It’s complicated, and people can have different philosophical approaches to the goals and purposes of criminal punishment. But my argument is that people should be internally consistent in their views. If people believe that the consequences of a crime should be considered when sentencing for that crime, then emotional consequences should count, too, because emotional harm is real harm.

I didn’t think I’d ever agree with Hawley

Hawley represents the future of the Republican party, in my opinion: populist conservatism that is willing to bend on party orthodoxy on how taxes and regulations shouldn’t be captured by big corporate interests, but is just completely abhorrent on cultural issues (and whether the government should be involved in those issues).

In an earlier political era, there would be opportunities for cross-party dialogue on the issues that the parties have deemed non-partisan (where divisions don’t fall within party lines and party leadership doesn’t care that their members hold a diversity of views on), but the number of issues that fall within that category have plummeted in the last 20 years.

Why do we punish based on consequences caused by the crime, then?

A drunk driver is punished much more severely if they hit and kill a person, than if they hit and hurt a person, than if they hit a tree, than if they don’t crash at all.

As long as we’re punishing people based on the actual impact of their crimes, then emotional impact should count.

why evidence rules exist in court.

Sure, but not for victim impact statements. Hearsay, speculation, etc. have always been fair game for victim impact statements, and victim statements aren’t even under oath. Plus the other side isn’t allowed to cross examine them. It’s not evidence, and it’s not “testimony” in a formal sense (because it’s not under oath or under penalty of perjury).

I’d argue that emotions are a legitimate factor to consider in sentencing.

It’s a bit more obvious with living victims of non-homicide crimes, but the emotional impact of crime is itself a cost borne by society. A victim of a romance scam having trouble trusting again, a victim of a shooting having PTSD with episodes triggered by loud noises, a victim of sexual assault dealing with anxiety or depression after, etc.

It’s a legitimate position to say that punishment shouldn’t be a goal of criminal sentencing (focusing instead of deterrence and rehabilitation), or that punishment should be some sort of goal based entirely on the criminal’s state of mind and not the factors out of their own control, but I’d disagree. The emotional aftermath of a crime is part of the crime, and although there’s some unpredictable variance involved, we already tolerate that in other contexts, like punishing a successful murder more than an attempted murder.

Along the same lines, from the same writer/creator, Armando Iannucci, there’s The Death of Stalin. The absurdity of how the inner circle navigated the politics around Stalin, including after his death, is hilarious but also a good look at how these power dynamics work in an authoritarian, despotic government.

Or also from Iannucci, Avenue 5, which basically is set in the future where all of this political nonsense continues, and is in the background of a comedy about a space cruise ship.

Everyone has their own reasons. If you disagree with their management, then you should celebrate other people choosing to leave, even if for different reasons than your own.

Republicans killed a COVID era $3600/year child tax credit, letting it lapse in 2023 back to the 2018 amount of $2000, which was increased from $1000 as a replacement for the $5050 tax exemption parents used to be able to get before the 2017 Trump tax reforms. For a married couple whose combined income was between $75k and $150k, that $5k tax exemption was worth about $1250, so it was a bad trade for them (or anyone making more).

If Republicans were serious about financially incentivizing having children, they’ll need to support the kids throughout the entire life cycle: healthcare for pregnant women, including through labor and deliver and post partum, support for families with young children (including parental leave mandates), subsidized daycare, good schools, parks and libraries, and economic stability (including in housing costs).

But they’re not, so here we are.

I don’t brush anything under the rug. I actively shared the Tweet that started this hole BS.

I get that. But my point is that you can’t claim that Proton’s CEO is acting independently of the Proton corporation itself when Proton’s official corporate accounts chimed in on his side on this.

Both of the American parties are a shitshow

Not on antitrust. The Biden administration was one of the strongest advocates for consumers on antitrust issues we’ve seen since Robert Bork convinced Reagan to tear it all down.

Anyone who says otherwise is trying to lie to the American public about it, and should be called out for actively advocating for false MAGA propaganda. Andy Yen did it, and Proton agreed with it.

Proton didn’t decide anything, Andy Yen posted ONE tweet and then doubled down on it with the Proton Reddit account which was deleted.

