Is the capability of these explosives at a safe level if the liquid precursors are less than 3.5 fl ounces? If they are still capable of blowing a hole in the fuselage with less than 3.5 fl ounces then the limits on fluids are still pointless.
I would say that many of those cheap goods are simply trash that people buy impulsively that either collects in their homes or ends up in landfills in a short period of time. Fast fashion being a well known one, where people buy lots of cheap clothes that are of poor quality and may only be worn once before being thrown out. We don't need these things and the environment doesn't need to be full of landfills of this junk either.
Maybe, but you're basically describing the entire US consumer culture. I'm originally from the UK, but moved to the US decades ago at age 25. The difference between the two cultures in terms of consumer behavior is huge. Companies like Black and Decker (tools) or Kitchen appliance manufactures make different products for these two markets to account for the different tastes - US consumers prefer semi-disposable quality products that are cheap vs UK preferring higher quality at a price. e.g. using metal vs plastic parts, etc.
Teenage fashion (e.g. Shein) is probably a poor example to focus on though since, even disregarding fast fashion, teenage clothes don't have a long usage period - they get outgrown or fashion changes, etc. The price/quality point of Shein is well suited for this.
Sounds like they're using the excuse of the tariffs to overcharge. They would pay the tariffs on their wholesale costs when they import. If they're then passing the same tariff % to the customer at their retail price then they're ripping you off.
It's very simple, Americans believe that the individual is responsible for themselves while most of the rest of the world wants to be "protected" by a restrictive government. One leads to innovation and one stifles it. We would rather be responsible for discovering the truth on our own, than trust a central authority to decide what is and isn't true(or propaganda). I find it funny how Europeans think their governments are protecting them from propaganda instead of drowning them in propaganda.
Heh. This is not the month to be making that argument.
I like having food hygiene standards - it means I don't have to worry about chalk in my bread, arsenic in my sweets, or antibiotics in my beef.
I honestly believe we'd be better off with informational hygiene standards, too. The last two decades have taught me this lesson - free speech absolutism is a giant "kick me" sign on the back of society, and when you find a security hole that big, you patch it.
I recognize there's a balance to be found, and reasonable people will disagree on where the tipping point is.
>free speech absolutism is a giant "kick me" sign on the back of society
How does this work? What danger represents freedom of speech? With lack of it dangers is understandable: it is a giant "welcome" sign for bloody totalitarian dictatorship.
If megacorporations can lie to you about what they're selling you (which is one of the things that free speech absolutists generally argue for), then you will have no way of knowing if what you buy is going to kill you.
I don't know any "free speech absolutists" who argue that fraud should be legal. Misrepresentation of a product or service you're selling is fraud. We already have laws against that.
This has actually been a fairly common position among American libertarians. Alan Greenspan, for instance, was strongly against fraud laws until some time after the financial crisis. The idea was that the market would sort it out.
(And no, I don't understand how this is a serious position that serious people can seriously hold, but then that is how I feel about libertarianism in general.)
The term "libertarian" I feel is almost useless as a description of the political views of Americans, because it gets used to describe views that don't make any sense with that label. Greenspan, for instance, often described himself as a libertarian (or "libertarian Republican", whatever that means), but that seems a bit rich for someone who was chairman of one of the most powerful central planning organizations on the planet for so long. If central planning is libertarian then I'm a blue whale.
The term "free market" gets misused just as much. It's not a free market if the government (or the Fed, which is just an arm of the government) has its thumb on the scales.
> It's the thumb on the scales that allows the free market to exist.
This is an oxymoron. A free market is a market in which all transactions are voluntary. Government intervention, by definition, causes some transactions to be involuntary. So you can't have a free market with government's thumb on the scales.
> Without it there's just men with guns, and men with more guns.
Historically, this is simply false. There have been societies that did not have governments that could manipulate markets, and they did not work this way.
In terms of guns, in such societies everyone had guns; there was no one who had overwhelming military force at their disposal. (They also had less wealth inequality than modern societies with governments.)
> Government intervention, by definition, causes some transactions to be involuntary.
Here is a list of transactions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repugnant_market) we're making illegal next Tuesday. Note that after Tuesday, all market transactions are still voluntary. Therefore your claim is wrong. (In other words you're not considering positive and negative freedoms).
