Pretty sure 90% of the posters of the type at the top of the article are made for $0. I bet for $10 you could get real artists from non-Western countries to make a simple poster, but these days people would probably claim those $10 jobs and then have AI generate them anyway.
I posted a longer comment above which kinda answers this but without repeating myself too much, Republicans mainly serve to keep Democrats from being able to consolidate power, and Democrats have now shown us what 15 years of a (D) trifecta gets you.
Taxes are higher than ever, cost of living has spiked even more here than other places, tens of billions wasted on CAHSR with nothing to show for it, and no good news on homelessness, poverty, or housing costs either.
Crime has been gradually going down per capita (at least what people have bothered to report), but that's a nationwide trend. If Dems are as good at governing as they claim to be, they ought to have more to show for their efforts than "we had the same results as Texas did."
And the latest Democratic superstars like Mamdani enter the picture, with "government run grocery stores" as his big innovation?
So, my question is why wouldn't one want to deprive these people of more power?
Edit: I'd like to add a reasonable example of what a successful (D) trifecta should have got us, lest you think I'm just some conservative who doesn't want them to accomplish any progressive goals:
As the largest state in the union, California has tremendous power. It could have come up with a 'MediCare for all'-like plan, which would cover all Californians who don't have MediCare. Basically a single public agency that insures all of us, and is run efficiently and transparently and which returns all premiums paid that aren't spent on care as a dividend check back to the taxpayers proportionally to what you paid in. If they accomplished nothing but that in 15 years I'd consider them worth supporting for that alone.
If they couldn't pull that off, successfully building HSR from SF to LA in a decade, by whatever means were necessary, would have been a pretty good accomplishment!
Or finally, if they could have caused enough housing to be built to just keep home prices stable, not even decreasing just stable.
I won't bother with the rest, but in the past 15 years Dems have only had 2 years of a "trifecta" while republicans have had 4.
Dems have had more presidential terms, the senate has been split, and Republicans have held the House for 11 of the past 15 years. The Supreme Court has been a Republican majority the whole 15 years (with an exception of a tie after Scalia died).
Republicans have the incredible ability to have overwhelming control and agency yet still act like the victims.
EDIT: In response to your edit... you claim Republicans exist solely to keep Democrats in check, and then you list a bunch of things Democrats weren't able to accomplish because they were blocked by Republicans. Your logic is that Dems are bad because they couldn't make certain things happen, but those things were all blocked by Republicans.
He’s literally doing the meme of republicans stopping democrats from legislating and then pointing to the lack of legislation as why they should be blocked.
Also lol at the trifecta for 15 years comment from him.
One party does not have an indisputable claim on being ethical.
Both of our political parties have done highly unethical things.
Without getting into a bunch of hot-button political fights, I'll just say: Different people prioritize different issues and the parties (and their politicians) each have a lot to be ashamed of.
I'd push back on that. Trump is the uhh... Trump... of 'economic central planning and limiting economic freedom'. He's clearly an idiot who can't even utter a single sensible sentence about economic policy of any kind.
The GOP itself though, really serves one important role: They interfere with Democrats getting and holding power. The Democratic Party has become the party of unserious economic policymaking, especially in California, where they've doubled and tripled down on their "no amount of taxation is enough" ideas - they will likely pass a wealth tax this year, setting a precedent for outright confiscation of property. "Just for billionaires!" Until they are accustomed to that extra money but the billionaires have all left, of course. Then where's it gonna come from?
If I had money to blow on politics, I'd give to Republicans in this cycle, even if I was pro-choice, pro-gay-marriage, anti-gun, irreligious, and pro-free-trade[1], because the Democrats have, much as the Republicans did in 2015, let their loons take the wheel and I don't want them to be given more power and influence.
Trump will pass away of natural causes someday and at that point, grown-ups will take over the policy discussions at the GOP. The opposite is happening in the Democratic party -- the old, retiring Dems understood economics and also how to negotiate with Republicans to get things done. The young ones that replace them learned everything they know about economics and politics at protest marches or perhaps on TikTok. And it shows.
It's somewhat amusing to read a defense of the GOP focused on a state over-taxing. Federal over-spending is possible without short-term tax increases b/c the federal government runs a big deficit. If the Federal government had to keep a balanced budget, Trump's policies would have raised everyone's taxes far more than anything the state of California would ever dream of.
(future generations will be taxed for all of Trump's gravy train)
Tying the fine to intent or gross negligence doesn't work for me, as a customer doesn't care why, they only care that the harm happened. Doesn't matter to me if you train everyone really well and one guy forgot his training just one time, or if you don't train at all.
I'm thinking:
(The following example is in "American" terms, I assume some other countries have similar ideas as SSN though)
- Name and address or name and phone number leak: $100 per customer affected.
- Email: $50 per customer affected, or $100 if tied to any other data.
- Social Security numbers: $2000 per customer affected
- Unsalted or plaintext passwords: $500 per customer affected.
- Cap is the greater of 200% of annual EBITDA, or 20% of revenue
Money goes to the government to be distributed DIRECTLY (tax-free) to the affected users.
This might bankrupt a couple of companies in particularly bad breaches, while companies are still getting used to it. Good! I hope it does and that business textbooks highlight those disasters, the way they do the Enron collapse.
