If heroin was fully legalized, zero restrictions, we’d be much better off than the current situation we have right now with the war on drugs, fentanyl analogs, and xylazine. Full stop.

If we hadn’t invaded Afghanistan and started importing heroin in bulk through Ahmed Wali Karzai’s mafia connections, we wouldn’t have tons of cheap heroin to hook people to begin with. Also, we did have fully legalized (functionally) zero restrictions opioids, back under Bush Jr.

That’s what Oxycotin was.

If you want to describe the US as a criminal nacro-state, you can start at the Florida pill-mills that flooded the country with hundreds of billions of dollars in highly addictive prescription drugs and made the Sackler Family some of the wealthiest people on the planet.

Based on this I’m not gonna read the rest of the article

I don’t work at Amazon, but we have a similar system. I’ve gone all-in on a couple of subordinates saying they deserved a 4/5 for this or that work. And because they were new-hires, I eventually got the grades punched through after a bunch of hemming and hawing.

Also advocated for my own higher-than-average marks on a few occasions. And just arguing the case gave me the grade as often as not. If everyone in the department had been as stubborn and insistent, I don’t know that they’d have given the whole floor these grades. But the squeaky wheel…

I’ve got a few friends who work at Amazon, and while the story certainly sounds embellished and a bit too “just-so”, the corporate attitude of make-work to justify a promotion even when its a waste of time and resources rings true as a bell.

Did this guy actually oversee a fully transition to a new service and waste a bunch of internal time and money for a system that’s sub-optimal by any conceivable measure? Idk, maybe. If he’d just written “Twitter” instead of “Amazon”, I’d have taken it at face value no problem.

Did this guy author an overly-complex plan as part of his promotional material, get it vetted and reviewed and rubber stamped by a bunch of friendly higher-ups because they wanted to justify his promotion, and then stuck on a shelf marked “Maybe we’ll do this in 2029 if we’re not busy with something else”? Equally likely.

Does Amazon have a bunch of bread and butter break-fix work they could be dedicating staff to, rather than chasing the next digital White Whale so they can feel cutting edge? Yeah, no shit. Absolutely.

price gouging laws only restrict predatory price increases on essential goods during officially declared states of emergency

I mean, maybe there’s something in the fine print I’m unaware of. But do you think this Instacart model turns off for a neighborhood hit by a hurricane or wildfire or flood?

I don’t see AGs offices zealously enforcing laws at even this scale, so its something of a moot point. If your DOJ is owned and operated by crooks, they won’t be going after their friends and co-conspirators anyway. And Instacart is fully in bed with the Silicon Valley crowd, which have been successfully paying off politicians left, right, and center since the Clinton Administration.

It creates a situation where an AG’s office with limited manpower and prosecutorial capacity needs to selectively enforce the law in order to shock the public into general compliance. Less “everyone is guilty” and more “too many people are potentially suspect but only a few of them have cases that could actually hold up in court”.

USAs generally hate trying cases that get tossed out or lose at trial. So they try to focus on cases they know they can win - either because the defendant can’t afford quality legal council or the case is so air-tight that a jury will easily convict. Incompetent USAs can quickly get themselves into a position where a defendant can get top flight defense and the prosecutor has to juggle a bunch of gaping flaws in the case. OJ Simpson is one classic example of such a case. Luigi Mangione may end up being another.

New customer discounts, student/senior discounts, etc. The problems arise when the nature of the reason they got a discount, or even the very fact that they did get a discount are hidden.

I’d argue even these arbitrary discounts are bad from a public policy perspective. What you’re describing is a hodgepodge of marketing and PR, intended to cultivate a loyal customer base with an eye towards maximizing revenue in the future once your client list is fully captured.

The better questions to be asking are “how much resources does it make to create Product X” and “what material benefit does the client receive from consuming Product X”? A high price is justified when a product is difficult to produce and highly beneficial to consume, on the grounds that the higher price subsidizes capital investment that bring production costs down long term.

But what Instacart is doing isn’t adding value to a product or pricing in cost of production. The website is instead trying to maximize the marginal profit on the purchaser. It’s the AI-equivalent of you asking “How much is that product?” and the vendor replying “It costs as much money as you have in your wallet.”

There’s no incentive to improve efficiency or maximize throughput in this model. It is entirely a zero-sum game of taking the client for as much cash as the vendor can possibly extract per transaction.

It’s not illegal, but it’s incredibly unethical and really should be illegal.

Funny you should say that because Price Gouging laws are absolutely a thing on the books. And overcharging an individual customer relative to the median historical price is a textbook violation. The question isn’t whether these actions are illegal, but whether any state AG will press criminal charges.

Says so right here.

