On the corollary, someone’s feelings can be a very important factor in addressing a situation. If you are to operate purely on logic, that logic needs to take into account the psychology and feelings of others when making a decision to maximize your intended effect. Doing something that “needs to be done” but pissing everyone else off in the process might lead them to undo your work purely out of spite, even if you were correct in your initial assessment.

Once a business enterprise reaches a size where it can afford to influence government policy to benefit said enterprise at the expense of its competitors, it’s in that business’ best interest to do so. A business which plays by the rules and behaves ethically will be usurped by one that’s willing to bend the rules into its favor.

Once things reach this point, the line between government and corporation blurs, and you get a state that will prioritize private gains of its corporate lobbies and bribes instead of the gains of its people and the health of society as a whole.

Therefore, ruthless and totalitarian antitrust of private enterprise must be incorporated to ensure a fair market with competition and choice can flourish, should you wish to go that route. Your business makes up so much as 1% of your industry’s domestic output? That business needs to be broken up into like 4 pieces.

Just don’t leave fingerprints on the bottle :)

I wasn’t referring to the article, I was referring to what Senate Democrats can do in the current situation. At bare minimum, that can do what they were elected for as the opposition party. We don’t get even a noteworthy fraction of that, let alone extralegal measures.

We can take a look at what Republicans do without a majority: stall for time, attack the moral character of the opposition, find loopholes in the procedural process that you’re technically not disallowed to do but annoy the shit out of everyone, and generally be as obstructionist as possible.

Replace the hot sauce with 2lbs of piping hot, thick, white American Patriot mayonnaise

This is one of the reasons my main email is a (unique) password I still memorize, so if my password manager fails catastrophically I can still get in.

With the way things are going, the next generation will have all three!

Tay? Yeah it did but that was mostly due to a 4chan ‘model poisoning’ campaign at the time.

Nobody is stopping you from giving free drinks to shirtless men

Is there a range limit on magenta? Do they have to be in my presence, just able to hear my voice, actively be paying attention? These are important factors!

In the US, there are still a lot from McCarthy-era sentiment and “Communist” is a pejorative within the general population. For instance, The Communist Control Act of 1954 is still on the books. Though it has issues as a law for being really vague, and hasn’t been used seriously against leftist organizing on account of that, it nonetheless remains and has never been outright challenged to the Supreme Court of the United States. Either way, it had a chilling effect, and was pretty successful as part of the US’s broader campaign to demonize communism and communist organizing.

Because of the way “Communism” and “Marxism” are used within US press and mainstream politics (especially by the Republican party), the average voter is conditioned to view them as bad words accordingly. The Democratic party, trying to court “moderate” voters within the political landscape here, all but refuses to touch those words with a 10-foot pole. It’s not part of their brand (and not part of their policy either, not by any stretch of the imagination).

Progressivism in my view is an umbrella term, but still pretty linked with liberalism as a movement in the sense that it’s mostly reformist, and acts a subgroup within the Democratic party. Most “Progressive” candidates for US political office are SocDems at most.

You can call it newspeak, but political movements arise under new/different names as the situation dictates, and often refer to different things. I’d argue that the point of newspeak within 1984 was actually to limit the evolution of language and restrict the development of new words/ideas, but I do get where you’re coming from on account of “progressive” being considered more politically correct.

I know this might not be the most convenient solution, but learning to resolder mouse switches means you can just replace the faulty components (and maybe the sliders too) and just keep using the hardware that works for you. As long as you don’t have a mouse with that awful rubber that de-vulcanizes after about 3 years, and don’t mind the visual wear from your hand on the shell over time, you’ll easily 10x the life of most products manufactured with planned obsolescence. Logitech almost always cheaps out on the switches for their gaming mice, unfortunately. After replacing the switches on my g pro wireless when they started double-clicking after 2 years (almost exactly), it’s been smooth sailing ever since.

ifixit almost always has comprehensive teardown and rebuild instructions for popular peripherals. Bonus points is that whenever you take apart something to do a repair, you can clean out all the hard to reach places that collect random dust and debris. Can be kind of gross but is also pretty satisfying. Additional bonus points for being more sustainable with your consumer habits and minimizing e-waste in landfills!

If you’ve got a mechanical keyboard, you can do the same but it’s generally a lot more tedious since most have the switches soldered on, and LEDs double the amount of joints you have to deal with. I recently did just the WASD and a few other high-traffic keys on my board after one one of them failed, and it was a several hour process

Oh yeah, it’s pretty terrible. Sometimes you can order meat from a deli/butcher counter and get it wrapped in wax paper but there’s the extra time spent to order it that way, and there’s a possibility that the wax is actually just plastic lining anyways.

Regardless, if you can find an alternative that works for you, any reduction in plastic is a good thing. It all exists on a sliding scale.

A lot of times, matters such as these should be seen as more risk management/reduction than risk elimination. A plastic lid has much less contact area than a whole plastic bottle, and single use bottles tend to shed more microplastics than reusable ones.

Just like the shopping cart theory itself, this is mostly just a thought experiment at this point in time.

The point of a protestation is to make it hard for others to ignore, and make it clear what the end condition is. I don’t plan on just starting to do this as an individual because it would have no impact; I still make sure my own carts get returned personally.

The point stands that our goodwill is frequently exploited for profit, often under the pretense that it’s just basic human decency.

I gotta be honest, my bf or I still make sure the cart goes back every time we shop, but I increasingly question whether I should bother. These grocery stores keep raising their prices well above inflation so they can pocket the rest and brag to shareholders about it, at the cost of people who actually shop there.

It’s tempting to say that if they’re going to play that game, they get no courtesy from me as a customer and can hire more cart collectors. It’s miniscule on an individual level, but it is unpaid labor.

There’s the argument that unreturned carts mostly inconvenience other customers, but honestly if the store is exploiting both customers’ goodwill and wallets, I think it’s fine to make the experience at that store just that little bit worse; maybe that last little push will encourage people to shop elsewhere (where it’s an option of course, i.e. not a small town).

I don’t feel this urge at stores like H Mart even though they have so many fewer return stalls and it’s often a longer walk to do so.

I guess this is kind of an antithesis to Shopping Cart Theory I’ve been developing in my head over the past little while. It’s conditional on the store itself being overtly greedy, but I think there might be something to it.

Aren’t there still massive issues with the Colorado River running dry? Hopefully they’re not too dependant on that water source for their chips

Key word is access. Not everything on your phone is available to the vehicle, but if, for instance, you allow your car to access your contacts, it downloads all of them with all the metadata which the company can then sell. Or internally run through algorithms to profile you and everyone who uses your vehicle. If you use Android Auto or CarPlay, or just connect to the entertainment systems, they’ll skim whatever metadata they can and phone it home. Even worse if you use a car’s official app, it will use your own phone as the transmission point.

No, it doesn’t immediately transmit an entire backup of your phone over a personal Bluetooth connection, but I was very precise in how I worded my sentence.

The cars themselves have connectivity that can be transmitted over cellular networks (same as/similar to whatever OnStar uses). Plus if you ever connect your phone via Bluetooth to listen to music or plug it directly into the car with a cable that can transfer data, standard protocol on a lot of cars is to just download everything off the phone that it can access.