Nah, he doth protest too much. I don’t expect women are appearing in his “fantasies”. Definitely finding Christmas presents if you catch my drift.

Same here, and I am hoping that as battery density increases I may be able to extend the range on mine when the car gets old enough for a rebuild.

This was a problem with government owned Volts, they reimbursed for gas as this was already happening for the rest of the ICE fleet but had no way to reimburse for charging. Would not be surprised if this trend is the same for many company fleets too. Fix that and you would probably see similar numbers to private ownership.

I don’t think those are inherently opposed, the whole point of libertarianism being about liberty. Power gained through free market principles is no different than any other power, and thus can and should be opposed through competing ideas/services. If I don’t like your service being provided, I or anyone should be free to provide a competing service that matches my needs/values.

Being a libertarian doesn’t require keeping Fountainhead as your Bible and worshipping at the feet of oligarchs instead of politicians/the State, and I would argue selling your soul to the company store is as antithetical to liberty as selling your soul to a centralized State. But as you’ve indirectly mentioned, there is a rather huge spectrum under the libertarian umbrella.

I won’t speak for other libertarians, as I know there are those that think do worship the oligarchy, and many of my views do probably put me on the left side of libertarianism. If I didn’t believe that government has a role is keeping free markets free and providing stability and peace for liberty to exist (most fiscally conservatively paid for by collapsing all social safety nets into an actual UBI requiring miniscule overhead, Universal Healthcare, and more Georgist tax codes), I’d probably be closer to the anarcho-capitalists maybe? Maybe some offshoot or flavor of Minarchist?

It only needs to be solved if the country is going to survive, so if that doesn’t matter then it doesn’t. There will be knock on results from that, because countries usually fall a grade or two when they fail, and with decreased affluence the number of children will increase again.

The reality is that if you do not have at least a replacement rate, retirement and social safety nets will fail as they become overwhelmed which leads to social unrest and upheaval. Immigration can help, but this comes with its own trade-offs. 8 billion people is also nowhere near an overstressor for the planet if fossil fuels and pollutants can be curbed, and even dropping the numbers of humans substantially will not help with unfettered greed continues to drive dirty industrialization

You are correct, as quality of life increases overall fertility rates decrease. That does need to be solved, and immigration is part of that solution. Unlimited/unregulated immigration is not.

Difficulty with legal immigration is generally the case for almost every first world country, the US is not abnormal or exclusive there. I do not meet qualifications to immigrate to Canada, or anywhere in Europe right now even as a tech sector worker, except possibly by having family history through my ancestors. I am not arguing that US immigration policy needs a lot of work, but it’s not fair how much the US gets singled out for it as if it’s the outlier here.

The invisible hand of the market is not all powerful, which is why regulation and safeguards are needed for a “free” market to function. Anti-monopoly laws, labor laws, etc. I lean libertarian, but do not embrace 100% laissez-faire economics. Immigration falls under this same framework.

The West has eliminated their manufacturing and blue collar base by outsourcing it overseas, which hurt large swaths of the working class. Outsourcing labor by importing labor from overseas to do the job cheaper here has similar results. See the agricultural sector in the US for this example. Everyone always says that the reason immigrants are needed is because Americans don’t want to do those jobs, but leave out “for the wages paid”.

Some regulation is needed, and we have had wholesale failure of meaningful regulation and complete regulatory capture by the oligarchy which started under Reagan and snowballed out of control since. Proper support networks and social safety nets have also failed, for the same reasons. Unrestricted immigration does not solve these issues, and with these holes in place does indeed hurt.

Things that aren’t a problem when everything is healthy and working as intended can definitely hurt when things aren’t healthy. Obviously the “health issues” need to be addressed to actually fix the problem, but ignoring symptoms while doing so doesn’t help.

https://www.theonion.com/gays-too-precious-to-risk-in-combat-says-general-1819594658

You are correct, everyone is a villain at that point. The problem with that, as horrible this is, is it incentivizes the action. For the same reason countries don’t negotiate with terrorists. If you prove that committing terrorist acts, or taking hostages, or using children as human shields works, you positively reinforce those acts. Its fucked up beyond belief, and all alternatives need to be exhausted, but at some level someone takes the responsibility for where the lines are drawn for the least damage in the long run.

Is it actually preferable to just give money to anyone who hijacks a bus load of people, or a plane, or a bank, etc, so that no hostages are possibly injured when that happens? It might be, and could be argued for. Is such acts becoming more frequent or commonplace because it works an acceptable price weight against innocent human life? Again, it very well might be. It’s only money. I am glad I am not the one making those decisions, but we can’t pretend that the calculus doesn’t happen and/or doesn’t matter.

