Broadly speaking? For the same reason every other state does. Continental unity opens up trade and travel, exploits economies of scale, and simplifies the legal system for interstate business and for civil rights purposes.

Specifically? Because federal coordination helps manage natural disasters (like wildfires) and centralize big programs life Medicare/SS and secures national defense (which California profits from handsomely).

Conservatives would actually call this a win for their side IMO.

Abstractly. But as soon as they see it happening in person, they begin frantically dialing the police.

That’s why Houston Food Not Bombs needed to get a court order forbidding the police for repeatedly ticketing them for no reason.

it’s really hard to argue with the research EA has done.

It’s not.

Effective altruism distills all of ethics into an overriding variable: suffering. And that fatally oversimplifies the many ways in which the living world can be valuable. Effective altruism discounts the ethical dimensions of relationships, the rich braid of elements that make up a “good life,” and the moral worth of a species or a wetland.

But setting that aside, the idea of charity is rooted in the theory that you need a popular buy-in before you can achieve significant lasting change.

That’s not wrong on its face. But the modern incarnations of charity are so heavily focused on the populism (flashy PR campaigns, obnoxious and invasive marketing strategies, charity as spectacle to drive more engagement) that they often fail to deliver their states goals.

The issue isn’t merely of one’s moral circle, it is of one’s visual range and economic heft. When you’re relying on a few plutocrats to dictate philanthropic social policy, you’re banking heavily on their omniscience.

Noooo! You can’t! This is what they want!

As soon as people start throwing bricks at squad cars, the cops will use violence, a thing they certainly weren’t doing before now!

Then it’ll be your fault, the next time some power drunk, trigger happy, bloodthirsty, badged up serial killer assassinates another civilian waving a cardboard protest sign.

James Gunn generally knows what he’s doing and I’m sure the movie is fine.

But a film that cost $225M to produce and another $200M to market on a franchise that’s nearly a century old and has always been box office gold… If it doesn’t turn a cool $1B the studio will consider it a flop. That its cruising in to the box office third place behind Minecraft (predictably disappointing) and the Live Action Lilo & Stitch (Christ, Disney, just die already) is… eh. Not a great sign for The Movies generally speaking.

He really literally is Woke, though. In the way reactionaries mean it, too.

He’s a working class socialist refugee journalist who fights corrupt billionaires, sociopath AIs, and genocidal tyrants. He’s educated, open minded, egalitarian, and forgiving. He’s a (French style) libertarian internationalist, a diplomat, and proletarian hero. The model progressive liberal.

I mean, its still a shit policy and it makes BlueSky worse.

Just not bad enough to do another platform migration, particularly to a platform nobody I know actually uses.

You’re not thinking enough like a grifter

I mean, its obviously a shit post. But I imagine spending a whole day doing fake interviews - 50 a day, five days a week, for a month - to make around $6k gross, and then tell yourself you can scale this up passively.

There’s no compelling reason why a state a big and wealthy as Texas can’t afford to manage natural disasters on this scale.

Their state leadership simply chooses not to do so. And the state media saturated the airwaves with “Nothing to be done, government would only make things worse” which… given the leadership of the state, isn’t even an unfair critique.

That’s all red states.

From California to Mississippi, the anti-tax era got everybody. Now states don’t have domestic revenue to pay for shit, so they have to go through the Feds for everything.

Ironic, in a way, since the core of anti-tax Republicanism was supposed to be about shrinking the size of government. But here we are, beholden to whichever idiot or asshole happens to be running the executive branch at a given moment

I mean, firstly, this appears to only affect UK users (atm). And secondly

Users who don’t verify their age will have certain content and features, like direct messages, restricted

So, features I don’t use or want, for the time being. Which will be a problem when I run into it, I guess. As it stands, BlueSky remains the least worst option. When that changes, I’ll change with it.

If not for Dunmore’s Proclamation, Washington would have still been fighting for the British

The two were on good terms not two years earlier when Washington believed Dunmore would help him secure more territory in the Ohio River Valley.

It’s a good joke

But half because the logic is so terrible. That’s not passive income. It’s retail

This is not the United states my ancestors died for.

It literally is, though. Trump isn’t a new kind of president, he’s a return to the nation’s white nationalist authoritarian roots.

Yeltsin was such a drunk idiot

Backed by the US in a coup against the Russian government

This isn’t a political critique, it’s warmongering

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas

Putin wouldn’t be President of Russia if the US and the USSR had been able to settle their differences without a 60 year long series of proxy wars and regime changes. Neither would Trump, for that matter.

You played yourselves.

This is beginning to read like the bodybuilder forum where muscle-heads argued over the number of days in a week.

Doesn’t seem like years of sanctions on Russia, Iran, or North Korea had a sufficient impact to cause any change.

Seems like it made them more insular, more self-sufficient, and more hostile to future diplomatic entreties.

Change by force can have negative results, and change by economic means can have positive ones

What if, instead of trying to extort or kill a nation’s residents in order to force them to adopt your preferred foreign policy, you simply afforded them an opportunity for peaceful coexistence?

Left: “We should have socialized healthcare, education, and housing.”

I mean, there’s The Left[Hakeem Jefferies/Gavin Newsom] and The Left[Bernie Sanders/JD Pritsker/Jeremy Corbyn] and then The Left[the DSA kids distributing food and fresh clothing to my nearby homeless encampment]. These are three very different flavors of Left.

You: “Both sides are the same.”

A big part of the problem with liberal democratic politics is how deeply co-opted all these parties have become. At the end of the day, John Thune and Chuck Schumer, Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer, Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre all bend the knee to Jamie Diamon and Jeff Bezos and Muhammad bin Salmon.

Wish it weren’t so, but that’s the world we live in.