High interest rates are designed to cause layoffs. That's how they fight inflation

That's not a given. And we haven't seen that in the current labor market. High interest rates suppress business growth by raising the cost of borrowing. This doesn't necessitate layoffs, although it can cause layoffs. In the current economy, we've generally seen reductions in job openings and reduced expansion plans. However, we've seen subdued growth nonetheless, coupled with maximum employment.

Hollywood has been woke and pandering throughout all of its existence. The problem has nothing to do with woke, it's got to do with bad writing and bad acting

Huh? This is a matter of scale and focused intent. For instance, if you don't see a difference in levels of pandering between say the 1989 Little Mermaid and the modern day one, you're being deliberately blind. They literally changed lyrics in the most popular classic songs purely on pandering grounds. The writing is bad as well, but that's because the focus is on the pandering rather than just telling a good story. You have writers going "so how do we shoehorn in a good message about the environment/racism/patriarchy/etc here" instead of going "what would make a good character arc and a satisfying story?"

As a second example, Doctor Who was always woke to some degree, but it's utterly jumped the shark at this point. Again, compare current day Doctor Who to ~20 years ago. If you think the level of wokeness is the same, you're deluding yourself. You have characters literally soapboxing/diatribing to the audience Atlas Shrugged style. That kind of thing never happened back in the day. Writers knew of "show, don't tell". Modern writers are "preach the message through all means possible."

There are only three resolutions to a constitutional crisis. The first is President becomes king. The second is Congress agrees with the president and changes the law. And the third is Congress impeaches the president. The Democrats aren't going to accept #1.

I wish I knew this for sure. I have seen many inklings that would lead me to believe they'd be perfectly content if it was their king. They've already pitched packing the courts, eliminating the filibuster, and rewriting the laws to favor their party (ala electoral college elimination). They've shown a sustained desire to work around Congress rather than with it.

If a popular Democratic president started doing illegal things broadly popular with their base, I'm not certain Congress would hold them to task with an impeachment. Say a president declared a national emergency, saying we can't have another fascist regime take over, so they start taking away everyone's guns, and they ban "misinformation and fake news" (meaning anything that doesn't support their dogma). Then they declare a climate emergency and start going wholesale destruction on the fossil fuel sector -- say they ban coal and natural gas nationwide. Can you legitimately tell me for certain that Democrats would rise up and impeach their leader? Again, I'd like to hope. But in today's day and age, I can't say that for certain.

But up until then Twitter was a great place for independent journalism without corporate propaganda

Hardly. It was just a different brand of censorship. Shadow banning was rampant, particularly on politically sensitive issues like COVID or the Biden laptop. The whole reason Musk bought it in the first place was in response to the fact it was a carefully groomed left-leaning stovepipe. In fact, I remember the common quip from the left when the right would complain about Twitter censorship was "then why don't you start your own social media platform? we don't have to give you a megaphone"

They will get impeached.

That's not a guarantee. The only historical precedent we have (Clinton) only had 5 Democrats vote in favor of impeachment even when he very clearly perjured himself. Now to be fair, that's a far lesser offense than what we're seeing now. But in today's hyperpartisan times, I legit don't know what Democrats would do if put in a similar situation. They sure as hell defended Hillary to death with the email server, even though that was roughly on par with Signalgate.

Human mucking about with nature has a bad track record, and many creatures depend on mosquitoes for food. It would be a terrible idea to mess with ecosystems on that level.

Disagree: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcr.usembassy.gov%2Fsecti...

"Life finds a way" was a warning against meddling with poorly understood biological processes... exactly what you would be doing by completely eradicating mosquitos.

We've been eradicating the screwworm for decades, with generally only positive results. Whole ecosystems aren't collapsing

Humans are also generalist eaters. That doesn't mean there won't be severe problems if you suddenly eliminated, say, all rice crops.

Would there though? Diets would adjust. Different crops would replace the missing rice. The total food supply would stay the same, just with different plants supplanting the missing ones on the freed up farm land

>>It will be filled with another part of the food chain.

when? like overnight? will bat species that live off of mosquitos immediately shift to some other food source or will their populations collapse before they have the time to make that kind of change in the behaviour of the whole-ass species

I'd imagine reasonably quick. Insects have lifespans in the ranges of weeks-months. And the biggest limiters on species growth are competition for resources and space. If one insect species is removed, another one will very likely fill the gap as the competition is reduced and resources freed.

that's not "wiping off" one leg of their nuclear triad by any stretch. plus they still have 2 more.

This attack wasn't about stymying their nucelar capability. It was to reduce their ability to yeet cruise missiles endlessly from 2000+ miles deep in their territory. And in that, it was immensely successful.

I mean we can say that but Jimmy Carter was talking about climate change back in the 1970's and the recommendations were the same as today: start planning on cutting back on burning fossil fuels, start to embrace renewable energy sources. In a perfect metaphor Carter put solar panels on the White House as a symbolic gesture only to have Reagan come in and tear them down. We haven't gotten anything done precisely because

What the hell do you mean "we haven't gotten anything done"? We literally did those things. The last US coal plant came online in 2013. US emissions are below 1987 levels. Renewable portion of power generation has gone from ~8% in 2001 to 23+% today. EV use continues to ramp.

You see...it's when people like you say stupid things like that that causes people to roll their eyes and tell you to fuck off. Because it's endless goalpost moving, "not good enough"-ism, perfect is the enemy of the good, and just flat out denial of real progress.

The NFL is the perfect example of why people pirate. For those that don't know, NFL games are generally broadcast in their home market IF the game is sold out. If not, the game was not broadcast locally. There are a few games (4-5 of the 16) per week that are broadcast nationally. Now if you don't live local to your team, then you could only watch your team maybe a few times a year relying on national broadcast. Then came NFL Sunday Ticket (if you had satellite TV). For one price, you could get all games** (IF it was not broadcast locally, etc.) However you could not get games for one team if you wanted to pay less. NFL Sunday Ticket started in the era of analog satellite so it was somewhat understandable back then that they could not limit games to the ones a specific customer wanted. These days, everything is digital over the Interwebs; yet NFL Sunday Ticket has yet to offer a package for one team. Compounding that is the price increases every year. And that's for the average residential customer. Commercial customers like bars had a different price structure often charging per screen. While some bars that had dozens of TVs would like all of the games, most smaller bars would really like the local team only..

It's even worse than that. Before, if you had cable TV or something like Sunday Ticket, you could at least guarantee you'd be able to see all the games. Now they've spread the season across multiple streaming networks, which means you need to have a handful of subscriptions to achieve the same feat. There's no single service you can go to and enjoy the full season.

We use per capita because it levels out ALL the sources for a nation and because some sources are easier to supplant than others.

Ha, no you don't. You use it because it's the easiest way to dunk on the US. And you guys love to dunk on the US.

Existing climate models and "deadlines" don't even take into account a "do nothing for the first 20 years" approach

They absolutely do. In IPCC AR, it's called Scenario A (Business-as-Usual)

Why would government exist at all except to "deliver better outcomes for society"

To provide core functions that society cannot provide? Such as shared military defense? Moderating intra state commerce? Foreign policy? Things of that sort? "Deliver better outcomes for society" isn't exactly their primary purpose. That's historically a state govt thing. Fed govt is supposed to do the bare minimum of tasks the states can't do themselves and then GTF out of the way. Picking winners and losers in the market isn't a role I'd subscribe to federal govt