Where would we deport them to?

That will just mean media is no longer produced in New York.

I was paid $35 per donation, and was allowed to donate up to three times per week.

So, $105 / week or $5,460 / year.

That would be about $10k / year in 2025 dollars.

The clinic was a ten minute walk from my workplace, so I'd walk there and back on my MWF lunch breaks.

Was the test available at the time? Did other sperm banks check for this mutation?

Way more than that. It was 200 babies, not 200 attempts. The success rate of artificial insemination is about 20%, so that's 1000 squirts.

I was a sperm donor back in the 1990s.

The donors aren't "random".

They are screened for general health, genetic defects, and academic achievement. I had to show my college transcripts, provide a blood sample, and have a medical examination.

TFA describes a screwup that only happened because a test for the condition wasn't available. But many other tests were done, so the odds were still better than an old-fashioned insemination.

Many of the recipients are women in nuclear families, whose husbands have fertility problems.

Seems to depend on location. In my home city in Europe, it was 3-4 times a day, even shortly after the war.

Numbers mean nothing once enough inflation is involved. But back in those same days, a mailman could support a family on his salary. Not a luxury life for sure, but enough to rent a place and put food on the table. Women working was still a somewhat new thing.

Yes, this stuff is moving digital as well. At different speeds in different countries.

Every single use of the word "capitalism" means the poster spews propaganda rather than logic. The word has become useless.

There are two main definitions:
  * the most used one (by several orders of magnitude!): "any economic system other than communism, including even those that don't use money at all (like early kibbutzim), except for neanderthals ("primitive communism")". This meaning has been used in communist countries to refer to the outside world; we had entire universities devoted to such concepts.
  * free market economy. This one would exclude eg. current USA as they have devolved into corporatism. Stuff like bailouts is an anathema to free market. Free market has its flaws (see eg. late 19th century USA) but makes most of current USA ills impossible: high insulin prices? New makers will pop up in months! As long as the govt deals with monopolies and fraud, it's a sane system.

But here... the pokemon card market is currently saner than stocks.

Come on, just 2nd or 3rd? You can do better, next year we'll be #1 again!

right, they modded me troll decade and a half ago here when I said the nations will fall apart, governments will fail, libertarian ideas will take hold. They are modding me troll today, yet it is exactly what is happening. It is possible that people are actually afraid that my comments will cause ot to jappen somehow should more people read them. My comments are not the reason anything happens, that is magical thinking by the fearful moderators. My comments are a prediction and the reality is moving in the direction of my prediction.

And we all know that won't happen.

The thing with fines is that all the people ACTIVELY involved have interests that don't align with the public and taxpayers.

The shops are ok with fines if they happen rarely and in manageable amounts. Then they can just factor them in as costs of doing business.

The inspectors need occasional fines to justify their existance. So, counter-intuitively, they have absolutely no interest in the businesses they inspect to actually be compliant. Just compliant enough that the non-compliance doesn't make more headlines than their fines. So they'll come now and then, but not so often that the business actually feels pressured into changing things.

You misunderstand wealth.

Most wealth of the filthy rich is in assets. Musk OWNS stuff that is worth X billions. That doesn't mean he as 140 mio. in cash sitting in his bottom drawer.

Moreoever, much of the spending the filthy rich do is done on debt. They put up their wealth as a collateral and buy stuff with other people's (the banks) money. There's some tax trickery with this the exact details I forgot about.

So yes, coughing up $140 mio. is at least a nuissance, even if on paper it's a rounding error.

The actual story that got buried is that the filthy rich are now in full-blown "I rule the world" mode when their reaction to a fee is not "sorry, we fucked up, won't happen again", but "let's get rid of those rules, they bother me".

These automated tags are about $15-$20 each. If you buy a million you can probably get them for $10, but still. Oh yes, and their stated lifetime is 5 years. And you STILL need an employee to walk around updating because it's done via NFC.

In many cases, there are modern tech solutions, but pen-and-paper is still cheaper, easier and more reliable.

It's not necessarily malice. What I mean is: They are certainly malicious, but maybe not in this.

Now THAT is a rare example of an actually smart law.

No government funds needed to enforce the policy, while the stores have an incentive to post the right prices. Why the max $5 though?

My grandparents and parents sometimes talked about how mail used to work.

Delivery within the same city within a few hours. The mailman would come to your house several times during the same day. Every day.

Telephones changed that. With phones, if something is urgent but not so urgent you go yourself, you can make a call. So the demand for same-day-delivery disappeared. Visiting each house only once means a mailman can cover more houses in the same amount of hours.

Privatizing mail delivery is an astonishingly stupid idea, given that what is left in physical mail delivery is often important, official documents.