Makeitstop

I really hate how many people resent the idea of any kind of student loan forgiveness.

Billionaires set up vast financial systems for the sole purpose of dodging taxes. No bid contracts get handed out like candy to politically connected scumbags. An obscene amount of money gets dumped into insurance companies that only make your healthcare worse. Giant corporations violate laws and rob both workers and customers, and if anything is done at all it will be a tiny fine that's smaller than the profit from their crimes.

All those things that actually harm the rest of us? No big deal. But you suggest that maybe it's a bad idea to keep generations ensnared in crippling debt? THAT'S A FUCKING OUTRAGE!

I mean obviously it wouldn't be fair to have a policy that directly benefits some people but not others. Why should student loan borrowers get special treatment? Sure, I'll fucking riot if anyone touches my tax credits for having kids and a mortgage, but that's different, that's good for society... unlike education. Besides, it's not my fault your generation don't buy houses and start families. Oh don't bitch to me about how you can't afford it, maybe you shouldn't have taken those loans out then...

They didn't rule on the case, they just decided not to immediately lift the lower court's order blocking the deployment. Still better than 95% of their other rulings, but not a final decision.

If only I'd posted more than one sentence, maybe I could have addressed the issue of impeachment... even though the comment I was responding to specifically mentioned the legal system, and the point I was making was about how no legal safety mechanism can function when the people in charge of it are corrupt, which is a problem when the people at the top in all the branches of government are corrupt.

So it is the system’s fault for allowing this. Why not make the system so that the president or the ruling party alone cannot appoint the supreme court justices.

The president can nominate anyone, but they have to be approved by the senate. Every justice we had made it through that process, most before they scrapped the filibuster.

I mean I only spent 5 minutes thinking about this, but why not make the appointments work the same way they vote for laws? I.e. both parties, not individuals, have to vote and get a majority to appoint, and only in emergency situations could anyone appoint a justice without a vote.

The same should be done for appointing the highest attorneys in the country.

Legislation doesn't have to have support from both parties either. The filibuster rule makes it possible for a minority party to hold up certain things, but there is no requirement that anything be supported by both parties.

And even if we did have a system where a majority of both parties was required to approve a judicial appointment or attorney, that would just break the system even more. It would give a veto to the Republicans for every appointment regardless of which party is in the majority and they would gladly leave half the government vacant when they don't hold the white house, or make such extreme demands that it wouldn't matter which party the president belongs to. This would just give the most extreme group more power to grind the government to a halt and hold the whole system hostage.

How fucking stupid is it to allow the ruling party to control the justice system. It’s just asking to be abused by fascists.

Law should be politically impartial.

Yes, they should be. Unfortunately, those laws can only be written, enacted, interpreted, administered and enforced by people. Laws have no power on their own. And we have to have a process for determining who is in a position to oversee those laws. Some of those people are elected. Some are appointed. Some are hired or promoted independently within organizations that answer to elected and/or appointed officials. And there is necessarily a trade off when balancing power between elected officials (who are going to be the most politicized but also the ones who are answerable to the people directly) and those who are more independent (who can be less vulnerable to momentary political currents but also never have to answer to the general public).

As I said, there are many flaws in the American system, some of which are very big. But we also have numerous mechanisms that should prevent situations like this. The problem is they all require someone to do their fucking job and push back. Many of those furthest removed from electoral politics have been doing a lot to uphold legal and ethical standards. But when the elected officials and their appointees at the highest levels are either actively undermining the law or simply failing to do their duty to defend the law, it isn't the law that's at fault.

The problem is that you have a majority on the Supreme Court that are blatantly abusing their power and ignoring the law when it advances their side's agenda, including just declaring the president to be above the law.

This would be the kind of thing that should lead to impeachment, but that requires a supermajority in the senate (because you don't want whichever party has a majority to be able to easily abuse the impeachment process) but that won't happen because every single republican with even a hint of integrity has been pushed out by Trump over the past decade. And even if there were Republicans that weren't entirely corrupt, dismantling your own Supreme Court majority would be a tough sell politically. And even if they did remove the existing justices, it would just mean that Trump would get to appoint new ones that would be much worse and with many more years ahead of them.

And with Trump filling the executive branch with the worst scumbags he can find, chosen specifically for their willingness to be loyal sycophants who won't let ethics or laws get in the way of doing his bidding, you aren't going to get any help there. Again, this is exactly why the senate has to approve appointments but they are also scumbags right now. And for the same reason, the impeachment that should be happening for basically every member of this administration are not coming.

All that being said, there is resistance coming from both the executive and judicial branches. This administration has been firing people illegally in part because it can't get them to do the illegal shit they want them to do. And those illegal actions and the related illegal firings have been taken to court and the administration has lost nearly 95% off the time. Sometimes the Supreme Court has stepped in to bail them out, but in most cases the ruling stands and the administration has eventually complied.

All of which is to say that, while there are many flaws both big and small in the American system, it isn't the system itself that is at fault here, it's the elected officials and the corrupt assholes they appointed. There is no system that will work when every branch of government is in the hands of people who ignore their ethical and legal obligations.

Babylon 5

It will always be Babylon 5.* Great writing, great characters, great storytelling, and the ability to go from light and humorous to deep and meaningful or tragic and somber without any of it ever feeling out of place.

* OK, obviously I would like for something even better to come along and replace it, but I'm not holding my breath.

Every few years I get someone into B5 and rewatch the series along with them. And every time there's one or two more cast members gone.

Have to make a few assumptions to make this workable. Im assuming we're only allowing things that were made as a TV series, so not counting specials or anything that jumped from another medium like radio or theatrical releases. And we're only including fiction, so news and the like wouldn't count. And we only include things that have ended and only count the original run of a series.

With all those caveats, my best guess is I Love Lucy. Started in 1951 and the actor that played their kid is still alive, though he didn't join the cast until 1955.

EVs have been expensive in part because it costs money to switch production from ICE or build new production capacity, and to establish supply chains and take advantage of the economics of scale. That's a huge investment, but one that they have to make if they want to remain competitive in the long term.

The bigger issue has been that they aren't designing lower cost EVs. It's not exclusively an EV issue since they have been moving away from lower cost ICE vehicles for years too, it's just that EVs didn't have existing low cost product lines, and they're more interested in delaying EVs and using them as HALO products than in building a functional but low margin model. To say nothing of the many dealerships that have no interest in selling EVs and would rather steer people to a high margin gas guzzler.

As for solar, at the grid scale it's the cheapest power source available, with or without government funding, not to mention the fastest to deploy. And residential solar does make sense even without incentives. It will pay for itself, it's just the upfront cost that's the problem.The incentives make that easier, but even without them and with the need for financing, you still come out ahead as long as your monthly payment is in the same ballpark as your electric bill because the solar payments will stay the same over time until the loan is paid off, while your electricity rate will only ever go up.

HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told the Washington Post that the grants were terminated because they no longer align with departmental priorities.

Yeah, they're trying to save lives and protect children's health. The CDC no longer supports those goals.