My goals for this system are for businesses to properly price in the risk of holding (or even momentarily touching) sensitive data. SSNs, for instance should already (in a sane world) be radioactive for any business to even CONSIDER touching. To the extent any business feels the need to collect or hold it, frankly I'd say, think again. Credit reporting agencies are the worst offenders (and under my rules Equifax would already be gone), as they maintain databases with that as primary key, and force all their customers to deal in that key, instead of taking advantage of some 1990s technology like one-way hashing, or better yet, coming up with their own identifiers that could be replaced responsibly in the case of breaches.
The irony is that corporations get a higher discount the more people they affect. Damaging 10,000,000 people should cost you more than 10,000,000 times the cost of damaging one, not less. It should be ruinous to cause damage at this scale.
SSN should be 1MM+. It is a password to your national identity that can be used to steal your identity and effectively cannot be revoked once leaked. It is a permanent grievous injury to someone to leak it.
You’re jumping - aggressively - to the conclusion that there’s a “being” inside my laptop once I’ve downloaded a large enough matrix of numbers. Or once I’m running it on the GPU? Idk.
It’s on you to prove that claim before telling us we’re enslaving beings.
What you're describing sounds precisely like the state of politics. The most successful politicians on both sides just scream "simple" solutions that don't stand up to even cursory examination. On the one hand, Trump, with 90% of his pronouncements being of that variety. And the DSA type, who just scream that we can fix everything if only we had much higher taxes (but ONLY for "billionaires" who would definitely pay them, perpetually, and wouldn't just leave).
The article asserts with little proof that lockout risk is a big problem. But consumer sites themselves basically 100% of the time have a recovery path that amounts to a SMS code or emailed code.
The only part that is very persuasive is the part about storing your passkeys with Google or Apple integrations, and what happens if they ban your account. But the same argument would apply if you’re only storing your passwords in a Google or Apple password manager.
I use passkeys and I always store them in a password manager I control - but usually I also store another one in the OS on Windows, Apple, and Google. Best of all worlds. Also, I appreciate that idiots aren’t forcing me to “change my passkeys” every 90 months like they STILL do with passwords!
I know I can't speak for everyone, but I at least don't see the passkey as even pretending to solve that.
There frankly is no solution for the problem you are talking about, because the 'average person' is extremely disorganized and barely understands anything about security or authentication, let alone how to manage their passwords/secrets effectively. And it appears consumers "don't want" that... arguably for good reason. We accept a tiny chance of being hacked in exchange for knowing that if our house burns down with all our devices in it, we won't be locked out of an Apple/Google account for life, even if we weren't wise enough to keep a DVD full of exported passkeys or lists of recovery codes in a safe remote location.
Passkeys are in practice for one thing and one thing only (and they're very good at it!): Replacing passwords with something that unlike passwords:
1. The secret doesn't need to travel anywhere so it can't be stolen at authentication time
2. Uniform and large entropy not bounded by memorability, creativity, or misguided dumbass website owners ("Please use THESE AND ONLY THESE 'special' characters: ! @ $ % _ ")
3. Impossible to be improperly reused
4. Each device's secret is independently revocable.
5. Extremely difficult to 'phish' on a fake website.
Even if we don't fix the "analog hole" so to speak where you can either SMS-reset or socially-engineer someone into resetting it, if we could kill passwords globally and replace with Passkeys, it would be probably the biggest win for security. I'd challenge anyone to name a better single thing we could do.
You heat the water when you wash dishes by hand too, don't you? It's not very hygenic to do dishes with just cold water.
Given that by hand you use much more hot water than the dishwasher would, you're using more electricity (or gas). Since a little pump doesn't use much at all, it's mainly just the drying heat that matters. Though nobody is forced to use the drying cycle - if one enjoys drying dishes by hand, they can still use the dishwasher to do the washing.
In my house you don't heat the water but it's been sitting in a metal water tank at equitorial latitude for hours so is generally quite warm for evening dishes.
Is it safe? Not for a restaurant where the temps need to get to parasite killing temps to pass muster.. but if I had to guess, the odds of getting killed by a bad-tempered cow outweigh it by 10x.
You're assuming an absence of solar hot water heaters - the world isn't homogenous.
eg. Our household conserves water (we track every litre we bring up to the tanks and filter) and we don't have a dishwasher - hot water is heated by the sun and run-off goes to the grey water tank for the garden.
No I'm not. I don't care how you heat your water. I'm saying you (should) heat it either way, and you use more of it when hand-washing so if you do pay to heat it, you pay more by handwashing.
And in your case, you use more water because you hand-wash, than you would if you used a dishwasher. You use slightly less energy because of the pump but also a lot more of your time, so... obviously how you relatively value those different things is up to you.
Our concern here, and that of many people in the area, is total water usage per household - and to a large degree water usage for washing, showers, and toilets is a small fraction of the total usage - and one that can be ignored as most people have grey water capture (as do well planned and infrastructured cities).
Water used inside the house runs out to water food, shade, animals, etc. and that use can be deducted from the water that is required for those uses.
Energy is no great cost, it comes from the sun - both as electricity via panels and directly as heat via solar hot water systems.
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