Why is "vote with your wallet and let the market decide" the Republican screed when people complain about monopolies, price gouging, insatiable greed, the rise of oligarchies, and the overwhelming power disparity between corporations and normal people, except when it's something conservatives like? Then suddenly voting with your wallet suddenly becomes "performative woke partisan politics".

It's almost like both of those are bullshit excuses to avoid dealing with real problems.

Strange New Worlds is a star in the otherwise bleak landscape of nu-Trek.

Jesus. Hard to believe Pixel started out as a cheaper Android option.

I was thinking about trading in my Pixel 7 for an upgrade this November during the typical sale they have, but not at that price. Maybe it's time to go back to Motorola. Anyone have a good experience with recent Moto models?

New air traffic controller hires would all be in the 21-31 years old bracket. The PS3 and Xbox 360 released 20 years ago. These are people who grew up with video games being around them.

I don't understand why they're promoting that they're "hiring gamers" (it's what the gamers would call a "weird flex") but it's not that surprising that new hires would be "gamers" if you define "gamers" loosely enough to include anyone who plays video games somewhat routinely.

And, to be quite frank, the skills that make a good gamer (good hand-eye coordination, ability to keep calm under pressure, routine use of voice chat) likely translate to someone who would be good as an air traffic controller.

Hiring gamers to increase the total number of air traffic controllers certainly seems better than the previous administration's solution, which was nothing.

But in any case, it's not really clear to me that "hiring gamers" is that meaningfully different from "hiring people who are 21-31 and grew up with video games all around them."

I'll believe they're serious when they start living the lifestyles they claim we'll need to curve the trend. Tons of posts about Trump but none about the supposed environmentalists who are still living the same lifestyles of the average Trump supporter. Where is the low-hanging fruit? Why aren't these people changing their ways? Why ask those who oppose your agenda when your own "believers" can't be bothered?

If these people were serious we'd see EV adaption in the double digits and be able to walk into any restaurant and get a vegetarian meal without having to double guess what may or may not be used to create it. We're not seeing that. We're not going to see that because environmentalism is only an issue when it comes down to politics and not lifestyle in the minds of these people. They want to weaponize environmentalisms as a political tool, not as a practical guide for end-user consumption.

But, you know, fOlLoW tHe ScIeNcE!!!

Scots with a single t! Do not make that mistake if you’re ever there, or someone’s gonna rip your bawbag off

You live in the UK, right? You know that Frank Dobson’s best achievement as health secretary was bringing in the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE), which makes decisions about what treatments to fund? Because no health system has infinite money, and so the alternative to making difficult, but calm, considered, evidence-based decisions for the whole country, is making those decisions whimsically and locally creating postcode lotteries and funding care for the patients who excite the most sympathy (eg cancer) over care for who who don’t (eg Alzheimers).

I have a dear friend, a senior clinician, who has served on a NICE committee. Genuinely some of the most amazing work he does. The decisions are really hard but they’re also inescapable.

Worth remembering that many European countries have tax-funded state provision of healthcare, often with national components. It’s not all social insurance like France, Germany and the Netherlands.

Spain, Portugal, Italy, DK, NO, SE, FIall Beveridgean. The UK has the highest degree of centralised organisation, though.

1. Separate shots haven’t been made at scale since 2009, so there’s no chance of doing this for the relevant populations
2. It creates a significant window of months in which babies are unprotected for two of the diseases, so it’s materially more dangerous
3. It means all these kids have more injections and discomfort
4. It’s pandering to idiocy. It’s really simple to explain that kids are exposed to far more pathogens on the daily than they’ll get in the three shots, and that their immune systems can cope. We need to do that, not admit defeat by dumbasses

At least in the UK, when you're operating a boat with a VHF radio, it's a requirement to leave it on channel 16 when not actively using it. Is that true in the US?

Gosh, what a thing to live in a country with unstoppable child rape gangs. How *is* President Trump, by the way? Bitten any 13 year old nipples lately? Silly question, of course he has!

It is always, *always*, ALWAYS projection with you lot. Every fucking time.

I understand the *theory*, in the same way I understand the *theory* of the second amendment. But just like I cannot look on with anything other than horror and bafflement at the *actual consequences* of the theory being implemented for 2A, so I cannot look on with anything other than dismay and bafflement at the *actual consequences* of having small settlements run their own police departments.

And obviously, while the citizenry of a place can, in general and in principle, vote the bastards out, or up sticks and leave themselves, many types of consequence of the (ab)use of coercive state power are permanent and terrible. From disfigurements to deaths to many other sorts. So when a town kicks out its councillors or fires its police chief, it may simply be too late for an individual innocent citizen lying dead in the gutter thanks to an aggressive and badly trained cop who took against them.

And that's just misreading errors! When you compound it with the mess that is the NCIC, plus other errors in the system, it's fairly miraculous that it ever actually manages a true positive.

Same in the UK. Designed for legibility above all else, and deliberately so

That difference is just bonkers to look at. But unsurprising: the UK designed the registration plate as a standardized machine-readable piece of road infrastructure. US states treat it as a state-issued identity/emblem/mini-billboard which also happens to carry a registration number. States literally sell specialty plates for money. Sometimes a state will go for a sane design, but mostly they just arms race their way to the gaudiest shite possible, legibility be damned. And then have creepy shitty AI ALPR readers with wild false positive rates trying to pick up the pieces.

Sometimes the UK's centralisation is a really obvious advantage, and this is one of those cases.

Why on earth would a small town (30k population!) be the right scale of organisation to run all this stuff? The UK is massively over-centralised, but it's still better as an approach than this. The smallest unit of government here is a town council, which goes up to 40k people, and all it has powers to do is manage things like parks, playgrounds, community halls, cemeteries, allotments, and bus shelters. Next level up is the district / borough / unitary council, up to 400k, and their powers are still limited to housing, parking, social services and a few other things, notably not including emergency dispatch or policing!

The tension between local and central is eternal, but I'll never understand the attraction of pushing coercive state power down to hyper-local level: it's just a recipe for abuse and fiefdoms, every bit as much as a fully national force accountable only to a national minister.