However, Florida is a small enough part of the global problem, that what they do locally will have essentially no effect. They couldn't fix the problem with local actions, and they also probably can't make it measurably worse.

Note that the US is not such a small part. That's a large enough fraction of the problem to make a measurable difference. Scale is significant.

> I used to think that. Then I looked at the math. The amount of money possessed by the billionares and a trillionare pale in the face of the size (and needs) of the actual economy

The Derivatives Market recently surpassed 1 Quadrillion Dollars.

Notice how none of the politicians are talking about taxing that? It's all a show to stoke up conflict between the lower classes.

On the other hand, the same people do want to put AI in charge of totalizing Central Planning, because "this time Communism will work", because Magic LLM Dust.

We just need an AI Surveillance Police State to bring about the Great Utopia.

Every single time they say the same thing but with different nouns substituted as Madlibs. Then millions die.

The way the article is written makes this seem sudden, but Wayback has a discontinuation article at least as far back as January.

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

Maybe third-party cookie blocking killed this. I can imagine automated personality profile builders being done in the background based on GIF's people choose to use.

Most of Virginia doesn't get all that cold. 30 kids in a room with limited air circulation should suffice, even without lots of insulation. Air conditioning, however, might well be a different matter.

IIRC, there's a decent link between registered gun ownership and the suicide rate. However, a lot of gun ownership is unregistered, so that's probably not reliable.

I might well agree that the current administration is worse, and scale does, indeed, matter. But judging scale when one side is crippling state governments and the other side is removing individual rights isn't clear. The events are too different.

One can say that "morally the crippling of state governments to enfranchise the disenfranchised" is better, but it's still a centralization of control.

To be fair, both sides have uniformly supported measures to increase the government's control over the citizenry. They tend to support different measures, with different arguments, but both do it. This is basically because people act to make their jobs easier. The differences are because they have (sometimes only slightly) different goals, or "centers of power".

Note that this applies to the Warren Court and the civil rights decisions as well as to the current more blatant authoritarianism.

Interestingly enough if you count out loud your lips won't touch in the middle until you get to a million.

Billion continues that deviation from the lower numbers.

Yeah, but it's $10 or so while a letter is around $0.80.

Were the check for $20 it wouldn't be worth it until you know that checkwashing is a thing.

Our Boomers wrote checks in 1960 so they write checks today.

And the banking sector is lousy with fiscal parasites who are all trying to extract rents from everybody so there is no smooth banking payment system.

Third parties like Paypal are notorious for seizing accounts without due process sp they are avoided for anything substantial.

Where I live Bitcoin Cash is used far more than other electronic payment methods because it just works and avoids all the malevolent third parties.

There are huge differences, but it *is* a reasonable analogy. It's certainly more like that than it is like "copying", even though copying, in the extended sense, is involved. As it is in all learning.

These can be published or accessed, but never both at the same time.

It has been my experience, sad to say, that online stores aren't above selling consumer credit card information either, and I've grounds to think Amazon is one that does this.

I have an industrial air conditioner for my home. (It's a small home, but summers are increasingly severe.)

I don't recall being asked a damn thing.

My suspicion is that this is scaremongering.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.