This may only be within the range of human hearing, and you can and do still suffer damage from excessive amplitude by frequencies above and below what is human detectable. ANC is not a protective technology for this reason, it is a quality of life technology.

I’ve been wanting that since 1994. Jawsome!

That is because the “well regulated militia” part is neither the subject of the sentence, nor a qualifier for the rest of the sentence. It’s pretty straight forward English sentence structure. It explains a primary reason why the individual right to keep and bear arms “shall not be infringed” is important, and like a comment line in computer code it doesn’t “do” anything to the rest of the program.

The federalist papers and the militia acts back up that “originalist” interpretation.

Yeah, let’s have a constitutional convention in this environment to update the entire Constitution, let’s see how quick the bill of rights gets tossed out for a complete police state and possibly a theocracy. The most fractious the country has ever been is a great time to remove and replace the foundation of a country. Or are you thinking more of a coup where only one political “side” makes the new constitution they want, and it just gets enforced on everybody else?

Since the entire union doesn’t work anymore and needs to be reworked from the ground up devaluing/depowering States, let’s be honest: there is no way the entire country re-forms whole under its existing borders. We will end up with at least 2 or 3 countries in what was once the contiguous 48.

I guess it’s been a while since there’s been a good civil war.

You seem to be confusing taking no action with taking positive action when compared to a negative action, conflating both to be the same thing under an “if you aren’t explicitly with me then you’re against me” view point. If the University we’re going out of its way to dump more money into new Israeli investments, then that would be the same belief but opposite. Not changing anything is by definition the only neutral action, and any change in any direction would be political. Not saying anything about what is ultimately “right”, just that there “is” an apolitical option and that is to do whatever would be done if this whole thing wasn’t happening.

Bees kill a number of people every year, yet people keep them in large numbers. Dogs do to, but we keep millions of them. This guy got unlucky with underlying health problems. Gila venom hurts like a son of a bitch, but is otherwise about as medically significant as a black widow bite. People keep those as pets too.

You are correct, and it is exacerbated by the cap on representatives. You will never really get it 100% perfect due to the land mass of the US, but uncapping it and making it proportional would go a long way.

That makes sense if the states were just administrative zones like the Canadian provinces and territories, all fully subsumed and beholden under the Federal Government. We are not. We are a closely connected economic and political union of individual states collected into a Republic, all of which work together and compete with different ideas. All powers not specifically enumerated to the Federal Government are each State’s to decide and manage. This allows States to try different things and see what works best, from tax strategy, to universal healthcare (Romneycare), to UBI.

The people have their focus on what is best for them personally. This encompasses differing things from worldwide events to their neighborhood, but it is still a narrow scope. City/county leadership is focused on how best to keep their city/county running for maximum benefit of their population. States have the same focus over all the cities and counties therein.

We only have a ruling elite because people tend to vote for the incumbents, and we have no term limits except for the Presidency. It is also relatively stupid to put everything to a mass democratic vote, especially for things that should be decided by experts. Water rights, mineral rights, pollution controls, regulations, revenue allocation, etc.

That is like saying that the division leadership in a company shouldn’t have a voice in decision making alongside the union and board of directors, just let the union make the decisions. You don’t need input from finance and design/engineering and human resources and warehousing and production and quality control, the people in those departments all elected their union representatives so we don’t need input from those department leads.

The Senate should go back to being elected by the State Government instead of by the people, the change to this brought by the 17th caused this muddling. The balance of powers with the 3 chambers should work, but making the 2nd chamber just a superior version of the 3rd throws everything slightly out of alignment.

“Well, that’s just like, your opinion man”. The constitution is still set up that way, and powers not explicitly granted to the Federal Government are the dominion of the States. We are still more like the EU than other “full-fledged” countries. You may not like that, but I would bet that just as many people feel differently as those that agree with you. It would also take the adoption of a new constitution to do that, and the odds of the Country remaining united through a complete constitution change compared to breaking up into several independent countries doesn’t seem high right now.

The US is far more like the EU than it is like Britain or Canada, being a Republic of aligned States. We have a body representing the states themselves (the Senate, and each state is equal and gets 2 Senators), a body representing the People in those states (the House of Representatives, which has been capped for total size and is no longer equally proportional but serves the same purpose), and a body representing the entire Union (the Executive branch - the President, Vice President, Cabinet, etc.).