> In terms of guns, in such societies everyone had guns; there was no one who had overwhelming military force at their disposal.
Tell me about power laws.
I recommend Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber.
No, it isn't. You are simply giving evidence that a market with any government intervention is not a free market. Which is perfectly true.
Whether the particular interventions governments make are good policy is a separate question. A free market is a tool. So are government interventions. Sometimes you have to make tradeoffs. But that doesn't change the fact that they are tradeoffs: that every time the government intervenes in a market, it means the market is no longer a free market, because some transactions are not voluntary. (Or because some transactions that would be voluntary if they happened are prevented from happening; see further comments below.)
> Note that after Tuesday, all market transactions are still voluntary.
First, even taken literally, this claim is not true, because there are lots of other government interventions in place that dictate non-voluntary transactions (the most common, of course, being taxation).
Second, you're quibbling. I gave the short version of the proper definition of a free market; the full version includes that preventing transactions from occurring that otherwise would occur (because both parties benefit) by making them illegal also counts as making transactions non-voluntary. In other words, "voluntary" has two sides: not forcing people to make transactions they wouldn't voluntarily choose to make, and not preventing people from making transactions they would voluntarily choose to make.
> It's not a free market if the government... has its thumb on the scales
See, this is why libertarianism doesn't make sense. If there's no government intervention, then monopolies, incumbents, and rich and powerful people in general take their place. The point of having democratic institutions intervene in the market instead is to keep the intervention under control and in check. The alternative is Oliver Twist, ecological disaster, maybe even feudalism.
But we agree that there's a lot of hypocrisy on the Right in general. A lot of insider trading and "I'm a free speech absolutist" and then buying up mass media to censor people who don't agree with you.
> If there's no government intervention, then monopolies, incumbents, and rich and powerful people in general take their place.
Historically, if there is government intervention, then monopolies--created by governments--incumbents, and rich and powerful people run things.
Of course if you take a society which has managed to regulate some aspect of all that using government, and then take away that particular government regulation--while leaving all the other ways the governments puts its thumb on the scale in place--then things will get worse, at least in the short term.
But that in no way shows that the absence of a government's thumb on the scale in every aspect, long term makes things worse. Historically, there have been societies that had little or no government intervention in things (for example, saga period Iceland, or some of the American colonies before the British tried to tighten up on them after the French and Indian War), and they did not have the bad things you mention; they had the opposite, people being able to run their own lives and getting along just fine, precisely because there was no government that could force them to do stupid things because of some government granted monopoly or incumbent, or because rich and powerful people were using their wealth and power to co-opt the government--the way they do in societies that do have government intervention.
> The point of having democratic institutions intervene in the market instead is to keep the intervention under control and in check.
That's the ostensible purpose, but it doesn't work. Giving a government the power to intervene in what would otherwise be a free market just means the rich and powerful use their wealth and power to co-opt the government. Having a government actually makes their job easier: it's cheaper to buy a government than it is to buy an entire society.
> there's a lot of hypocrisy on the Right in general
There's a lot of hypocrisy on all sides of the political spectrum. I don't think the Right is any worse than others in that respect.
> I like having food hygiene standards - it means I don't have to worry about chalk in my bread, arsenic in my sweets, or antibiotics in my beef.
And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards, and without having our ancestors' food poisoned.
Also, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food, I've got some oceanfront property in North Dakota I'd like to sell you. You do know, don't you, that antibiotics in your beef, for example, is done all the time in factory farming with government approval?
You included in your argument at least one bad thing that, as I pointed out, is not only not stopped by government regulation, it's explicitly permitted by it. The fact that there was a bad thing that happened before government regulation, which a government regulation was then passed to try to prevent, doesn't make your argument valid.
> And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards
Narrator: "Most humans didn't survive past year five due to preventable illnesses and food born contamination, the humans' ancestor's infant mortality rate was rather high before the age of food safety and soap".
>And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards, and without having our ancestors' food poisoned.
Sure, with reduced life expectancy. If you're fine dying out in your 30's, maybe 40's at best you can eat whatever you want. Your body is pretty resilient to poison short term.
>, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food
Extremist takes aren't doing you a favor here. Like I just said, we can resist a surprising about of poisons short term. Many people indulge in alcohol after all. We have no need to strive for "all bad things" out of our food.
