Tell us you don't understand how the government works without telling us you don't understand how it works.

Congress has the power to delegate it's authority to smaller expert groups. Passing a law that says "The FTC can set rules for trade and commerce in these ways..." is completely valid. Or sure, we could have Senator "series of tubes" Stevens write every single specific rule that controls Internet communications. That will work fine.

There are only two groups of people who want to eliminate regulatory authority: (1) people who are too dumb to understand the negative impact it would have on normal people, and (2) corporate hacks and simps who understand exactly that negative impact and see that as the goal.

As an aside: I find it hilarious that the same people who bitch about "we are a republic, not a democracy" and fight against, for example, eliminating the electoral college, are often the same people who bitch about "unelected bureaucrats".

I'm so tired of seeing this tired old red herring trotted out during debates about daylight saving time.

Using local time versus UTC has absolutely nothing to do with DST. You can get the same effect by eliminating DST and keeping a static UTC offset for local time. There's a reason that Britain, for which GMT/UTC is local time still has British Summer Time (UTC+1) during the summer.

The problem is how the rising and setting of the sun affects schedules. Using UTC everywhere means you'll have people saying "schools need to start an hour later in winter so the babbies don't have to walk in the dark" -- the exact same argument used against permanent standard time.

Well-stated. I can't fathom why this is modded down to zero. Wish I had points to spend.

I have to assume the majority of people have no idea what "neoliberalism" means. Seeing "liberal" in it pisses off progressives because they think you're blaming them for Reagan and his policies, and it pisses off conservatives because they think you're stealing credit for their golden-age accomplishments.

All true, but natural beef is so delicious it's worth those compromises.

Don't worry, I'm sure that the lab-grown stuff won't make those same mistakes.

Property taxes also increase regularly. Given it's ostensibly the same market forces driving both (supply and demand), in a fair system we should be seeing rent prices and property taxes increase by about the same amount each year.

And the other kind of idiot doesn't see the writing on the wall that points to a future where most features are subscription-only. This was obviously a test balloon sent up by BMW to see what the reaction would be to a hardware subscription service. They tempered it by making it optional but I'm absolutely certain they are talking internally about which features would be tolerable to most drivers as subscription-only.

What an absolutely wrong and completely "yes, please sir, use me as a doormat" take. Maybe you don't buy anything but the words on a page but most normal people buy a car, which includes everything bumper to bumper.

Besides, if this is all a nothing-burger, then I guess it's okay for people to hack their cars to enable heated seats for free? I'm sure nothing will go wrong when most people are driving around with modchips or softmods screwing around with the internals of their cars.

I'm pretty sure that's the entire point behind the exercise (well, except some bonus mild cruelty associated with thoughtless and shitty rules that will inevitably be biased against the poor and powerless). They want to create terrible regulations so that they can point at them later and screech about the TERRIBLE OVERBEARING REGULATIONS. This gives them a lever in 3 years to push against these AI regulations in addition to any others they want to excise.

This is just the techbro version of what Regan did in the 80s. He and his administration claimed the government was and had always been incapable and incompetent, and they proved it by being incapable and incompetent. Then they pointed at their own failures as justification for burning everything down, something we are still paying the price for today.

This is actually a pretty interesting topic, if you care about the facts and details and aren't just parroting right-wing talking points.

Obama’s pledge that ‘no one will take away’ your health plan

The oversimplified short version is that health care is complicated and Obama made some campaign stump claims that really needed nuance. The ACA did have provisions for grandfathered plans but it also required them to meet rules around coverage changes and price increases or they lose that status. Some states also have laws that conflicted with grandfathered plans that prevent people from keeping them.

Frankly, most of the plans that were no longer valid under the ACA were shitty plans anyway and only provided the illusion of medical insurance. They didn't cover preventive care, had ridiculous maximum coverage limits, lacked coverage for serious illnesses, or didn't allow for expensive treatments. Basically they covered a runny noses and stubbed toes but not cancer or diabetes -- the exact kinds of things that drive people to medical bankruptcy.

Yeah, headings are one of the aspects of Markdown I dislike.

Numeric lists are also obnoxious, since you only have two choices: (1) use the real numbering in the text (1, 2, 3, ...) and deal with manually re-numbering everything if the order changes or (2) give up on the unrendered text and just use "1." for each item. Both options suck.

Oh, and single asterisks being used for italics instead of bold is just plain wrong, and this is a hill I will die on.

I guess I'm "the other guy" because I also liked Pocket (originally Read It Later), though I stopped using it a few years before it got killed. I agree that Mozilla buying it was a mistake, though I try to be charitable and hope it was partly because they wanted to improve the privacy and openness of a product that could, as you suggest, be used to harvest user information. An open web is their mission, if you believe it.

I've looked around to see how much Mozilla paid for it and can only find "an undisclosed amount". Where are you getting the $20M number?

One thing I think most people don't understand about Pocket is that it was more than just a bookmark database. When you saved a site, it really saved a snapshot of the entire page so that it was available even if changed or removed later, and pages were cached so they could be read offline. These were the unique "TiVo" features of Read It Later that made it more than bookmarks.html and also required backend support, which is why the "just make it an addon" argument doesn't really hold water. Someone has to host the service and data, and that (plus the existing userbase) is really what Mozilla was buying.

But all that said, it was a boondoggle and was probably just Mozilla trying desperately to find ways to be relevant in "mobile". They could have easily built this functionality themselves at a cost much less than whatever they did pay for Pocket. Eventually shutting the whole thing down was the shitty cherry on top.

Archive.is is usually pretty good at getting around paywalls.

Scientists Thought Parkinson’s Was in Our Genes. It Might Be in the Water

I think the term you're looking for is "Corporate Democrat", and I completely agree.

Even though the term "socialism" is still almost poison in most of US politics, I think we need to embrace "social Democrat" to make clear the difference between status quo corporate Democrats and people advocating more of the progressive ideas of the early-mid 1900s and places like the Nordic countries. With some effort I think control of "socialism" as a damning label can be wretched away from the conservative pundits and restored to have legitimate meaning in the political discussion. Bernie Sanders made decent progress on this all by himself, and probably would have succeeded if he'd been selected as the Democratic nominee.

Even if someone disagrees with it, at least disagree on rational grounds.

This makes me wonder what would happen if the secession ammendment were later repealed by the remaining states. I guess it would be tantamount to a declaration of war at that point, like Putin deciding Ukraine is suddenly part of Russia again, but if done by a constitutional convention it would circumvent the fact that only Congress can declare war.

It's become just another form of wealth transfer from the poor to the upper classes in the economy. Perks and incentives to earn "points" and cash-back by spending on credit cards are financed by those merchant fees, so the entire country is subsidizing them by paying hidden fees in the form of higher prices of goods and services. People who buy a lot with credit and can easily pay off their credit card bill every month come out ahead. People who can't or don't purchase much or who cannot always pay their bill in full get screwed. And card networks (Visa, Mastercard, etc) are leeches in the middle sucking blood from everyone.

Once you understand how the system is rigged, it's actually pretty disgusting.

I want them to bring back Slashdot subscriptions. I'll happily pay to support Slashdot, but I uncompromisingly reject advertising. Not to mention, the few times the newer ads have gotten through uBlock filters they've been atrocious.

I know the site has been on life support for a decade but subscriptions seem like a pretty easy way to make some money.