FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
2d ago
Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. But regardless, it should be clearly marked. Many of them seem not to have a mute button at all.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
3d ago
Something really interesting to me, in a casual way, is that we don't see extremely different cultural and historical trajectories between countries that were involved in WWI and WWII in Europe and countries that weren't.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
3d ago
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Automated voices on self-checkout gas pumps and cashier stations must be muted by a single clearly marked button press. If this makes it harder for you to run self-checkout, hire cashiers. Any time a store implements self-checkout, they must have a CostCo style cart-checker on the way out. It is unacceptable to me how easy it is to steal from Grocery stores, and that the grocers have decided that they'll just let dishonest people steal rather than hire someone. It makes me want to steal.
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On a related note, create a process by which jobs can be certified as "easy" by OSHA and thus eligible for lower-than-minimum wage. Such as the aforementioned cart checkers. It should be possible to hire someone for a job that isn't worth minimum wage.
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Abolish almost all police enforcement personnel. Police should function purely in investigative and administrative roles. Instead, a 2% flat income tax on all citizens will fund both detectives and a public militia consisting of all able-bodied individuals. Every male citizen will be expected to serve 20 hours of militia service per month, patrolling local neighborhoods on call for emergencies. Completing your service hours will entitle you to avoid paying the tax, if you don't serve you do pay the tax. Citizen militias will be on hand at all times, day and night, to respond to crime calls and other emergencies.
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Abolish DA and PD offices. Rather, the roles will be combined as State's Lawyers, and the same lawyers will be assigned randomly to prosecute or defend any given defendant. This will mean that defense attorneys and prosecutors will have the same experience, relationships, and access to investigative, police, and judges.
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All fitness and sport equipment will be tax-free.
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Significant encouragement towards mixed-income and mixed-use housing developments. The ideal layout is the classic American small town, where a series of small row-homes and apartment buildings border large corner homes where the local Doctor/Lawyer/Banker lived. There is significant value in having poor and rich Americans interact and form social bonds.
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No product can be marketed using any kind of patriotic or "American" theme unless it is owned, headquartered, and predominantly assembled in America.
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Strong encouragement for alternatives to graveyards. Graveyards are becoming increasingly sprawling, depressing eyesores of identikit headstones, poorly maintained because of bad finances, too large because of a system built for a much smaller population. A bitch and a half to move if development becomes necessary. Cremation, mausoleums, Tibetan Sky Funerals, go wild. But graveyards are a problem.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
3d ago
I would guess that Iran wanted higher casualties, but also did not want to invite instant retaliation. I guess they might have wanted to achieve a dozen causalities or so. They erred on the side of too few, which is a lot better than erring on the side of too many for everyone. On the plus side, they learned something about Israel's missile defense capabilities.
This assumes that Iranian leaders are constrained to believe in the Israeli government and media's official reports. They are not. Iran is free to spread to its own people that significant damage was done to Israel and that the Jewish world media conspiracy is covering it up.
I've lived and worked around Amish and Mennonite communities my entire life. I admire their lifestyle, their community, and their philosophy. I think the world has a lot to learn from the Amish, especially in terms of the communal decision to adopt technological standards. I buy my produce from Amish farms whenever possible, I have worked alongside Mennonite contractors, I grew up around scoutmasters and farmers and distant uncles with PA dutch accents, I would guess that my interactions with Amish-and-adjacent folks is probably top-5 on this forum at the very least. I know and admire the hell out of the Amish, I highly recommend Knock's essay Utopia in Pennsylvania. That said, the refutation to the Amish question is pretty thorough and not particularly difficult:
They're essentially parasitic on the USA. The Amish have no defense policy, they don't even really have a police force or a court system. They rely on the English for any of those things when they become necessary. Their safety from external threats is entirely dependent on the broader American nation. It's not really a scalable solution. Somebody needs to do all the things that allow the systems to exist by which Amish communities are protected, allowed to function.
As a comparison they suffer from the Private School problem: private schools can expel students more or less at will for behavioral problems, while public schools have to educate every student. Amish communities don't have lots of drug use because if you start using drugs, you're cruisin' for a shunning. Assuming that the kind of person who wants to do drugs wouldn't simply leave the Amish community of his own accord. If you allowed any town to simply exile anyone who refuses to obey social rules, the statistical outcomes for the remaining residents would improve.
The whole theological concept of Anabaptism is built on the core idea of informed adult choice, they reject infant baptism because they believe that people should choose to enter the faith in a fully informed way. All Amish have total free choice to stay or leave at any time, the only thing holding them there is social pressure. Statistics show that between 90-97% of Amish kids return from Rumspringa and join the church. ((I haven't dug into the statistics deeply, but I'm told that the stricter the community the more kids tend to leave permanently)) Imagine what NYC or SF or Seattle or your nightmare modern progressive hell-hole of choice would look like, if the bottom 3-10% of worst-behaved least socially adapted kids just left town at age 18 and never came back. Short of a federal prison, if you took the 3-10% of people who were most prone to choose something other than a peaceful happy life, whether in a slothful or a Faustian fashion, and removed them from the population, you would see massive improvements. Being Amish isn't just a status one is born into, it is also a set of choices one has made. If you narrowed the subset of the population in your statistics to people who have chosen to remain in the religion of their forebears, chosen to remain in their hometown, gotten married and had kids, had solid employment, I would bet the statistical gap narrows significantly.
@f3zinker 's frank The Grand Inquisitor style elitism is probably not all that uncommon. Yes, all these things might be bad for the population but not for me. This is visible in the fact that there are very few converts. While it would be difficult to enter some of the more strictly closed communities, there are Mennonite churches where outsiders are welcome to worship, and over time if one bought a nearby farm converts are welcomed to join the community over time if they show good faith. We don't see that happening at scale. People, who have the option to live this way, mostly don't.
From a progressive perspective: what about the oppressed within Amish communities? I've never met a gay affirming Amish community, though they'll deign to sell a gay couple some pies or quilts they're not about that kind of life. So what's a gay amish kid to do? The Amish are a community founded on religious dissent, but how does the religious dissenter fare? Where does the beaten Amish wife flee? Amish life is a mold by which most people who fit can be made happy, but some people by bad luck will not fit. What do they do? Where do they go? Well the answer in a world where the Amish community is parasitic upon the English community is: they leave the Amish. In an Amish world, that question may be more difficult to answer.
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