This approach is great in theory, the problem is: it does not scale. We are bombarded with a lot of information in the news, ads, social media, and average individual does not have enough time (not to mention access to information, or intelligence to interpret it) to fact check everything on their own. "The last man who knew everything" lived in early 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Man_Who_Knew_Everythi...
You don't need to fact check the torrent of information you describe. You can just ignore it. None of it is worth the time and effort to fact check anyway. You don't need any of that information to make the decisions you need to make in your daily life.
If you want to argue that you need to fact check all that information to, for example, decide how to vote in elections, none of that information is of any value for that purpose either, because it's basically all propaganda at this point. There are no "independent" sources of information that you can trust, other than your own eyeballs and brain. (Possibly you are lucky enough to have some friends and family whose eyeballs and brain you can also trust.)
First of all, there's a difference between facts and understanding. Thomas Young may have understood the wave theory of light, but he could say nothing with certainty about Queen Victoria's underwear. Secondly, it's getting easier to understand everything, because ideas are becoming more powerful. We are however bombarded with facts, that part is true.
Sadly very true, I hope the hostility American officials recently showed toward our values and institutions will prompt them to do something. Not to mention America siding with Putin a few days ago.
Not even most Americans believe that. I would say paradoxically we have a slice of folks who want liberty from the government and also have plenty of government protections.
Then there is the "liberty at all costs" types, the fringe of which idolizes the David Koresh lifestyle.
There are plenty of folks who also think it is OK to ruin someone's entire life if they post something sexist to Twitter.
Americans are not so easily generalized; they come in many flavors.
Seeing how almost everyone here in France despises our current government, I don't think this propaganda you mention is very effective, if it's as present as you claim.
Meanwhile money basically dictates who gets elected on your side of the pond, whith billionaires being crazy over-represented in your political offices, despite being a tiny minority in your population.
Also, the people advocating for smaller government are often on board with executive power consolidation and increased police and army funding, so I think it's little more than a stance.
You can't "discover the truth" on your own, no one can. Are you able to go everywhere something happens in the wordl to get a first hand account of the event and then build your own conclusions? Of course not, you rely on media (social or legacy) to digest the facts for you, and they might (and do) influence you and how you think about the world. It can't be another way, so fighting obvious lies isn't a bad thing in my book.
What do you expect the approach to be when your goal is to go out into the world and find qualified people in demographics you aren't getting naturally in your applicant pool? If you want to hire women software engineers you solicit applicants from "women in tech" events and groups.
The belief, whether you agree with it or not, is that diverse teams produce better results. If your natural applicant pool is all dudes then your job as a headhunter is to find a woman who you think can beat them on merit.
The other way you do it is you hire them on as juniors where everyone's resumes might as well be written on toilet paper and "most qualified applicant" is a bit of a joke and train them up.
It's not performative outrage, it's a statement of fact. You didn't merely widen the net, you spearfished candidates of the right race and ignored those of the wrong ones. Regardless of your intentions, how is that not racist?
> Just for clarity, this was for a publicly posted job position, so non-target candidates were able to, and did, put in applications. They were assessed the same way target candidates were.
Before answering your question, I quickly checked your history to confirm my suspicion that you don't give a fuck about racism unless it's against white people and found this gem:
> You're assuming there is no genetic component whatsoever to human skills and interests, and the only reason women are not studying computer science/car repair/welding is sexism.
Your outrage against our hiring practice is 100% performative. So no, I'm not going to engage with you any further.
At no point do I say these bad initiatives are not “DEI,” since they clearly fit under the umbrella of DEI. I simply say they’re bad initiatives.
You might be confused by me saying “DEI isn’t the core of the problem,” but that’s not the same thing as saying “these bad things are not DEI.” I hope this clarifies things for you.
Accusations of racism were always a lie used simply to silence those who said it was a lab leak. Our governments failed us, lied to us, censured us, and demonized those who didn't bend the knee.
Debanking someone in our current society is the most abusive things they could have done. It prevented people from accessing and using their own money in an era that is almost cashless. It effectively starved people out and left them trapped. It is so excessively overboard, yet there are those here who will defend it because it happened to those not on their side. When the government changes and it is used against them they will shout and holler with surprise. I'll never understand how people don't see how something that you allow the government to do to others will eventually be used against you too. It's only happened every goddamn time throughout history.
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