doesn’t it seem silly to remove the leaves from a lawn, then buy and put down commercial fertilizer

I think you are imagining leaves from small and widely spaced trees. We do not put down fertilizer, but we remove leaves from the part of our yard we want to include grass. The parts of the yard we let the leaves stay kills all the grass (hardier plants grow there, but they are not compatible with mowing to a walk-over height). Leaf mould easily takes two years to create, and grass needs sunlight in a half year from fall. Chopping it up helps, but at the volume created by our over-hundred-year-old oak and several other large trees, even chopped there is just too much mass per lawn area to be able to leave it and not kill the grass.

Because our society has widely available public transit and pedestrian/biking options, of course there is no overwhelming pressure to drive to be able to hold down a job and purchase food. /s

Bizarre to have a headline claiming five “types” were identified, but then only describe the behavior of a single type. What are the other four?

People with currently-known genes for conditions like Tay-Sachs (recessive gene, if a baby gets two copies they are a normal baby the first several months, then get progressive nerve damage until they die around three), or Huntington’s (relevant gene is dominant, but condition manifests in adulthood) may choose not to have kids, or use technology like PGD to select embryos without the relevant genes, or in the case of recessive genes may refuse as spouse any potential partner that also has the gene.

Those are complicated decisions, and nothing should be forced, but it’s important to be able to talk about. There shouldn’t be a taboo on talking about how parents’ decisions affect their children, even if those decisions involve genetics.

Western countries do stuff like this, too. Engineering is amazing the world 'round.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millau_Viaduct

The Millau Viaduct is a multispan cable-stayed bridge completed in 2004 across the gorge valley of the Tarn… in Southern France… As of October 2023, it is the tallest bridge in the world, having a structural height of 343 metres (1,125 ft).

Salt in the wound: The default judgements locking in wage garnishment to pay illegal parts of the debt (on top of the immorality legal ones) because the kind of people who get these loans have many responsibilities and often can’t make an arbitrary court date, and it’s not clear to them the stakes are “show up or lose all recourse” (no appeals are possible).

I’m not sure what you mean by “tax credit”. Religious congregations do not receive payments of any kind from the government. They do not pay taxes on their income (donations/tithes), so each donor’s money goes farther, and donors, if they itemize on their tax returns (pretty rare with how generous the standard deduction has become) have tax incentive to give generously. But without donations, there won’t be any building or full time officiant.

A lot depends on how far the Supreme Court lets the Trump administration go with blatant law breaking. The veneer of system unity across multiple branches of government would give them a much better chance of avoiding '28 elections entirely, but if they are faced with the choice of following at least some critical laws or abandoning the veneer of lawfulness, it really increases the chances of a “divided they fall” scenario.

It also depends on whether MAGA coalesces around a successor. Factions with different visions of government have agreed to work together with Trump as a figurehead. If they don’t path to Trump term three, the successor selection is another opportunity for internal infighting to break their grip on power.

Scary times, and horrible unnecessary suffering for huge numbers of people on the way, but I still see hope to come out of it without the country disbanding.

What would you call working towards rural areas, seniors, and veterans having equal access to digital services as most city dwellers?

Churches and other religious congregations in the US are NOT funded with taxpayers money (at least, pending Supreme Court decision on the Kansas taxpayer supported Catholic school), and pastor salary and building upkeep are very real costs. If a family values the community having employee(s) and a building, and doesn’t want the hassle of other payment options, automatic debits are a good option to have available.

Things that actually are funded with taxpayer money, yes, they should be free. The Project 2025 plan to kill NOAA so weather forecasts will only be available to subscribers of private companies is incredibly destructive to such a huge number of people, and yes, this broadband decision is in that same awful category.

Vacant homes in general, yes. Similar numbers of people have second homes for vacations as are homeless in the US. There are also quite a few abandoned homes in dying rural communities with no jobs.

Property management companies are managing rentals, not squatting. Some investors hold properties empty, but they aren’t in large enough numbers to be THE problem.

Sure you can: https://fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html

The Koch foundation made a long-term investment in making it seem like grass roots movements were pushing society to the right. They kept it up for over twenty years, and that persistence has paid off for them in ways that will likely take a similar amount of time to reverse https://time.com/secret-origins-of-the-tea-party/

The difference in the size of left- and right-leaning media isn’t in news or comedy sites. The right-leaning news and comedy media is only modestly more watched than left-leaning media. Where the right really dominates is sliding politics into every single popular subject - topics like sports, games, wellness, and religion have tons of audience for right-leaning shows and basically no audience for left-leaning ones. https://www.mediamatters.org/google/right-dominates-online-media-ecosystem-seeping-sports-comedy-and-other-supposedly

I agree with everything you wrote up to the point of claiming all the US housing problems are inherent to capitalism. Japan is a capitalist country, but Japanese houses are for living in, and Japanese houses depreciate like cars - which is way more sustainable than the US train wreck. There are other ways of housing even without leaving capitalism.

Neighborhoods fighting densification tooth and nail make housing scarce, and people who want housing having to outbid each other for (proportional to population) fewer and fewer houses makes them unreasonably, unsustainably expensive. Which attracts investors and adds icing to the problem, but at root it’s the homeowners who got theirs and then pulled up the ladder after driving the scarcity of housing in the locations where people want to live.

If people demanded governments really invest in densification and new houses where the jobs are - including sharply limiting the ability of noisy impacted neighbors to drag the process out - the availability of houses would force prices down, which would cause the predatory investors to lose interest and add icing in the other direction, to affordability.

When I was four (in 1986), my parents moved for my Dad’s job (he was transferred), and ended up accepting the company offer to buy their house at not a great price because they couldn’t find a market buyer. At least from my experience, buying and selling forty years ago was just as fraught as now.

Do you have examples of specific practices that have become common and make house sales more difficult?

The people who care about executions being humane are generally opposed to the death penalty. People who support the death penalty generally want suffering to be inherent to the process. Only limit is whatever the Supreme Court deems “unusual”. Cruelty is allowed by the Constitution as long as it is “usual” cruelty.

In states that have death penalty (and federal when we have a president who supports death penalty), it’s the pro-death penalty groups - the ones that want it to cause suffering - that get to pick the process.

Sem was confused when it appeared that the named AI character was continuing to manifest in project files where he had instructed ChatGPT to ignore memories and prior conversations. Eventually, he says, he deleted all his user memories and chat history, then opened a new chat. “All I said was, ‘Hello?’ And the patterns, the mannerisms show up in the response,” he says. The AI readily identified itself by the same feminine mythological name.

Yikes. I had heard of issues with smaller AI companies that did not guard rail their products, but this is a supposedly flagship AI developer with extensive safety testing, and they haven’t even acknowledged the size of this issue.

My local grocery store has half the self checkouts they installed permanently disabled, and plans to remove them. They never got rid of human cashiers, but they misjudged the optimal ratio of selfcheck/cashier way too heavily on the self check side.

What figure is this? Sikh maybe?