How are you going to say that Proton didn’t say anything and then acknowledge that the official Proton social media accounts were making statements like this:

Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses

That’s the context you keep brushing under the rug. The official Proton position is not just that Trump made a good choice, on this one thing, it’s that you should vote for Republicans over Democrats.

Yes, it was official corporate Proton position to delete that comment. But it was the official Proton position to make that comment in the first place.

OpenAI’s commercial entity

They should never be allowed to call this a “non-profit”

They never did. The nonprofit parent owned shares in a for-profit subsidiary, which was structured in a way that investors in the for-profit subsidiary could never control the company (the nonprofit would own a controlling share) and had their gains capped at 100x.

Andy Yen went out of his way to criticize Democrats on antitrust, which is how you can tell it’s actually a pro-Trump position unsupported by the actual facts.

I like Gail Slater. She’s possibly the best choice among people who Trump likes, to head DOJ’s Antitrust Division. She has bipartisan bona fides.

But to say that Democrats, after 4 years of Lina Khan leading the FTC, and a bunch of the reforms that the Biden FTC and DOJ made to merger standards and their willingness to sue/seek big penalties for antitrust violations, aren’t more serious than Republicans about reining in big tech consolidation and about stronger enforcement of antitrust principles, completely flips around the history and is a bad faith argument.

Andy Yen could’ve praised Gail Slater, and that would be that. Instead, he took a post by Trump that didn’t even mention Democrats, and made it about how the Democrats are bad on taking on big tech. That’s the problem everyone had with it.

That’s not an outrageous medical bill. It’s an outrageous bill for clawing back government benefits for those whose full time care for family members prevents them from working.

school gun team

This fucking country, man.

The marijuana smile cross skull is actually symbolism for 👊🇺🇸🔥which means “prayers up for our troops” and “we are currently clean on OPSEC.”

Beef is a bad example. It used to be cheaper than chicken and similar to pork, but the real cost of that land use policy that would allow such grazing in the west, and then the subsidies that make factory farm feedlots possible, wasn’t properly borne by the ranchers themselves. Today’s cost of beef is a better reflection of the true cost of raising that meat, that inefficiently.

If you do the same analysis with chicken or pork, you’ll find that we can and do afford to eat a lot more of those particular meats than we used to.

I fully expect beef to go like tuna, and slowly become a luxury item only for the rich within my lifetime. That is more of a trend with beef itself than broader trends in inflation generally.

Housing, education, and healthcare costs have grown much faster than inflation.

Food, energy, cars, appliances and home goods, furniture, apparel, and other durable goods have generally grown slower than inflation, at least between 1980 and 2020. Much of the last 5 years of inflation, though have eaten away at some of those gains of the previous 30-40 years in those categories.

Electronics, technology, entertainment, most services have generally gone down in price.

So the basket of what we buy is different, with different ratios. A time traveler from the 80’s would be shocked to learn just how many ready made rotisserie chickens or pizzas you could buy for the wage equivalent to one hour of warehouse work, or how many big screen TVs you’d need to pay the average monthly rent for a 1-bedroom apartment. Plane tickets between New York and LA are basically cheaper than one month’s rent in the cheapest possible home you can find in either of those cities. The ratios are all different than before.

But with housing costs high, it kind of puts all of the effort into that single basket. When it used to be that 1/3 your income could comfortably go into housing costs, now in many cities it’s closer to half, even for people up the income scale, because the rest of life beyond having a roof over your head is just cheaper in comparison to that very basic need for shelter.

GDI is supposed to be basically equivalent to GDP, so it’s not a better number to use. Sometimes the numbers diverge (see here for a discussion of this issue in 2022) because they use different methodologies to determine the number, but that’s usually a sign that some kind of measurement is off, not that there’s some kind of actual divergence in the true numbers of what they purport to measure.

And we moved away from Gross National Product/Income to Gross Domestic Product/Income because it was a better look at the domestic economy. We care more about the production/income within national borders rather than the production/income of a particular nation’s residents.

I want one of these so bad

When you say “these,” you’re talking about a revolution, right?

Seriously. It’s like looking at a map of a battle and assuming the arrows are actual terrain features.