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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: December 18th, 2023

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  • This phrasing is so weaselly you baited me into fact-checking it. Congratulations!

    on track to

    meaning it’s crediting Biden with things that haven’t happened yet? I didn’t investigate how many future acres he needs to make this meme true.

    more land … first-term persident

    The Pacific Remote Islands are much larger, but mostly water. Created by Dubya, expanded by Obama, both times in their respective second terms.

    modern

    Personally, I’d have counted Carter as modern. His Alaska Conservation Act weighed in at 157 million acres. I think that one got Congressional approval too, so maybe they’re only counting land protected by executive fiat.


  • I’m not a Libertarian, but I sympathize with some of their economic viewpoints – significantly more so than tends to be welcome here. Unlike some of you, I don’t speak to the motives and attitudes of all libertarians, only my own. I’m not a Republican. I don’t smoke pot. I did vote for Jo Jorgensen in 2020. I do give a flying fuck about liberty. I don’t confirm or deny being a myopic cunt.

    Oddly enough, I do support some form of public healthcare. I’m well aware that most libertarians don’t. A hundred years ago, maybe even 50 years ago, I wouldn’t have either. The problem is that medical science has advanced to where a free market insurance model doesn’t work as well as it used to. Health insurance used to be a luxury when lung cancer would kill a rich man almost as quickly as it killed a poor man. That’s no longer the case, and the costs have accelerated to where the treatment can bankrupt an uninsured middle class man.

    The real sinker however is pre-existing conditions. You can’t insure a house that’s already on fire, and we don’t ask homeowners policies to do so. Waiting periods for costly conditions sometimes almost work, except for patients born a pre-existing medical condition. If the insurer had the choice, they’d just refuse to write the policy, even if treatment is cost-effective from a public policy standpoint.

    So I support free market solutions where they exist. Health insurance may be one of the few situations where it doesn’t.








  • They’re trying to capture the consumer surplus. Normally, a seller can have either high margins and low volume, or low margins and high volume. The retailers wet dream is to get the benefits of both. If the reward program profiles you as someone who buys coffee at $4.00, but not at $6.00, you’ll get coupons for coffee that the people who buy coffee every week regardless of price won’t get.

    FWIW, I’ve found stores that don’t even have rewards cards frequently have lower prices than their competitors’ reward card sale prices.



  • I recently read a collection of novels by a prominent 1960s science fiction writer. In three novels and 400 pages, I don’t think there was a single female character who advanced the plot other than by sexually entertaining a male character (Despite one of the books having a female title character, and another had a lot of minor female characters.) I know it’s a product of its era, but even then, there were more woman PhDs than men who’d been to space, so I think a good science fiction author ought to be able to at least imagine the possibility. I have nothing against female sexuality, but the most interesting women supplement it with some other talent.








  • A lot of users here have a lot of wrong opinions about a lot of things, but it’s not our job to fix them.

    and I stopped trying to argue in the comments.

    This is allowed. Maybe if you let someone get their last reply, they’ll think they won the debate and keep on being wrong. But if you keep arguing, they’ll think you’re an asshole, and still keep on being wrong. Myself, I rarely share my thoughts on a topic more than once per thread, even if someone disagrees with it.