HelixDab2

They signed up to be the lowest of the overly-entitled rentacops out there. that’s on them.

Exactly my point.

The FCC (FAA? I may have that wrong)

I'm pretty sure that the TSA falls under the Dept. of Homeland Security, as does Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

realize they aren’t pasty-whites and then it’s mean to minorities.

You see that makes it worse, right? You've got a lot of non-white people signing up for the job of a rent-a-cop so that they can abuse the same kind of authority that is leveled against the populations that the job attracts. It's like a black kid on the south side of Chicago looking at the ways that CPD abuses suspects and say, goddamn, how do I get into that gig?

And this just reminds you that if they could get other jobs then they will.

Eh. Maybe some of them. Maybe. But policing attracts a specific kind of person that wants that job; sometimes it's people that are genuinely white knights, but they generally get run out pretty fast. More often it's people that want authority. Given that TSA pay ain't great, and that we're in an era--temporarily, if Trump wins--of historic high employment, I don't think that too many of the people in the TSA are really stuck there.

Sales tax on goods makes sense.

No. Sales and use taxes are inherently regressive; they affect the poor far, far more than they affect the wealthy, and thus harm all of society.

Tariffs don't make any sense, because that cost simply gets passed on to the consumer. The company I work for uses a lot of aluminum; the raw material is imported from China, and is custom extruded to our spec here in the US. Aluminum from the US is prohibitively expensive. If tariffs double the price of the aluminum, then the company we buy it from is going to pass that price on to us, and we're going to turn around and pass it on to our consumers. There's simply no competing industry in the US, and building the industry to compete would take a decade or more. So it's not even creating an incentive to buy American, because you can't.

Honestly, he wants to return Russia to it's 'glory days', which means back when it was an imperial power, and they could send tanks into Hungary to crush people protesting for democracy. When Ukrainians threw out their pro-Russian president, he saw that influence he wanted slipping away.

FWIW, even if it only caused a four hour long erection, that is not what your partner is going to want.

Trust me on this.

After an hour--usually less than half an hour, IME--it's not going to matter how much lube you have, they're going to be hurting. You'll be frustrated, they'll be frustrated and in pain, and no one is going to be happy. Maybe there are a very, very few women that like getting pounded for over an hour straight, but I haven't dated one yet.

Well, uh, the bible isn't really that opposed to rape. You just have to pay the family of the woman the bride price. As long as you've got the money, it's all good.

And no, that's not a joke. An unmarried man that rapes an unmarried woman has essentially committed a civil infraction under the book of the law. OTOH, a woman that commits adultery should be stoned to death, and a man that rapes a married woman is also put to death. Because according to the bible, women are property.

Yeah, but every time I have to buy something new, they automatically sign me up again. They never give me an opt-out.

Nah, you're not abnormal. I've had the same thing happen at multiple store. The most invasive has been Microcenter; they tell me that I have to give them my email in order to wait in line for tech support, and then bombard me with spam. Every time I buy something new there, I have to tell the cashier to NOT use the address on file that they won't unlink from my bank card.

They're not trying to get rid of regulation though; they're trying to make sure that the regulation is in their favor. That's what regulatory capture is. They're going to be fine with regulations that help cement their place in society.

Probably not, TBH. It's probably about social order; they likely believe that there should be a specific order and set of rules in society, and that somehow billionaires 'deserve' what they have, and that it's 'right'. "The way it is is the way it should be." They likely also have regressive views about the position women should hold in society, LGBTQ+ rights, etc., for the same reasons. It's a fundamentally conservative thought process.

How do I get to that? I saw something posted yesterday by, I think by SatansMaggortyCumFart? But I can't find it again.

Sure, we should have the data, because more data is usually useful, but I'm not certain that it's actually material.

Let's say that, statistically, the people that owned >20 firearms were 100% more likely to commit a violent crime with a firearm than the general population. First, that's still a very, very low percentage of people that own >20 firearms, second, any way you cut that, gun ownership is still a civil liberty in the US, and third, you're still looking at correlation rather than causation, and I don't know if a correlation--and remember, this is just a mental exercise, rather than any real statistics--gets you any closer to finding the real cause.

This is the same problem that you run into when you start talking about factors that make someone into a person that commits a mass casualty event; you can find a lot of factors, but simply having one or more of those factors doesn't mean that you will commit a mass-casualty event, and not having any of those factors also doesn't mean you won't commit a mass casualty event.

I think that there's a lot of anxiety more than puritanism. There's a lot of reasons, but one of them is certainly the growing political divide; women are trending more and more liberal, and men more and more conservative. Women don't want to get trapped by a man that doesn't think that she should have rights, while men seem to think that they are 'owed' a woman to have their babies (...and how are they going to fucking pay for those kids, when they think their wife is going to stay at home, and they have zero fucking job prospects...?).

TBH, if I was a woman, I sure as fuck would not want to risk dating men right now.