I think what’s wild is that particular group’s incredible thought process of “oh yeah, the current guy is just doing a hit job on this other guy because he’s running for President. He’s sending all these various agencies after him. blah blah blah…”

And I’m just like. Or you know, simple answer is that guy is doing crime stuff and ought not to be doing crime stuff. To really over simplify the most recent crime stuff. The crime was he wrote the wrong thing on the sheet of paper. You look at the paper, it says it’s for lawyer stuff. You look at the receipts shows the money went to hide sex stuff. Lawyer stuff ≠ hide sex stuff. Ta-da!

And a bit more detail. The whole argument that hiding sex stuff wasn’t political money. Literally a letter between crime guy and other person handling political stuff was, we need to hide this sex stuff otherwise that could hurt us in election stuff. Like I get it that there’s some folks wanting to believe that President guy is just mad at crime guy and wants to whatever him so that President guy can stay in office. But crime guy literally admitted crime stuff in letters he thought no one else would ever read. Crime guy is not a very smart crime guy.

I don’t like current guy, don’t get me wrong. But crime guy is an idiot. I just don’t want an idiot back as President. There’s just way too many people hitched to an idiot here and willing to go down with the ship. Crime guy is an idiot and he’s getting smacked with a lot of the crime shit he’s done because he’s an idiot. There’s not any other way to slice this. Crime guy is just not good at anything and is coasting on mom and dad money still. If anything, that Crime guy is still floating on some money is a testament to Crime guy’s book keeper.

Biden’s next move: Nothing.

while 76% said a not-guilty verdict would have no impact

And this is playing pretty true with where I live. Pretty much Trump was found guilty, everyone spent 37.1839 seconds processing that new bit of information, and then went on with their day with the needle on how they will vote in November moving 0.3nm in either direction.

Like, how everyone is going to vote. That’s already done. There are very, very, very few people who are left in the undecided category. So, this whole thing wasn’t going to change the calculus of anyone running for office.

There is a legal way to do this:

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress

— Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1

Nebraska and South Dakota have a compact that’s been approved by Congress that has land swap between the states based on where the river is when particular assessments happen. So land leaving one state and going to another state isn’t unheard of. If you go look at NE and SD’s border in the southeast corner of SD, you’ll see the river and the border is pretty tight. Now compare that to states that have no such compact like Arkansas and Tennessee. River and the border are all kinds of messed up.

The thing is, both Idaho’s and Oregon’s State assembly will have to vote on it as you indicated. It’s not up to the citizens to dictate when a state’s border can be redrawn. Once Idaho and Oregon have a compact, they will need to send it to DC for Congress to vote on it. If it passes both the House and the Senate, the new compact can be enforced and the new borders drawn.

From what I’ve heard Oregon will not even begin to entertain this notion.

But yes, this is completely legal in the Constitution and we’ve done it before too. And we even have had the case where we took one state and split it into two happen before as well. Virginia and West Virginia. So we’ve used this part of the Constitution enough to know exactly how it needs to go down.

Is it going to go down? IDK. California said they were going to split up into 3, 4, 5 different States, not holding my breath on that one either. Would be pretty neat to redraw Idaho though. Never liked it’s weird long edge on the west side. Now it’ll look like someone giving the middle finger or something.

This issue is a bit more complex than just “hospitals shouldn’t be for profit”. Not to dismiss that’s a big driver here, but there’s a lot more going on.

Rural communities tend to have lower insurance coverage, that means for the people who do show up, their debt will eventually go into collections or be completely written off as a loss. Rural communities have vastly less access to better insurance and many just completely forgo insurance altogether.

Additionally, rural communities have a tendency to enter a death spiral between visits and costs. The number of people showing up at the hospital is low, but for the ones that do they show up with incredibly expensive conditions.

A lot of the financing and extended lines of revenue for rural hospitals is tied into the expanded Medicaid offerings under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). There’s clear demonstration that states that have opted to not expand Medicaid are the ones overwhelmingly facing hospital closures. States that have expanded still face issues, but states that have not are facing worse outcomes for rural hospitals.

