NY Times, you sack of shit, the word you’re looking for is “an act of treason,” not “an escalation.”

Wealthy people use drugs at far higher rates than poor people. Drugs are expensive after all. The difference is that when you’re poor, drug use makes you homeless.

Also, I sure as hell would want to be high 24/7 if I had to sleep on the sidewalk.

Check your browser extensions. 🤣

You got the order backwards. Homelessness creates drug addiction, not the other way around.

Exactly. Start by not making homeless people jump through any moral more moralistic hoops than you ask home owners to jump through.

Your speculation doesn’t trump the massive real-world success and scientific evidence behind a housing-first approach.

You know the difference between a homeless person with mental health issues and a housed person with mental health issues? The latter has housing.

No one has been able to explain how Epstein got his money to get this whole thing started. He did also have a lot of ties to the Mossad and senior Isreali leaders. It’s pretty likely his work was an Israeli influence operation. Fund someone to build a sex island and staff it with illegally young girls that can’t be found in such numbers anywhere else. Provide means for the rich and powerful to discretely access the island. Fill the place with video and audio recording equipment. Create records of everything that happens there. Then, invite as many members of the American ruling class to rape children on the island as possible. You now have lifelong blackmail on every one of those people. For the cost of a few tens of millions, Israel bought itself control of the American political and business elite. Even if they only manage to snag 1 in 10 of these leaders in their web, it’s enough. That guarantees that whenever a big decision is made regarding US-Israeli relations, there will be someone in the room that the Mossad has lifelong blackmail material on. There are few more powerful forms of blackmail imaginable than telling someone “we literally have video of you raping children.”

It does go a long way to explaining both parties’ total capitulation to Israel. Up until the 1990s or so, Israel was an ally, but we didn’t see this fawning supplication we do now. Presidents were willing to actually stand up to the Israeli government and use American funding to rein them in. At the same time, Israel also wields the Mossad, probably the single most competent espionage, influence, and assassination outfit on the planet. Look at what they managed to do to all those Iranian nuclear scientists or the mass pager attack. The Mossad are terrifyingly competent, and they truly believe in their cause. Blackmailing the US political class on a massive scale is something entirely within their capability.

Well, at least I know your favorite sports team!

You must be a big fan of the Washington Generals.

This issue has been settled (violently).

It hasn’t been settled at all. All it would take for secession to be legal and an available option would be for someone to get elected president on a platform of “I’ll let states secede.” That’s literally all it would take. If the person commanding the military just refuses to use it to put down a secession, secession will happen.

It’s very easy for secession to be legal. You just have to have the federal government on board with it. Someone could absolutely run for president on a platform of, “I’ll let states secede from the union. If you want to go, I won’t stop you.” What SCOTUS says is irrelevant. If the president simply refused to send in the military to suppress any rebellion, secession would be fully legal.

One further benefit is that it allows you to optimize what little toilet paper you do buy towards strength. Normally there’s a tradeoff. Softer and less abrasive toilet paper is nicer on the bum, but it comes apart more easily. It can leave bits of toilet paper dust around and even tear at the most inopportune time. But if you’re only using a little to dry off, you can buy the strongest stuff you can find, regardless of how harsh it might be to use as regular dry wiping paper. Who cares if it feels like sandpaper if you’re just using it to pat yourself dry?

Plenty of people in your position fund their retirement off their home equity. It’s called a reverse mortgage. If you don’t have heirs you care about leaving the house to, it’s not a bad way to fund retirement.

Raising house prices do benefit you, if you don’t have kids or don’t otherwise have heirs you want to leave money to. Reverse mortgages exist, and their are millions of baby boomers financing their retirements off of the increases in their home equity.

I think the reason tech hadn’t been as enshittified in the 2010s was that the companies making these products and services could still grow profits just by expanding number of units sold. So you could make more money while also being good to your customers. Make great stuff, expand the potential market, make more profits, repeat.

Eventually however your market caps out. Eventually everyone who isn’t living in an uncontacted Amazon tribe or too poor to afford food already has a smart phone. It doesn’t matter how great the features are; the global market for smart phones will never be more than ten billion units a year. And likely never more than half of that. You can only sell so many phones in a year, and people can only afford to pay so much for them.

So what do you do if you can no longer grow profits by growing scale? You have to wring ever more profit out of each customer. And thus, enshittification.

Buy the toilet. Refuse the subscription. Box up your waste and mail it to the company.

I tend to sleep pretty hot, especially with the memory foam mattress we have. I actually looked into bed coolers at one point. A few companies make refrigerated bed chillers. They have a pad with tubes embedded in it that circulate fluid from a unit positioned next to the bed. They’re fairly pricey.

I almost got one, but I ended up trying something different. The devices tend to be pretty complex, often unreliable, and chained to spyware apps. Leaks in the lines can cause mold, and often they require regular cleaning by flushing cleaning solution through the lines.

Ultimately, I found a much simpler, reliable, and low tech solution - classic rubber hot water bottles. I have two rubber hot water bottles. I keep them full of water. Before bed, I’ll take them out of the freezer. In the morning, I put them back in the freezer. They do a great job of keeping the bed cool. Now, you don’t want to have a big block of ice in direct contact with your skin while sleeping. To avoid this, the bottles have an outer cloth case. There’s lots of different varieties of these bottles, but these are the ones I tried and have worked well for me.

Tell that to every farmer in the US. Do you seriously not know about the DMCA?

Read some Cory Doctorow.

And really, the politicians are fine with that. The goal isn’t the complete elimination of 3D printed ghost guns. The goal is to greatly increase the skill level required to print a 3D printed ghost gun. With relatively modest tools and enough skill, you can machine your own gun from scratch in your garage. Yet the barrier to entry is so high that few who seek guns for evil ends use these methods. A random street drug dealer might find the idea of printing a gun at the push of a button very tempting. But they are unlikely to find the idea of building a machine shop and learning machining appealing or practical. Or in your case, learning all about open source 3D printers and their software. Yours is just the 3D printer equivalent of the home gunsmith. Yes, you and people like you exist. But the politicians aren’t aiming for complete elimination, just vast reduction.

Accessibility matters. It’s why the printing press was such a big deal.