Says the ‘man’ who just tried to buy an election in Wisconsin.

What I will say about them publicly is that if we are afforded another shot at democracy after all this, they and their fellow travelers cannot be permitted to have a voice in the political process. Just about any system of government can work if everybody involved is commited to making it work, but if 1/3+ of voters hold pluralistic, representative democracy in active disdain there is no system that can protect itself against those people engaging with the system in bad faith. This was the fundamental failing of reconstruction, and it’s shaping up to be the undoing of freedom in the US now.

I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that just letting the “marketplace of ideas” play out is tantamount to throwing the gates open to any demagogue with a big enough megaphone. Participation in the political process must be restricted to good-faith actors in some fashion, be that at the “supply side” of media and content creation or at the voting booth. Anything else is akin to a basketball team kicking, biting, and throwing punches on the court and the referees shrugging and insisting they have to be allowed to play anyway.

Cirrus aircraft are expensive even by the stratospheric standards of general aviation, which leads to a “no seatbelts, we die like real men” attitude from your average GA pilot with a 60-year-old Cessna that flies backwards in a stiff breeze.

That said, the RV-10 is a (relatively) inexpensive kit plane, and one that has a couple parachute systems available for it. In the case of a kit plane, I think it’s not unreasonable to say that adding the parachute system is a good idea… the incident rate with such aircraft is much higher than with other general aviation aircraft, and the cost of adding the chute isn’t eye-popping compared to the other costs involved.

Immediately, and in a vacuum? No, and you’re right to fear that it will get worse before it might get better. But the wealthy and powerful have constructed a society that insulates them from consequences for committing vast amounts of (banal, legally-sanctioned) violence against the broader public. Mangione’s actions, and more importantly the public response to them, are a demonstration that there can still be consequences for that kind of predatory behavior, even if it’s state-sanctioned and protected, and at the end of the day consequences lead to changes in behavior.

I respect your point of view, but I personally have long been of the opinion that one’s human rights are contingent on one’s humanity, which is a quality that one can degrade and destroy through acts of inhumanity. Societies have a right and need to defend themselves from amoral predators that do not respect the social contract, and in cases where that society has become so corrupt and sclerotic as to have de-facto predator and prey classes, vigilantism may even become justified. (To be clear I don’t think it’s good that it came to this, or that further escalation won’t start to have terrible collateral damage, but there is a certain inevitability to it.)

I did some SWAGging as to how many deaths could be reasonably attributable to UHC’s policy of excessive denials, and based on the studies I was able to find about mortality rates and delay of care, I conservatively arrived at a number of ~4,600 per year. Since Brian Thompson became CEO of UHC, that adds up to 17,000+ premature deaths. In another context he would have been standing trial in front a war crimes tribunal, but because our criminal justice system doesn’t have a mechanism to handle homicides where the murder weapon is a contract dispute, he was on his way to tell shareholders about quarterly profits – profits earned from the immiseration and death of thousands --when he was shot.

I won’t say that Brian Thompson deserved to die, but I will say this: Nobody calls it murder when an antelope gores the lion.

A quick scroll of your comment history suggests you are happy to make an exception for CEOs.

Not saying I necessarily disagree, but only pointing out that the axiomatic statement you’re making here isn’t a universal truth, and might not even be true for you. I personally think that the death penalty should be reserved exclusively for people in positions of power who abuse that power – call it a Sword of Damocles exception – but an exception that still is.

Cops don’t usually distinguish between net and gross revenue when they put out these kinds of press releases.

I’ve found myself taking a paradoxically accelerationist stance about it, for this exact reason. At the moment, those on the right agitating for violence are a minority, and those that are actually prepared to act consist primarily of a few thousand militia LARPers and an even smaller number of actually-capable fighters. These groups are gradually accruing malcontents while the right wing’s filter bubble casts their ideas as acceptable, but the sooner those chuds decide to go loud, the more lopsided and emphatic the beatdown will be – provided that the armed forces are under the command of non-authoritarian President. Afterwards the public condemnation of insurrectionists will effectively choke off recruiting. Conflict feels almost inevitable at this point and giving the violent authoritarian fringe more time to plan and recruit only makes that conflict deadlier.