Finally, costs for healthcare have steadily increased at rates that outpace pretty much every program out there. Pharmaceutical companies are ever shifting costs of materials and medication making long term planning difficult. These companies cite new regulation requiring a remixing of their costs of products. Basically, if some state mandates $30 insulin, that makes cancer treatment go up some, massive percentage. So a requirement to reduce cost to consumer in one area induces an increase in cost somewhere else.

And no just telling hospitals they can’t drive a profit won’t fix the issue. The doctors, insurance, coverage, politics over the ACA, the education of those doctors, the supply chain of the hospitals, and the production of medical supplies all have played a role in this. There’s just thousands of things that have to change or we’re going to see more of this.

The entire thing is predicated on a completely unsustainable economic model. This system we have is completely unsustainable. It was never sustainable, it’s just that the losses had to eventually add up enough to run the thing into the ground. And this isn’t limited to just Red States, it’s just that the Red States are the ones least prepared for this slowly building problem. This issue is coming for everywhere. There’s no hospital that’s going to survive this if we do not fundamentally change the system upon which our healthcare is built on.

There are just too many flaws to band-aid here. We have to have a massive overhaul of our system or people are literally going to die. The problem is, that we can’t tell who is going to be at the steering wheel to direct those changes. There has to be a shared vision between the two major political parties that can endure for decades to ensure that whatever new systems is made, is actually built. If the two parties that run our government can never agree, hang it up folks, we’re done here. I know some people are going to take that as an invite to bash the other party, but at the end of the day, we either all work together or we don’t.

We have to have some sort of change to our system like yesterday. It needs to be a massive change that take effect at ALL of the layers within the healthcare system. We cannot keep making minor incremental changes, it’s just plugging one hole in the dam only for another one to spring forth.

I looked at that picture that they had up for that “100,000” headcount. All I know is that there’s a lot of people on Trump’s team and in Wildwood, NJ who are extremely bad at estimating headcount. That picture of the crowd at it’s largest is (being absolutely generous here) is roughly 20,000 tops. 100,000 people is a massive amount of people, like it is a lot of people. There are zero ways there’s 100,000 in that picture. When you hit 100,000 people, you know it, because it’s an ungodly amount of people.

Seinfeld has publicly supported Israel following the 7 October Hamas attack, and traveled to a kibbutz in December to meet with hostages’ families

In case you’re wondering what the argument is. You should still read the story though.

Trump: We need a Christian Visibility Day

The Christian Visibility Day at home:

I keep telling folks, but the 118th Congress, the current one, we have so far 46 bills that have made it to law. The only one that really made a big difference was Pub. L 118-5 which ended officially the student loan repayment pause and ended some enhanced benefits of food stamps, SNAP, free lunches, etc.

The other 45 bills have been mostly bumps to the debt ceiling (and of course the small “benefits” Republicans reaped in those), a 250th anniversary of the Marine Corp collection coin (because Congress has the power over the treasury, that’s one of the things they do), renaming post offices (Congress has power over the post in the Constitution), some bumps to VA funding, and that’s about it.

The small wins they got in avoiding the fiscal cliff aren’t exactly massive bangers. I mean compared to say the 117th Congress, the one before this one, that hammered out 362 laws with hits like the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPs act, and so forth. There’s just been nothing like any of that in this current Congress.

And the 116th Congress gave us 344 laws, navigated a pandemic, AND got two impeachments out the door.

The Republicans have shown, they’ve got nothing. We literally have on record them as doing nothing. This has been the least productive Congress in modern history. They have literally set a brand new record for number of times it took to get a speaker and for the least amount of work done EVER.

so why would we tolerate it from a judge who is in an arguably more important position?

Because the person being tossed into jail could very well become the most important position. No nation is above political retaliation and the reality of a mob murdering the judge and daughter and then subsequently getting full pardons from that most important position is a non-zero value.

Given the weakness that exudes from Congress on Impeachment, there’s zero ramifications for such a situation. And given the nature of Trump, there’s zero compunction that would ever keep him from this situation arising.

