BraveSirZaphod

This behavior is literally millennia older than capitalism.

This feels more like a poor non-native English speaker than an AI. LLMs do happily lie, but they don’t usually have significant grammar mistakes like the missing articles here.

This is just exposing that you don’t actually read the New York Times.

Here’s an article on the plight of Gazans in Rafah in the face of a potential Israeli invasion.

Here’s an overview on the gang situation in Haiti as the government is functionally collapsing.

And here’s an article discussing the increasingly common practice of restaurants charging significant cancellation fees.

Meanwhile, the NY Post has such great stories as:

• Kate Middleton officially hits rock bottom
• Rudy Giuliani’s ex engaged to Palm Beach energy exec after six months of dating in ‘whirlwind romance’ (Exclusive!)
• Unions want full control of schools and our kids — we can’t let Albany allow it
• Activists lobbying to ‘morally’ allow trans kids to change their bodies are only doing more harm

If the people in charge have the ability to end democracy, how can democracy be claimed to exist in the first place? Democracy is supposed to be our capability as individual citizens to regulate the people in power, but if they can turn that switch on or off, we don’t actually have that capability except as they choose to allow us to.

The simple answer to your question is by the people taking a person who very overtly says that he has no desire to preserve democracy and in fact has already sought to overturn it once before and then proceeding to return that person to office in order to do just that.

We do have the ability to regulate the people in power by not voting for them in the first place. If we take the ability and use it to give power to someone who wants to do away with democracy, that’s pretty much on us.

Ultimately, any frustration with Biden - and I acknowledge that valid ones absolutely do exist - must be squared against the fact that we have to put a candidate up against Trump. Whether Biden is the person with the best odds against him is an objective and empirical one, though also one that’s hard to accurately study and answer. Disapproval polls are certainly one source of info, but they do not necessarily mean that any other potential alternative would do better. It is very possible for large amounts of people to disapprove of Biden but ultimately disapprove of Trump even more. We can’t actually personify “broadly generic and popular Democrat” into a real human, and even if we could, that’s basically Biden, so unless there exists an actual specific person who is both broadly popular and with more political clout than Biden who’s also interested in running, the practical choice is Biden against Trump, no matter how much ink people want to spill on the matter.

Edit: On a more pragmatic matter, I absolutely agree that telling progressives to shut up, stop complaining, and vote for Biden is not a particularly effective style of messaging.

“just make them do X” carries an implication that the relevant party actually has the ability to do the thing.

It’s like taking the legal cases against Trump and simplifying them to “just put him in prison lol”

Gonna take it you didn’t read the article, because this literally is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

Under the proposal, banks could continue to charge fees when a customer’s account falls below zero, but either at a price in line with the bank’s actual costs to administer the overdraft or at an established benchmark created by the new rule.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed potential fees of $3, $6, $7 or $14 and is seeking feedback from banks and the public on what would be appropriate. Current overdraft fees often push $30 or more, taking a significant bite out of low-income accounts.

You’re vastly overestimating the powers of the executive branch.

Flying is also dramatically cheaper and more accessible today than it used to be.

If you want the fancy treatment from back then, pay the prices people paid back then and buy first class.

I quite liked it, personally.

I imagine saying that is going to be treated as an admission of heresy here though.

Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, will become public domain in literally 13 days.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/us/politics/transcript-biden-speech-israel-ukraine.html

Here’s a transcription. I’d really recommend people actually read it before commenting.

To their defense, it’s not exactly a safe idea to hold an anti-Hamas rally. Polling, as unreliable as it is in areas like Gaza, generally shows majority, but not absolute, support for Hamas, and it’s of course a completely different picture in the West Bank.

To quote the speech that you evidently did not watch or read:

Like so many others, I’m heartbroken by the tragic loss of Palestinian life
We mourn every innocent life lost. We can’t ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians who only want to live in peace and have an opportunity.
Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people. Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, and innocent Palestinian families are suffering greatly because of them.
Yesterday, in discussions with the leaders of Israel and Egypt, I secured an agreement for the first shipment of humanitarian assistance from the United Nations to Palestinian civilians in Gaza. If Hamas does not divert or steal this shipment, these shipments, we’re going to provide an opening for sustained delivery of lifesaving humanitarian assistance for the Palestinians.
As I said in Israel, as hard as it is, we cannot give up on peace. We cannot give up on a two-state solution.
Israel and Palestinians equally deserve to live in safety, dignity and peace.
In recent years, too much hate has given too much oxygen, fueling racism, a rise in antisemitism, Islamic-phobia, right here in America.
And I know many of you in the Muslim American community, the Arab American community, the Palestinian American community and so many others are outraged and hardened saying to yourselves, “Here we go again with Islamophobia and the distrust we saw after 9/11.”
We must also without equivocation denounce Islamophobia.
And to all you hurting, those of you who are hurting, I want you to know I see you. You belong. And I want to say this to you: You’re all America. You’re all America.
And here in America, let us not forget who we are. We reject all forms, all forms of hate, whether against Muslims, Jews, or anyone.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/us/politics/transcript-biden-speech-israel-ukraine.html

I’m almost starting to believe we just might see some kind of deal with Democrats, which a week ago I would have believed could only even happen in political dramas.

I’d pretty strongly disagree with that, if you mean actually causing centrist Dems to not vote for Biden.

I’d remind you that if all Green Party voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in 2016 would have instead voted for Clinton, those states would have flipped, Hillary Clinton would be President right now, Roe v. Wade would still be intact, and many many many things would be very different.

Now, I won’t pretend that these kinds of hypotheticals are super meaningful (the Libertarian party obviously exists as a factor, for instance), but the fact of the matter is that voting for the Greens in a tight state can and has contributed to very real harm to people. Second-order effects really aren’t that complicated to understand.

You can believe whatever you like. The companies that disagree have no obligation to service you. Go find services that don’t require phone numbers if this is important to you; they do exist.

Studies show pretty conclusively at this point that increasingly housing supply, regardless of how it’s done, leads to decreased pressure on housing costs.

The city is welcome to build public housing if it wants, but until it gets around to that, the least it can do is not make it literally illegal for anyone else to build meaningfully dense housing.

Just to give an obvious example, it will obviously benefit the people who wind up living in the housing that is built. They’ll likely be relatively wealthy, but you can add some incentives and subsidies for some affordable units, and even despite that, a wealthy person moving into a new apartment means that person isn’t moving into some other unit, reducing demand on it and enabling lower prices across the market.

The writers almost certainly do get a cut. Musixmatch does not own the copyright to any of the lyrics, and as such, negotiated with the copyright holders in order to be allowed to store, display, and sell access to the lyrics. This almost certainly involved some amount of money changing hands.

Spotify is paying money for access to the lyrics and using that as a feature in their product. A chunk of that money is almost certainly going back to the actual writers.

For the median American that works full-time, who earns around $56,000, the cost of Spotify is 0.2% of their income.

Obviously everyone is in their own financial situation and for some people that will still be a burden. But for sake of comparison, in 1989, the average cost of cable TV was $18, and that’s of course in 1989 dollars. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that $11 for unlimited access to basically all music at any time is a pretty good value for the money.

That said, if it is still onerous to someone, they’re obviously not in ideal circumstances and I’m really not gonna fault them for just pirating.

Spotify is not profitable right now; their current revenue doesn’t come anywhere close to covering their costs. The only reason they’re able to survive is investors holding on to the belief that, some day, it’ll be possible to actually make the numbers work.