Commentators in the industry have been prognosticating about a subprime auto loan bubble burst for years and it keeps not happening, for whatever reason. Frankly I’m a bit surprised it hasn’t happened yet, but without some sort of engineered soft landing it feels like it has to be coming eventually. Car prices keep going up, loan terms keep getting longer, and the cost of borrowing is punishing right now. Negative equity in new loans keeps rising too. It’s only going to take a small systemic blip in people’s ability to pay to create a sudden spike in repossessions.

So this is something that I already have to deal with at the state and local level, in the form of building and fire codes. Most such codes are developed by standards organizations. Is it a little bullshit that these organizations are able to maintain copyright control over parts of the law? Yes, but also organizations like the International Code Council and the National Fire Protection Association generally do a very good job developing these documents, and the current state of affairs is such that these organizations and other like ANSI and ISO are de-facto part of the fabric of law in the specialized areas they write standards and tests for. Requiring their publications to be freely and publicly available will actually be an improvement on the current state of affairs, where much of their work is locked behind paywalls.

Here’s the weird part though-

Four in 10 hiring managers said they always contacted workers who applied for made-up jobs. Forty-five percent said they sometimes contacted those job seekers. Among companies that contacted applicants, 85% report interviewing the person.

Does that part make sense to anyone?

This strikes me less as fraud and more as a way to stay open to talent that you may not need immediately but still want to be able to add to your organization, in an era when basically nobody sends unsolicited resumes anymore. Like, maybe you don’t have a project in need of a Whatever Specialist right now, but it’s a field your company works in, and if a really exceptional Whatever Specialist is on the market, you don’t want to miss the opportunity to bring them on.

It’s the Chicago mob all over again!

Federal authorities raided a home belonging to Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao early Thursday as part of a California investigation that included a search of at least two other houses, officials said… Agents also carried out searches about three miles to the south at two homes owned by members of the politically influential Duong family that owns the recycling company Cal Waste Solutions, the Chronicle said. The firm has been investigated over campaign contributions to Thao and other elected city officials, the local news outlet Oaklandside reported in 2020.

Their numbers are declining, but it’s leaving primarily those who are most psychotically zealous in their commitment to fundamentalism and Christian Dominionism. Those few who don’t toe the line completely are either finding themselves pushed out of their communities, or their communities are having to make adaptations to allow mutually-incompatible views of theology to coexist, to at least temporarily.

So far a fair number have actually come out against the verdict, including Lindsay Graham… which makes me think there are a number of Republican legislators who own guns and enjoy partaking in a little nose candy from time to time, as well.

North County was previously where all the middle class white people went after fleeing the urban core. Then as more African American families moved in to get away from urban decay, the white population moved to suburbs south and west of the city. This isn’t civil rights history, either – it’s been an ongoing process as recently as the 90s. My (white) dad grew up in Blackjack, just a short ways from Ferguson, and his parents only moved out of the area around 1995. When the unrest around Michael Brown’s death kicked off, he turned on the evening news to see the supermarket where my grandmother used to buy groceries going up in flames.

This is what’s actually meant by the “invisible hand.” They pushed prices past what the market was willing to bear, and lost sales as people made do without. Now they’re adjusting prices back down, because it makes more sense to accept a smaller margin and make it up in volume. It’s a textbook example of the demand curve in action.

When market-based systems work, they work fairly elegantly. It’s the cases where they break down that I get concerned with.

If I recall, it’s between 3x and 10x as expensive to build buried lines versus overhead, tending more towards the high end of that number in existing built-out neighborhoods where there’s a lot of existing stuff in the right-of-way that needs to be removed or worked around somehow.

The real problem that folks have been bringing up is for-profit electric utilities ignoring line maintenance and instead just pocketing as profit the funds that should have paid for that work. Lots of folks in my area have noted that the utility used to regularly trim trees near the lines, but that work basically stopped after it merged into a larger regional power company. Even when people would call to report branches basically draped over the lines, the utility would ignore the issue.

For what it’s worth, I live in a relatively small pocket where power is provided by a county public utility, and the outages in our area were much less severe and power was restored to all but one or two people within a day. The utility board is far from perfect, but in this case they performed significantly better than their for-profit peer around us.

I’ve got the good fortune to have an >800 credit score, and even the offers I’ve seen from “status symbol” card issuers have had bonkers-high interest even when the Fed was holding the prime rate close to zero. The lowest I’ve ever seen was still around 15%, and even at that “low” rate you’d have to be truly desperate to carry a balance. Even unsecured personal loans tend to carry interest rates at half of what a credit card offers.

Okay, body slams are out, but what about The People’s Elbow?