mpa92643

The Reddit API changes around third party apps like a lot of other people here. It was so clear they were being disingenuous about the changes and that it was a de facto ban. Pretending it wasn't a ban and that they "support third party developers" really pissed me off.

It's one thing to charge for API access (which is not unreasonable, per se, since API calls cost Reddit money), but Reddit decided to charge an extremely unreasonable and unjustifiable rate to third party app developers. On top of that, they decided NSFW labeled content could only be seen in their official app and could never show up in any third party apps that decided to pay for API access. They claimed it was about "making sure children don't see adult content," but that was clearly BS since they could just not serve that content in the API for non-18+ accounts and require third party developers to agree to certain terms of use or have their app cut off.

So Reddit forced third party apps to have to charge a subscription fee to their users and those users would not get full access to Reddit content anyway. Gee, I wonder what users will do if they have to choose between paying a subscription for less content or using the crappy official app with worse and fewer features to get all content for free...

The disingenuousness of the justification for the changes and pretending there was no ulterior motive was worse to me than the changes themselves. I missed Reddit a lot at first, and occasionally I still do, but I haven't been back since.

They're not centrists. Not a single one.

They just realize this is a political loser and are pretending to buck party leadership because they're all in districts that they're almost certain to lose in the midterms. They know the Senate will never approve the subsidy extension. It's all about publicity for them. I hate that they're being described everywhere in the media as moderates just because they realized they're going to lose their next election unless they act like they support the ACA.

They all voted for the Medicaid cuts. Bresnahan in particular put on this big show saying how he's "a hard no on Medicaid cuts" and that he "told leadership I'm not backing down."

Then the bill came up for a vote and, surprise surprise, he voted for it without hesitation, then insisted it wasn't actually Medicaid cuts because it was "only targeting fraud."

Makes me think of Dark Souls

Any market where choosing not to participate is simply not a viable option should be prohibited from being for-profit.

If all smartphone makers start getting too greedy and charge too much, people will just not upgrade their phones and the smartphone makers will have to lower their prices or justify their higher prices with innovations. People can choose not to participate in the market and pressure the entire industry to lower their prices or create new features to encourage participation.

If insurance starts getting (read: gets even more) greedy, cancelling your insurance isn't an option, especially if you're sick. Foregoing insurance means either dying or accumulating extraordinary medical debt you can never repay. There is no pressure on insurance companies to lower their prices because you will always have to pick one of them. As long as they all increase their prices together, they all benefit and their profit keeps going up. Their only "innovations" in the industry are to minimize payments for medical services and maximize how much they shove in their pockets.

For-profit health insurance should be illegal.

We don't have a parliamentary system where a party can kick out an elected member for not supporting the party's agenda and replace them with someone else. Each member is individually elected to represent their state or district. For better or for worse, they get to decide what is best for their constituents and their constituents get to respond in the next election.

Joe Manchin was the major impediment in 2021-2023. He mostly supported the party's agenda but had some sticking points. He had to be onboard with whatever passed given the razor thin majority.

I saw all these screeds about how he should be kicked out of the party, but the objective reality is there is very little you can do to pressure a centrist Democrat from a state that voted for Trump by 50 points. The only option available was to placate him and come to a compromise (which he ultimately agreed to for major climate change reduction investment).

The reality is that the Democratic Party is not monolithic, it has some centrists who don't support some of the more ambitious goals of the party. If you want bigger action, you have to have a bigger majority. Slim majorities give small wings of the party outsized influence on policy.

The thing you have to keep reminding yourself is just how disconnected from politics the average voter is. We've seen 2 full months of every day bringing some new chaos, but for most Americans, the only major things that have happened are:

1. Elon Musk is firing lots of government workers
2. Trump is enacting tariffs

Everything else is just noise to them and they filter it out. Until things really start to affect them directly, apathetic Trump voters who thought voting for him would magically turn the economy back to what it was before Covid are going to assume things are improving (because they already were before the election, they were just in a sour mood and refused to admit it).

The short answer is basically Trump supporters are overrepresented in the watchers. Biden also got numbers in the high 60s.

Democrats don't usually force shutdowns because the people most likely to suffer under a shutdown are federal, state, and local government employees, people who work in academia, and people in major metropolitan areas, all of whom make up a significant portion of the Democratic base. It doesn't make sense to force a shutdown if your own voters are just going to blame you for the disruption it causes to their lives anyway.

Now there's far more to lose, and Trump is going to get the blame for it. Shutdown for a few weeks to protect a few hundred thousand federal workers for at least a year is a pretty safe gamble when you're not likely to get blamed for the short-term disruption anyway.

Absolutely. They can't amend the Constitution through ordinary means. Which is why they've installed a bunch of extreme right-wing Supreme Court justices who can interpret the Constitution however they want to benefit right-wing extremists.

Here's a completely plausible scenario: Donald Trump orders ICE to deport any child born here to non-citizen parents in complete defiance of the court order. The district court judge gets really annoyed and issues criminal contempt rulings against the head of DHS and ICE for disobeying an order of the court. Trump orders DHS and ICE to ignore the court and promises pardons to anyone facing criminal contempt charges.

Because the SCOTUS has ruled "core powers" are "absolutely immune" and the pardon is an explicit power granted to the president with no limitations, he can use the pardon power literally however he wants, including as part of a criminal conspiracy to break the law.

And bam, full blown constitutional crisis because the SCOTUS basically neutered the entire judicial branch and gave the president dictatorial powers.

Strategic tariffs can be useful for lots of reasons. Protecting a culturally important industry, supporting certain values in that industry that aren't respected in other countries, maintaining an industry that is important to national security (e.g., domestic steel production) that would be difficult to ramp up in an emergency if the domestic industry collapses in the face of foreign competition.

The inherent tradeoff is that there will be retaliation by the tariff recipient on some other industry in your country; you basically accept a detriment for one domestic industry to gain a benefit for another.

But blanket tariffs are just stupid. There are lots of industries for which it will never be cheaper to produce locally than in low-wage countries in East or Southeast Asia and that are the kinds of jobs most industrialized nation workers just aren't interested in doing. Companies will simply pass that tariff onto consumers instead of investing massive capital and spending much more on labor to relocate domestically.

People will buy less of everything because it's suddenly way more expensive. Companies will sell less and have to lay people off. Blanket tariffs are effectively a regressive tax increase that directly impacts economic growth.

This may help

https://youtu.be/24ib5pMkprY?t=95

You know what's really insane? Before the ACA was passed, there was no federal requirement for how much insurance companies had to pay out on healthcare costs. The ACA set a minimum of 85%, so no less than 85% of premiums has to actually go toward paying for medical services.

Before that, they could literally just pocket 75 cents for every premium dollar if they wanted to with zero legal repercussions. I guarantee we'd be on our way there if the ACA were never passed.

For-profit health insurance should be illegal. Same thing with for-profit hospitals. I've read stories about doctors whose hospitals were bought by for-profits or VCs and turned into patient mills where they're forced to push unnecessary elective surgeries and provide the bare minimum of care to maximize profits.

A healthy population is good for society and it should be something we invest in. We shouldn't make a business out of someone getting sick, and then another business out of charging then exorbitant amounts of money for getting treatment, and then ANOTHER business to harass them because they can't pay that exorbitant amount.