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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • The argument that “you shouldn’t vote for someone just because your favorite celebrity endorses them” seemed like a much more credible argument before the 2016 election when the winning candidate essentially won by literally being a celebrity.

    Prior to 2016, Trump was probably best known for being the host of a reality TV show, and being a “businessman”. Taylor Swift is definitely better known, and you could also make a solid argument that she is a better “businessman” as well.


  • I hate to burst any utopian bubbles out there, but the problem with society ultimately isn’t capitalism, or communism, or socialism, or fascism, or any other system of government or economics. The problem with society is people. We are the problem. While some systems of government are certainly better than others at protecting us from our ourselves, eventually they all crumble and succumb to our depravity.

    “We have met the enemy, and they are us” -Pogo




  • p3n@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonerule
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    25 days ago

    In my fantasy timeline this is forced to go to arbitration but the arbiter actually is a human being who is so outraged at the circumstances that they award the entire net worth of the Disney corporation as damages in a legally binding non-appealable decision.




  • The whole purpose of separation of powers into executive, legislative, and judicial branches is to prevent consolidation of power. It is supposed to be like the 3-way standoff from the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

    I think the root problem here is that a justice shouldn’t be allowed to serve until after the president who nominated them is out of office, and if they would be otherwise eligible for another term, would no longer be permitted to run for the presidency while the justice is serving on the court. This would also cut-down on the issue of lifetime appointments by shortening their appointments by 4-8 years.

    That and the President obviously shouldn’t have immunity from the law.

    What happens with the vacancy on the court while we are waiting for the president to leave office? It gives the legislature plenty of time to argue about the appointment, which they will do anyways.





  • This is like survivorship bias, but in reverse. Obviously almost everyone who killed themselves with a gun had access to a gun, but this doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have committed suicide by some other means if they didn’t have access to a gun.

    This is something that is impossible to determine scientifically. If everyone in this study group killed themselves with a gun, how many of them would have not killed themselves if they didn’t have a gun? They can’t un-kill themselves and let us take away their guns so we can determine the effect.

    What this study shows is that a gun is likely the first choice of gun owners who are trying to kill themselves. It cannot determine how much less likely they would have been to kill themselves had they not owned a gun, if at all. Intuitively I do believe that it would be less, because other means are likely more difficult, slower, or less effective. Whether this would result in slightly fewer suicides or much fewer I do not know, but this study doesn’t prove either.