namlem

People who cannot own weapons are not truly free.

Yeah was gonna come in to say French duralex glasses are extremely durable. Though they are thicker than these German ones I think.

Senators should be appointed by citizens assemblies/elector juries imo.

Hell yes. Also just citizens assemblies in general, whether for appointing officials or directly deliberating on issues. Turns out randomly selected citizens actually perform far better than elected officials.

Both referendums and elections are fundamentally broken and not particularly democratic to begin with. Deliberative citizens assemblies are the future of democracy. Randomly selected citizens, selected by stratified sampling for representativeness, are able to deliberate at a farm higher standard of discourse than elected officials. Such assemblies have performed extremely well so far in Ireland, France and Belgium

Ranked choice won't solve our problems. Approval voting, single transferrable votes, or mixed member proportional elections won't solve our problems. Elections have intractable problems, they cannot be solved because they are inherent to the process. The ancient Athenians understood this.

The way forward is sortition. Not randomly selecting people directly to office mind you, but convening deliberative citizens assemblies to directly weigh in on issues and even potentially to appoint officials to govern. There is a rising movement to implement such reforms that has started to gain a foothold in Ireland, France and Belgium.

Those who want to know more should look into the Sortition Foundation and DemocracyNext.

There is no "US police force". Every non-tiny municipality has its own police force. Countries have sheriff's departments, and state governments have their own police. These are all separate institutions with different policies, norms, and practices.

It is not taxed federally because it is not considered income. Similar how getting repayment for a debt is not income. Idk about state taxes.

You still have to pay blockchain fees on crypto transactions.

You can't have a functional democracy based on voting and elections, they are too easy to corrupt. We need to transition to sortition and deliberative citizens assemblies.

I'm sure NASA is thrilled as well, since this is great news for the Artemis program.

A lot of the productions themselves have to borrow money to get made. Higher interest rates means shows and movies cost more to produce.

The Falcon 9 second stage doesn't survive reentry and the booster only needs to get through a partial reentry at much slower velocity.

Idk I wore old clothes in school even though my parents were well off and no one made fun of me. Different local cultures I guess.

The Master and His Emissary by Ian McGilchrist

Why Materialism is Baloney by Bernardo Kastrup

The first one really opened my mind to alternate modes of thought. The first half of the book is especially interesting, the second half is skippable. I don't think I could have appreciated the second book if I hadn't read the first.

The Dictator's Handbook by Bueno de Mesquita and Smith is another good one. Afaik, the first successful attempt to create a true theory of politics.

No thanks, I'd rather not permanently destroy a productive and innovative industry with communist schemes.

Where does one go to find these vendors? Are they the sorts of places that other sites prohibit links to?

No thanks, I'd rather get the AI results than SEO blogspam

Ultimately what matters most is what incentives the police have. If they have bad incentives, fancy new tech won't actually be used for public benefits

They key difference is that only nobles could have private property.

No thanks, I'd rather my tax dollars not be wasted on a pointless boondoggle.

Private property under feudalism wasn't available to all. There can be no capitalism without liberalism. Property rights as a matter of law and everyone being equal under the law is essential.

Earlier partial market economies were in practice more like command economies with relatively small free markets in certain sectors.

It doesn't even work that well at the local level. The Kibbutzim in Israel were socialist for like 70 years, but now are almost all mixed market capitalist in some form or another.

Syndicalism in practice is closer to capitalism than socialism, and the syndicates are the de facto state.

There are some large co-ops in the US. The largest iirc is CHS, a tier 2 co-op (co-op made of smaller co-ops).

This is not socialism, it is syndicalism. Some argue that syndicalism is a type of socialism, but in practice, it behaves more like a type of capitalism.

>Pursuing a co-operative model is far from plain sailing, however. Numerous hurdles exist. For one, membership does not come cheap. To join a co-operative, workers typically put up a one-off payment of about €17,000 each. Plus, just as they are entitled to a share of any profits, so, too, are they liable for any losses. Commercial pressures can also prove acute, as Fagor Electrodomésticos’s troubled history shows. The fact that all major investment decisions have to be put to the vote can also make Mondragón’s co-operatives less agile than their conventional competitors. And finding financing can be problematic as the private capital markets are effectively closed to them, admits Fagor Arrasate’s Mendieta: “We can’t incorporate external capital into the co-operative’s share capital because we are governed by the principle of ‘one person, one vote’, which no capitalist investor would accept.”

As with any system, there are tradeoffs.

Or at least it would if it didn't bundle YouTube together with YouTube music

I think possession of lockpicks is illegal in NYC as well. Though I doubt they're enforcing that rn

Technically they are being charged with misuse of public funds, not embezzlement, as they didn't steal the funds.