I asked the Supreme Court, and in a 6-3 ruling they agreed that police tying a person to the bumper of a car and dragging them to death is within the constitutional purview of the executive branch. But a mayor-elect giving a neighbor advice on navigating the municipal bureaucracy while awaiting a green card is felony espionage and a clear and present danger to national security.

I requested clarification, at which point Samuel Alito reached under his robe, grunted, and began flinging feces at me while ICE agents swarmed in firing tear gas and demanding the press pool disperse.

Wonder who’d finance that?

Saudi Arabia

I can only see companies solely interested in stripping anything valuable from a pair of husks, or foreign investors looking to effectively own a great portion of the American cultural sphere.

Netflix is legitimately looking to consolidate streaming services into a functional monopoly. There’s a real value add in capturing all those HBO subscriptions and turning them into Netflix subscriptions. Plus, the benefit of adding the Netflix catalog to their own exclusive platform is self-apparent. Given the Netflix model for making movies - make one movie and reskin it a hundred times - this would be incredibly bleak for the HBO property set.

That said, Ellison has a ton of money coming in from his friends in Saudi Arabia and Softbank. And the Saudis really do seem to believe the future of their country is just a thousand data centers propping up a feudal style caliphate. Manipulating the world’s largest military through their idiot-boxes seems to be a winning formula for global hegemony, so there’s also plenty of value-add for The Kingdom.

So you’re probably right on both fronts.

Trump seems like he’s waiting for the two companies to compete at lining his pockets before he makes a decision.

Very possible that Ellison’s near-trillionaire dollar parent company can win in a slugging fight. But that cuts into his position to corner the market on national media, just as his inflated Oracle valuation is running into slightly-more-skeptical-than-a-goldfish Wall Street investment.

Meanwhile, Netflix only has $400B in equity to throw around, but appears to demonstrate some real value-add in consolidating with the other non-Disney Streaming Service that actually makes money. This isn’t just a vanity project for them.

Sure, in theory. But then you get a glut of responses and have to pick which ones you’d actually care to prosecute.

That’s a bunch of annoying manual work that nobody in Trump’s FBI / DOJ is willing (much less competent) to perform.

Have a friend working as an AUSA in Texas and he can confirm this letter went out a week ago.

It’s very vaguely and broadly written. Doesn’t do a great deal to identify who or what qualifies. Idk if officials are expected to hit some kind of Antifa Witchhunt quota or if raising a flag just brings a bunch of cheap reactionary heat down on the office itself.

My friend’s Africa American, so he’s not touching the request with a 10’ pole if he can avoid it. Most of his caseload is just meth dealers crossing state lines and interstate wire fraud, so there’s not a ton of Antifa to be found anyway.

18th century grammar nerds literally shitting and pissing and crying right now

If I have a cake, then I can definitely eat it, but if I eat it, then I can no longer have it.

If you change “have” to “keep” it is clearer in both instances. The second interpretation is clearer because it puts the consumption verb first, which implies this action precedes the subsequent verb. But the underlying statement holds true in either instance.

The example of “antisemitism” (a bunch of people are using the word to describe valid criticism of the state of israel) raised in an other comment here is also very relevant.

The joke of “antisemitism” is that Semitic People include Arabs and modern day Ethiopians/Somalians, two groups who are very explicitly and unapologetically persecuted by the Israeli state government. They do not include Eastern European expats who came to the Levant by way of Philadelphia.

Modern Western media describes an antisemite as a kind of anti-white racist critical of other western Jewish people in elite social circles. But the actual historical antisemitism - the one Henry Ford railed against in The International Jew and spammed across post-WW1 Europe after getting his brain cooked by Protocols of the Elders of Zion - is rooted in Christian Nationalism and anti-Immigration conspiracy theories that fit far more neatly with post-9/11 anti-Muslim racism and Cold War hostility towards the Third World.

The manipulation of language in this instance is a very deliberate effort to judo-flip the very idea of bigotry. You turn social energy aimed at pursuing an equitable and egalitarian society into an excuse to segregate the population and persecute poor immigrants and minorities.

¿ Por Que No Los Dos ?

Wouldn’t’ve

“Everyone” meaning folks off-line who you feel the urge to keep correcting because you got hounded by grammar nazis on the internet and now the “correct” meaning is branded into your skull.

Mamdani promised to execute the bourgeois class and redistribute housing to the proletariat and he’s already breaking promises

Most people aren’t cheering that we are rearming, but they understand that it is a necessary evil.

Plenty of people are chomping at the bit for a Glorious New War we can all watch on the TV.

Russia is right at our doorsteps

That hasn’t been true in over 40 years. And even when it was true, Europeans suffered far more under the paranoid police states of their own governments than any cross border conflict.

Personally I prefer the first option.

Not like any of us have a material say, but enjoy conscription I guess.