to the old 90s consensus. Both parties have grown critical of free trade, with Republicans going much further and wanting to throw huge tariffs on any country that feels icky (and somehow thinking that jacking up prices on all imported goods will improve inflation*). Republicans have also grown extremely fond of attacking any corporation they perceive as being too woke or socially aware, even going so far as to invoke the powers of supposedly-small government to ban certain diversity practices.

Both parties have become relatively protectionist, but Republicans tend to be against any form of actual domestic investment. On housing, pretty much all supply-side solutions (which you'd think would come from the supposedly market-loving Republicans!) are instead coming from the Democrats, with the Republicans instead reducing essentially everything to culture wars.

Again, look at the Republican party as it actually is today, because they largely do not have any substantial policy beyond stoking white conservative rage. I'm not saying mainstream Democrats are revolutionary champions of the working poor, but there simply is no competition compared to the Republicans of today.

I mean, it's both, among other things.

Target would absolutely love to charge $1000 for a carton of eggs, and would if they could, but they can't. There has always been some ceiling price past which most consumers will simply walk away and go somewhere else. What exactly that number is depends firstly on the actual cost of getting the item in the first place, since no store will sell an item at a loss (unless they expect that to drive greater returns elsewhere), but then on how much money people actually have available to spend, and that very much is influenced by how much money the Fed is printing, among plenty of other things.

My point here isn't that corporate greed isn't a factor, but it's not a new factor. It's not like corporations were feeling generous in 2019 and then got in a greedy mood in 2021. They always have and always will charge as much as people are willing to pay, so any changes to what they're charging should be examined by looking at what other factors might be at play. In this case, they've probably realized that they've gotten past the point of driving too many customers away.

Obviously corporate PR will never come out and say "We're being greedy because fuck you, but we got a little too greedy so please come back", but that is and always has been the dynamic.

There are very real constitutional issues with explicit wealth taxes. It took a constitutional amendment to authorize the federal government to collect an income tax, and it's quite possible that it would take another to authorize a wealth tax. Particularly with this Supreme Court, Congress probably doesn't have the legal ability to impose a wealth tax even if it wanted to, to say nothing of the general complexity and costs of collecting it. There are plenty of economists who support the general idea of taxing the wealthy more but who prefer other taxation schemes.

He is terrible, but he's better than any replacement, he's shown a willingness to work with Dems, and most importantly, if he ever breaks any promises, the Dems can sick him to the wolves.

In most cases, longer. Jews had been in Iraq more than a thousand years before Islam was even developed.

There's this notion that modern Israelis are essentially just Europeans who invaded after WWII, which is simply not true.

While the Zionist movement largely did originate in Europe in the late 1800s, the majority of Israeli citizens today are not of European ancestry / Ashkenazi. The majority are what's called Mizrahi, coming from Middle Eastern Jewish communities that were forcibly expelled from Arab countries during the 50s and 60s. For instance, Ben Gvir, the current Minister of Defense (and to be clear, a complete little shit), is from an Iraqi family. In 1948, there were roughly 150,000 Jews in Iraq, making up nearly 40% of the population of Baghdad. Today, there are estimated to be less than five. Likewise, in Yemen, there were roughly 50,000 Jews, maintaining a presence that goes back well over 2500 years. Today, there may be one single Jew left in the country. The same situation happened all throughout the Arab world. The departing Jews generally had to flee their homes without any significant belongings, since their property was often confiscated. In Syria, for instance, a 1964 decree prevented Jews from traveling more than 3 miles from their homes, banned them from owning land, banned them from working in the government or in banks, banned them from leaving anything as inheritance - which would instead be seized by the state.

If something is possible, and this simply indeed is, someone is going to develop it regardless of how we feel about it, so it's important for non-malicious actors to make people aware of the potential negative impacts so we can start to develop ways to handle them before actively malicious actors start deploying it.

Critical businesses and governments need to know that identity verification via video and voice is much less trustworthy than it used to be, and so if you're currently doing that, you need to mitigate these risks. There are tools, namely public-private key cryptography, that can be used to verify identity in a much tighter way, and we're probably going to need to start implementing them in more places.

An extremely specific and highly regulated type of work action has a lot of rules in order to legally be protected.

For instance:

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a “sitdown” strike, when employees simply stay in the plant and refuse to work is not protected by the law.

https://www.nlrb.gov/strikes

Especially at the level of working for Google, employment is a voluntary agreement, not a right. If the employees find it unconscionable to work for Google, the correct thing to do is to, you know, not work for Google.

Workers have essentially zero right to protest on company time on company property and disrupting work.

It would be another thing if, to address your counter-example, an employer went through everyone's social media and systematically fired everyone who made the "wrong" public stance in an avenue that has nothing to do with the job (still legal probably, but much shittier), but using your own work time to interrupt business operations isn't going to be tolerated pretty much anywhere.

Again, if these employees had been protesting outside the company offices on their own time and were fired for that, I'd be more sympathetic, but that's not what happened here.

In this particular context, "I believe Joe Biden should be the elected to another term" in apparently objectionable.

Similarly, "I believe that the murder of 1000 Israeli citizens on October 7th was bad, and also that the Netanyahu government is atrocious and its military response has been grossly disproportionate and involved multiple war crimes" is enough to get you ejected from plenty of leftist spaces that insist that the October 7th attacks must be celebrated as an act of radical resistance.