I agree that plastics are here to stay for many reasons, but the reasons you list above aren't them. We had frozen foods before we had plastic packaging. Fresh foods need not be in plastic (they even have plastic-like vegetable bags made from cellulose these days, but there is nothing wrong with brown paper bags), baked goods don't require plastic (light cardboard with or without a wax coating works fine), and as you point out, rice (and anything similar) can be sold in burlap bags, no plastic required. You can sell liquids in metal cans or glass bottles.

Shelf lives will be shorter (sometimes a lot shorter, sometimes only minimally), the product will probably not be as attractive while sitting on the shelf (no little plastic window means I can't see the donuts in the box I am buying, the horror), transportation costs may increase (glass is heavy), but the reasons "we can't" are all because "we do business a little differently now" and not because some fundamental property of plastic makes it so. If you're over, say, 40, it is not hard to remember a world not dominated by single use plastics.

That's a possibility. Luckily, there are a whole bunch of "blue" counties you can use as a control. How did drug de-criminalization do in e.g. Portland?

To provide context on this one: Darth Cheeto was talking about China's growing market share in the auto industry and warned that if Biden were elected to a second term it would result in a "bloodbath" for the domestic auto industry. The media reported this as "Trump warns that if he doesn't win, there will be a bloodbath" implying he was calling for insurrection.

We can debate "better' but requiring additional services, requiring the covering of pre-existing conditions, and requiring children to be allowed to remain on their parents plans long after they were "children" was not ever going to make healthcare cheaper.

Err... no. The entire point of Starlink is that it's not in a high orbit like e.g. Hughes is because high orbit = high latency.

Remember: under capitalism, man exploits man... but under communism, it's the other way around.

Likewise. I can never fully explain how frustrating it is to try to debate with someone whose argument essentially boils down to "nuh uh" or, worse, can't hold a civil conversation. I can respect people who disagree with me but are at least willing to talk, even if we'll never convince each other that we're correct.

Please forgive me, as I'm going to reorder your comments a bit to make them easier to respond to:

The Colt model 1911 was introduced in 1911. It's a .45ACP semi-automatic handgun with a 7 round magazine. The US military still uses them in some applications. It's designer, John Browning, had several predecessor designs before then, going back into the 1890s. His auto-5 shotgun is a semi-automatic shotgun that entered service in 1905, and his Browning Automatic Rifle, a fully automatic rifle with a 20 round magazine entered service in 1918. Hiram Maxim invented the machine gun in the 1880s. It's not really true that "their guns don't compare to our guns." They absolutely do. A BAR is far more dangerous than e.g. an AR-15.

The Glock 17's primary innovation was its polymer frame and striker firing mechanism (though these likely existed before then). If you're looking for "9mm handgun with lots of rounds in the magazine" you can go as far back as the 1890s with the Broomhandle Mauser.

Why so? What's the "correct" reading? How do you square that with "a well regulated militia?" The implication of said well regulated militia (e.g. a well trained, well equipped body of men that can be called upon for the common defense) is that their equipment would be substantially similar to the average infrantryman--automatic rifle, hand grenades, the whole shebang. At the time the 2nd amendment came around, people personally owned artillery, even armed ships. Personally! How then, can you say "well, no, the second amendment really doesn't contemplate the level of destruction that we can inflict today (WMDs not withstanding).

This is a fair question. I don't see anything wrong with semi-automatic weapons in civilian hands. You obviously disagree with this, and I can respect your position, but I don't see how you square that with the constitution. While I'm opposed to the objective, I certainly support your right to try to change the constitution and I respect people who choose to follow that route to gun control. We disagree, but we both respect the law.

Here's the rub: You can't go back. It's too late. The genie is already out of the bottle, and nothing you can do will change that--in fact, things can (and will) certainly grow even more complicated. 3D printing will continue to improve. How long until fully automatic weapons can be made completely on such an apparatus? Already they're churning out switch kits for semi automatic pistols to turn them into machine guns.

Even ignoring that, though, there are more guns than people in this country. If you banned them all today, and had a tremendously optimistic compliance rate (say 80%) there would still be something like 80,000,000 firearms remaining in circulation. It would take you decades, even centuries for them all to go away. All of them, in such a world, would be in the hands of people who, by definition, do not respect the law. I don't want to live in a world where "bad people" have a monopoly on force, and I am forced to submit to their whims or die.

That's just a rumor based on spinning the Windows 95 CD backward.

I suspect I understand it a lot better than you do. In the context of the time, a "well regulated militia" was one that was well trained and equipped.

Please construe the "right of the people" to "keep" arms in the absence of private ownership.

I don't believe that's clear at all. I have seen such claimed, many times, probably most famously by Warren Burger, but the language of the second amendment is not ambiguous. There is an enumerated, federally protected right to keep and bear arms, and that right belongs to the people. You will find exactly no jurisprudence by the Supreme Court saying otherwise. Every time the second amendment has come up, the court articulates an individual right--even in US v. Miller, the question is only as to the extent of that right.

In the same sense that the first amendment only protects your right to operate a printing press utilizing movable type or shouting from a soapbox in the town square? Or joining in groups in person only? Perhaps the first amendment only protects the adherences to religious sects that existed in 1791? No, of course not--the first amendment protects your right to "speak" or publish using your computer, you can "assemble" in a Zoom meeting, and e.g. Scientologists and Mormons are free to regale us with tales of flying to earth in DC-9s or come to our doors to tell us the good news that, believe it or not, Jesus showed up in North America at some point.

Your suggestion that "technology changing" makes your "arguments carry more weight" is ludicrous in both that context and in the context that the Constitution provides a means to change it when we find it doesn't work in certain situations anymore. That such a change requires broad consensus before it can occur is a feature, not a bug.

Google's Gemini:

Whoa, whoa, whoa, back the truck up here. The issue with e.g. Hamas and hospitals isn't that their wounded are treated there, it's that Hamas uses the hospitals themselves for activities that result in their protected status being compromised.

There is absolutely, positively, nothing at all wrong with combatants being treated at civilian hospitals, period, full stop. Hospitals, even military hospitals, hospital ships, etc, are protected from being legitimate targets regardless of who is being treated there.

As pointed out by the GP comment, Congress has already provided the funding. It's just not being spent. You can say almost anything negative you want about the Congress and it's likely to be true, but in this specific instance it's a simple falsehood and whoever modded you up should be ashamed.

This seems unlikely; "VMWare" isn't "the company" anymore, it's Broadcom, and Broadcom has been following this strategy for some time now. Its shareholders seem happy with the way things are going--their stock price is 5x what it was four years ago, and >20x what it was ten years ago. Revenue is up 14x over that same period.

Personally, I hate these sonsofbitches and what they do to the companies they acquire and their acquisition of VMWare has certainly screwed me in the mid to long term, but the shareholders of Broadcom are certainly not the solution to the problem.

The free standalone "Windows Hyper-V Server" is dead (2019 was the last version). The Hyper-V role is still there (and will continue to still be there) but is licensed as part of the Windows Server OS so is not, strictly speaking, "free."

Err... while the guy you're replying to claiming the west is at "pre-industrial" levels of emissions is laughable, using "worldwide emissions" as a means to say "the west" has been increasing dramatically is equally wrong.

Here are US emissions. Here are the EU's. Here are China's. Notice anything?