Everyone fears the “official” acts that Trump can carry out. Smarter people understand the non-official actions that he can give a nod to and give comfort to. That’s how truly corrupt governments work, not by official acts, but the non-official ones.

Maybe if that’s the case going back to Kansas which has a better cost of living is a better choice than trying to live in a city or state with the highest cost of living?

Not to deride your minimum wage tangent here, but there’s something to be asked here. Why does California have a high cost of living? Why does Kansas have a low cost of living? I think when you ask the question of why cost of living is so vastly different from area to area you start to get a better picture of why we have a lot of problems addressing wages matching that cost of living.

It’s almost as if people pointed out that raising the minimum wage will result in higher costs for everything and thus raising the cost of living

This has been a national thing. I feel like you’d might have a point if this wasn’t true literally everywhere. Even where I live in very rural Tennessee cost of living has gone up. Our county recently increased sales tax and property tax is likely to go up as well. Cost of goods like eggs have gone from 78¢ to $2.19 here from 2019 to today, with eggs at one point hitting $6.99 a dozen here.

So there is a relationship between minimum wage and cost of living but that’s clearly not the case with California’s minimum wage increase that goes into effect next month. Everything, everywhere is increasing in cost. Which goes back to what I was saying. When you start asking questions on why cost of living is different, you get a picture of bigger factors that drive national cost of goods and services. And you see that touched upon in the article.

“We suspect that low-wage workers’ high likelihood of living in three-earner (or more) households might be due largely to California’s high housing costs,” the legislative analyst’s office said.

Housing is a massive thing everywhere and housing is flying through the roof. The reasons for that are complex and it’s absolutely a discussion, for perhaps elsewhere though (I cannot imagine that Lemmy comments are that great a place for such a trite diatribe). Minimum wage does indeed play a role but, and I could be reading your comment incorrectly, I believe that you are attributing a much larger weight to that factor than it deserves and forgoing the complexity of the issue by solely focusing on that sole reason.

In a 2-1 decision, judges ruled that “the age-verification requirement is rationally related to the government’s legitimate interest in preventing minors’ access to pornography. Therefore, the age-verification requirement does not violate the First Amendment.”

WHY CAN PARENTS NOT DO THIS ASPECT?!

This is the continual wild part of recent conservative bullshit. Everything the State is taking up is basically something a parent could step in and deal with.

“My kid read a bad book that turned them into a frog! Which is also gay!”

Well watch what your fucking is reading then and have a discussion about why you disapprove of it.

“My kid is watching porn and now they can’t function in society and don’t want to get a $7.25/hr job of listening to Karens scream at them!”

Then fucking don’t leave a computer in the their room perhaps? Maybe take their phone away at the end of the day? I mean or have a rational discussion about their ever changing body as they begin to become an adult? I mean any one of those is better than “OH I KNOW! I’LL LET THE GOVERNMENT PARENT FOR ME!!”

And what’s wilder about the Conservative movement, the level of parenting has zero rhyme or reason.

• Watching porn? — That’s Government parenting.
• Working in a meat packing facility with blades so sharp they slice through literal bone? — Oh yeah that’s totally a regular parent thing.

Fucking wild is what it is!

I’m really struggling to wrap my head around where this line between Government overstepping and justified Government regulation is with them. If you don’t want your kid watching porn, then don’t let them fucking watch porn. Ideally you should have a talk about their ever evolving sexuality but clearly that’s just crazy liberal talk from me.

I had some discussion with someone once about the 10th amendment and it relating to State’s banning abortion. And guy was like “Oh yeah this is a clear win for State’s rights!” And I’m like, the 10th amendment is setup that we have one of two winners at the end of the day. The State or the People.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

It says OR there. That means every “State win” is a “the people loss”. You do understand that right?

Just fucking silence as that thought slow rolled into his brain’s processing center, that then subsequently hit the panic button because of overload.

I just fucking can’t. DO you want Big Brother in everything or no? Because every inch you give to the Government helps them step-bro your ass.

They absolutely will. And then several months in it’ll be, “he isn’t hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

The whole lot of them failing to learn anything from mistakes.

