At that level of wealth, it is easy to insulate oneself from anyone who would actually give helpful advice, and even easier to find oneself in the company of yes men suckups.

I just had a read through the bill and, as written, it would prohibit elementary school children from playing pretend as animals on the school playground during recess. Obviously, if a student were using that as pretext to, like, bite someone, you’d want a supervisor stepping in, but to straight-up ban harmless elements of play-pretend like this is frankly asinine.

Oh, the litter boxes are real…

It’s just that their purpose is to be used during a school shooting lockdown.

On average, disposable plastic bottles shed microplastics much more prolifically than plastic water piping.

If the VIN matches and the vehicle fits the description when it was added to the plan it’s not a big deal… Unless you’re telling me I can’t remove the free advertisement badges from the back of my car and have it still be insured.

Your eugenic sentiments aside, if you want people to have fewer babies, you don’t just tell them to stop fucking; you teach them how to use contraception and make it as accessible as possible.

.loc and .iloc queries are a fun syntax adventure every time

Sometimes things only appear impossible when we don’t think in more complex terms

Just because it isn’t real doesn’t mean we can’t imagine a world where it can work

I’m not Canadian but I greatly support these measures, so if I may I’d like to weigh in.

I think that manufacturing country and ultimate ownership are probably the biggest key factors, as they dictate most where the lion’s share of money flows in a consumer economy. For example, if there’s American investment/VC/private equity for a company but it’s like 10%, it’s not great but definitely not as bad as a completely international company with locations in Canada.

If you want to get super fine-gained, you can even dig into whether a company outsources a significant portion of its auxiliary labor (e.g. digital infrastructure, customer support, shipping) to international firms, as that can make a difference as well.

Component sourcing is also important but there are a lot of cases where domestic isn’t as feasible due to global supply chain reasons. That’s one that’s going to be much more industry specific. Like, if you’re buying furniture and the wood comes from abroad when there’s a robust domestic timber industry in your country, I think that should be a red flag.

Coming to a final determination on any company is going to be one of those things that exists on a sliding scale and probably would benefit from some sort of scoring effort. Either way, my verdict is that any measure that boycotts the US is worth the effort if it’s done by enough people. Even a few loonies per person spent on local vs international over a broad enough group will make a noticeable impact.

bump up the id of old posts every time there’s a new post

That’s probably the worst thing I’ve read today, it’s such a bad thing to do on so many levels wtf

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.

Maybe lol

I could be wrong, but they likely asked because vinyl/PVC is generally toxic to the environment so it was probably a means of asking whether your neighbor replaced the foliage in their yard with a fixture that poisons the ground. I wouldn’t be surprised if the strips in the chain link were vinyl, as that’s a pretty common outdoor filler material.

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.

The point of the article seems to be for raising awareness I guess? I dunno I’m not from Brazil but I found it to be an interesting article.

imo it’s perfectly fine to push for local action if federal-level bans have not been as effective as they need to be. While just writing the same piece of paper saying “you can’t do this” by the city won’t do anything, one can draw attention to the issue within the context of resource and enforcement allocation. I won’t speak to the bigger picture as I have no idea what that looks like for Brazilian locales.

Edit: though I guess you’re right that the article doesn’t really address these facets of the issue. I think it doesn’t properly go into ways the problem can be further addressed, including more proactive ones vs just ramping up enforcement.

I’m not the person you replied to, but pretty sure the question was whether the neighbor in your story replaced their hedge with a vinyl fence specifically.

Banning something does not always fix the problem of its use. Per the article, there’s a sizable sporting contingent with competitions being common. If there’s money and fun in it, it doesn’t go away just because the government says you can’t do it anymore.

The article also mentions lots of local bans, and that the practice remains popular regardless. Motorcyclists still get cut by the lines, sometimes fatally, but there isn’t any formal data collection to categorize the lines as a cause of death.

It’s the same “I’ll respect you if you respect me” dynamic in an imbalanced-power system.

I’m screwing you over if I personally feel bad for what I’m doing to you (never happens, therefore I’m always fair). You’re screwing me over if you inconvenience me.

It’s just premusk twitter at this point.

I mean, given that Jack Dorsey founded it as basically the “not Twitter Twitter” after musk bought the main one, I don’t think it’s surprising to see it face basically the same moderation issues in the name of being “even-handed”