mozz

And get to tell junior congresspeople to get out and bring in $18,000 a day for you and your friends to use to elect more friends to office, which you then use to enrich yourself on a scale that makes the $18k/day look paltry.

I don’t know for sure but I can buy it. It would explain a lot.

So, there actually is a solution, and Britain did it until Thatcher came along, and it worked great: The government buys up a lot of property, and rents it to anyone who wants it at reasonable rates. They’ve got the money to do it, and it brings in income for them anyway, and it pierces the bubble so that private landlords can’t charge “market rates” and send the whole operation into an ever-increasing spiral of both rents and property values.

A lot of British landlords actually wound up selling to the government anyway, since the lack of a bubble means you can’t even make that much from renting out properties as a business venture, so they’d rather just get rid of the properties and invest in some other endeavor that’s an actual profit seeking enterprise. Literally everyone wins except the cockheads.

I am sure in America it would be absurdly unpopular, but it works great.

Car thief urges police to quit driving around in deserted car parks and stopping and asking questions that aren’t any of their business in the first place

There is actually a solution, and Britain did it until Thatcher came along, and it worked great: The government buys up a lot of property, and rents it to anyone who wants it at reasonable rates. They’ve got the money to do it, and it brings in income for them anyway, and it pierces the bubble so that private landlords can’t charge “market rates” and send the whole operation into an ever-increasing spiral of both rents and property values.

A lot of British landlords actually wound up selling to the government anyway, since the lack of a bubble means you can’t even make that much from renting out properties as a business venture, so they’d rather just get rid of the properties and invest in some other endeavor that’s an actual profit seeking enterprise. Literally everyone wins.

I am sure in America it would be absurdly unpopular, but it works great.

Never before have I seen such a confluence of right comment and wrong username

Maybe. The way I’ve heard it explained is that it’s time consuming and humiliating for almost everyone though. Here’s the first random story I could find. I’m clearly missing something, though, since they clearly aren’t putting a stop to it, so maybe you are correct and it’s only the scrubs that have to go to the call center.

I suspect that “let’s walk around / drive our tanks around / etc, in the open, without having taken measures to make sure the drones can’t get us” will soon start to look like those “let’s everyone run at the machine guns at once, they can’t shoot us all” tactics from World War I that in retrospect makes the commanders look like idiots because they did them for years instead of abandoning them on week 1 when it became clear they were bad ideas

The “ban” is nothing of the sort, this is a much more accurate story

Cricut has excellent customer service. In addition, their web site also has one of those chat bots that wants you to explain your problem to the AI, and it worked flawlessly for a fairly complicated problem the one time I needed it. I was pretty surprised.

It's okay to be direct a little bit.

"You don't wash the mushrooms? It says on the package, man, they might have poop or pesticide or whatever else."

"Okay, well if I'm gonna be eating them can I wash them? I'll make 'em up, man, I'm not telling you what to do. But I don't wanna eat anything that's on them that might be bad for me. I would prefer not to at least."

I don't know, you can adapt the language, or stay away from the whole conversation if it really feels wrong. But usually if there's an issue it's better to say what the issue is even if it's a little uncomfortable. You're not making a problem or starting a confrontation, it's just saying what's on your mind and sharing. Otherwise you don't really have friends and allies, just sort of alien people you're going through the motions with while you each harbor your own little secret thoughts all through the evening.

Having to grovel for money and spend a lot of your working life strategizing how you can extract enough money from rich people, to pay for your next campaign, is a far too large part of every single congressperson’s agenda.

It’s not optional and it is time consuming and humiliating and it automatically puts a bunch of power in the hands of rich people instead of voters. It’s for real a little bit confusing to me why the congresspeople don’t put a stop to it (publicly funded elections).