Oh man! I was just about to say Texas! Oklahoma has its own version of this scheme. These oil companies, they absolutely do not want to pay decommissioning cost on this and they’ll use every trick they can find to avoid it as long as possible.

Coal industry does roughly the same thing just different tricks. Everyone in the fossil fuel industry looking to get out of that whole “what comes next” problem.

But can’t say much, recycling solar is nascent and hardly done at this point but the whole solar industry is brand new so hard to draw a conclusion there. Same for wind, most do eventually get landfill but there is interest at least in recycling, so we’ll have to see how that plays out.

But the energy sector in general seems to always want to skirt the costs at the end of operation, never calculating the full cost into the revenue stream. Stop paying the execs so much and hold some of that cash back for clean up time. You know it’s coming, the responsible thing is to not act all shocked that clean up time has come and file bankruptcy. Execs that do this ought to be shot.

Open the door HAL

Oh don’t even get me started. Hall effect has been known since 1879, those JoyCons didn’t use it because it was cheaper to use shitty graphite. They literally went the cheap ass route because they didn’t even care.

“Nintendo sues” oh look it’s a day that ends in Y. The only person Nintendo isn’t dead set on suing is Nintendo.

Here’s you 937th remake of Super Mario Bros 2 that you can only rent, have a nice day.

And our online service is absolute trash but you’ll pay anyway to have a legal emulator until we also discontinue that for Super other garbage online service!

Wild days ahead where we’re trading Wendy’s delivery futures on Robinhood.

Remember the go old days when teachers…

checks notes

Taught classes?

Self-immolation. To set oneself ablaze, usually in protest.

I just want to note here for those about to journey into this conversation, there’s a major hiccup that didn’t exist before. The Supreme Court placed an new expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment in the 2008 Heller case. This has significantly altered how the second amendment is read in the United States. So what may seem like “brain dead easy” things to do, likely cannot be done as they would be unconstitutional.

I say this because the question posed simply indicates “Present + Congress” which seems to imply, “which laws would you pass to fix gun control issues” and post-2008 that is no longer a thing. Any discussion needs to include at this point a conversation about the Supreme Court, the new understanding of the 2nd Amendment, and that the Justices currently on the bench will likely enforce their new expansive interpretation for their term on the court (which is a lifetime appointment).

We are now at a point that we cannot fix this issue without a Constitutional Amendment, a reorganization of the Supreme Court (packing, impeachment, etc), an incredibly careful tip-toe around this new understanding of the second amendment, and/or talking about the underlying issues that surround gun reform (economic and societal issues).

And we are seeing the consequences of Heller in things like 2022 Bruen which SCOTUS indicated that a “historic standard” should be applied to new gun regulation. This has lead to US v Rahimi where the Court of Appeals for 5th Circuit has removed the Federal protection that folks charged with domestic violence can still obtain a gun as “domestic violence” had no historical standard on which to base on. Which is an absolute astonishing level of logic there.

We are no longer at a phase where legislation alone along the strict lines of “just gun reform”, this new understanding of the second amendment has forever (or at least as long as those Justices sit the bench) altered how we can approach this issue. We cannot just simply say, “let us figure out ways to regulate gun ownership in itself” that is no longer allowed. We can approach the issue indirectly: how do we increase the cost of Interstate gun ownership, how do we regulate the the dissemination of ammunition, how do we address the various issues that draw people into violent crime, how do we address the issue of school shootings at an societal level. But we have been cut off from direct approaches that regulate guns themselves except in the most extreme cases and even then, advocates are continually being handed new tools by the Supreme Court to bring about new challenges for those.

Any meaningful debate about gun control needs to include the Supreme Court. Because given the current Court’s propensity to expand gun rights and the understanding of the second amendment, any law that might get introduced to fix the issue today, could and very likely would be overturned by the court. This has become a new chess piece in this game to be considered since 2008, prior yes this could have been a Congress and President issue alone, but post-2008, the Courts must be considered in the discussion. The Supreme Court too strongly embraces the new understanding of the second amendment to let any direct law be allowed to go unchallenged.