Capitalists People in just about every system ignore negative externalities, which are defined as costs borne by other people for the benefits that they receive themselves. Ironically, capitalism might be the best short-term solution, if only we had the political will. One of the major functions of government is to internalize negative externalities, via taxes and regulations. It’s easy for a factory owner to let toxic effluent flow into the nearby river, but if it costs enough in taxes and fines, it’s cheaper to contain it. We just need to use government regulations to make environmental damage cost too much money, and the market would take care of re-balancing economic activity to sustainable alternatives. The carbon tax is a well-known example of this technique, but we’ve seen how well that has gone over politically. Still, it’s probably easier to push those kinds of regulations in a short time frame than to fundamentally revamp the entire system.

This knocks loose a memory for me. The instructor for the anthropology class that I took in college introduced the idea of natural categories versus cultural categories, and the example that he used was the category of things called “chair.” It’s a cultural category, which is defined as things that humans assign to the category somewhat arbitrarily.

A chair might be something for a human to sit on, like a wooden platform on four legs, with a vertical back for lumbar support. It may have armrests (“arms”) or not. If it doesn’t have a back, it’s a stool. But stools can also have backs, like some barstools, if they have longer legs. But a director’s chair has long legs, and a back, and is not a stool?! And then what of a papasan chair, with no legs, with the seat and backrest combined into one, curved platform?

If you sit on a stump around a campfire, that’s kind of an improvised chair, defined more by the use than the shape. Then, put a collection of stumps around a table in a cabincore dining room, and now they are formally chairs.

In the other direction, the student union at my university is well-known for its colorful terrace chairs with a sunburst pattern on the back. It has a couple of 10-foot-tall versions for people to climb on (at their own risk!) for social media photo ops. Those are chairs, because of the shape, although they’re not for a human to sit on.

And then let’s not even get into lounge chairs, upon which you can be fully recumbent instead of sitting… Point is “biological female” is a natural category (sexually-reproducing organism bearing the larger of its species’ gametes). It includes lizards and ferns, but not all of what we call women, because women is a cultural category. It’s kind of arbitrary.

And yeah, intelligent people know this, and the “adult biological female” people are just trying to hide their bigotry. I just like to think out loud about it.

Muskegon

Sorry, I’m not in a position to know. It would be very interesting if an investigative journalist looked into the state of employment from the perspective of workers these days to put together a bigger picture than one store.

Really? This is an example why I’m done with Democrats.

Would it be worse than a fascist dictatorship?

The President has historically had wide latitude to act in times of emergency. The instigator of the insurrection should’ve been in Gitmo on January 21, 2021.

Sure, call me extremist, but look at where we are now. I’m fucking right. But, barring the correct action, Biden could’ve followed the moderate, decorous course of launching the prosecution that day. But no, it took TWO. GOD. DAMN. YEARS.

I’m so done with Democrat excuses.

Centrists: Don’t vote for third parties, because they can’t win. Work within the Democratic Party.

Also centrists: Not like that!

The grocery store in which I used to work has been desperate to hire cashiers for years, really since the start of the pandemic. There were some days that we had only two lanes open because that’s all the staff that we had. During busy times, the store manager, the store owners, and sometimes the managers-on-duty would go up to the front to do check-out. The store installed more self-checkout lanes out of necessity.

Nowadays, I go shop there only in the evenings, and there are enough cashiers because they’re all high school students. But the help-wanted sign at the front of the store is still offering open cashier jobs. They’re certainly not eliminating jobs that people desperately need.

Computer-vision has been a thing for years, though it’s now bundled under the moniker “AI”. I know that the self-checkout cameras at the store where I go use AI to “watch” customers. I would assume most of them do, now. Heck, the cheap camera that I bought to point out my front window for fun pretty reliably detects animals, vehicles, and people.

The store nearest my house, where I shop a lot, is a bit more upscale. They’ve installed fancy self-checkout kiosks that tell you to continue scanning items while waiting for the attendant to come deal with an issue. The giant, discount grocery store with locations on the edge of town have enough room that they’ve installed self-checkout lanes that have about a 2-meter conveyor belt to a large bagging area. It’s enormous.

Yeah, nobody’s buying this bullshit.

Good comment, but this bugs me:

*Reagan

Regan was Reagan’s chief of staff for his last couple of years in office.

I like the metaphor of a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of flotsam in the cold water a mile from shore. He’s losing body heat, and eventually hypothermia will set in and he will drown. But if he lets go and starts to swim for shore, he’ll lose body heat even faster, use up his energy, and he probably won’t make it. The “harm reduction” argument says that he should reduce his heat loss, and stay clinging to the flotsam. He’s safe right now, while attempting to get to shore is difficult and dangerous.

Of course, by the time that the fallacy of that strategy becomes apparent (*gestures at current events*), he’s too cold and weak to even attempt the swim.

In my city, we have a barely-there progressive, third party with a presence in the city and county government. It’s all that remains of an attempt to in the 1990’s to launch a Midwestern political party based on an electoral reform called “fusion voting,” which would allow a candidate to get the endorsement of multiple parties, and appear on the ballot multiple times as a candidate under each of those party banners. That way, the candidate would know where their support came from, without the “spoiler effect.” I learned from the Wikipedia page that it was an important tactic in the movement to abolish slavery.

But, in this case, the Democratic Party (technically, the Democratic Farm Labor Party) went to court to shoot down that idea, arguing that it was too confusing to voters. The American left isn’t just sitting here waiting for someone to start a revolution, it has two major political parties actively suppressing it.

Amusingly, one tidbit of information that I just now learned from that Wikipedia article, presented without further comment:

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during the heyday of the sewer socialists, the Republican and Democratic parties would agree not to run candidates against each other in some districts, concentrating instead on defeating the socialists. These candidates were usually called non-partisan, but sometimes were termed fusion candidates instead.

Voters do have a say.

That’s why I vote third party.

Not at all. Making families buy life-saving medicine, at whatever price, is in fact the opposite of left-wing policy. Universal, single-payer health care is just centrist policy in many countries.

Same deal, you’re not wrong. At the same time, it has to be done. Voting Democrat to hold off the fascists was, at best, a holding action rather than a viable, long-term strategy. A slow track to fascism, as it were, as they were going to win an election eventually. Democrats weren’t going to fix the problem. For example, we voted for Biden in 2020 to hold off the fascist threat, they attacked the Capitol because they lost, and Biden did next to nothing about it. Hence, the depiction of the party as the pawl in the ratchet mechanism.

Let me say again, the FPTP voting system leads to two dominant parties, but nowhere in mathematics or law does it say the those two have to be Democrats and Republicans. We’ve always had the choice of a different two parties. That the Blue and Red duopoly would lead to fascism via the ratchet effect been clear for nearly 30 years.

I wouldn’t claim that Democrats don’t see the people of Palestine as human, exactly. They may just put it out of mind. Denial is a very potent force.

In case anybody was actually wondering, the difference is sudsing agent. The manufacturers originally put a chemical in laundry detergent to make more suds. That doesn’t make them clean clothes any better, it’s just for psychological effect. Customers feel like it’s working better when they can see suds.

But too much sudsing in front-loading machines can cause leaking from around the door seals. (Same as putting dish detergent in the dishwasher.) So the HE detergents are the same thing, but without the sudsing agent. They work just fine in top-loading machines, too.

But does anybody remember those TV ads for Biz detergent which pitted a woman using it against man using “Hiz” detergent? Hooray for casual sexism!