Salt in the wound: The default judgements locking in wage garnishment to pay illegal parts of the debt (on top of the immorality legal ones) because the kind of people who get these loans have many responsibilities and often can’t make an arbitrary court date, and it’s not clear to them the stakes are “show up or lose all recourse” (no appeals are possible).

A lot depends on how far the Supreme Court lets the Trump administration go with blatant law breaking. The veneer of system unity across multiple branches of government would give them a much better chance of avoiding '28 elections entirely, but if they are faced with the choice of following at least some critical laws or abandoning the veneer of lawfulness, it really increases the chances of a “divided they fall” scenario.

It also depends on whether MAGA coalesces around a successor. Factions with different visions of government have agreed to work together with Trump as a figurehead. If they don’t path to Trump term three, the successor selection is another opportunity for internal infighting to break their grip on power.

Scary times, and horrible unnecessary suffering for huge numbers of people on the way, but I still see hope to come out of it without the country disbanding.

Vacant homes in general, yes. Similar numbers of people have second homes for vacations as are homeless in the US. There are also quite a few abandoned homes in dying rural communities with no jobs.

Property management companies are managing rentals, not squatting. Some investors hold properties empty, but they aren’t in large enough numbers to be THE problem.

Sure you can: https://fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html

The people who care about executions being humane are generally opposed to the death penalty. People who support the death penalty generally want suffering to be inherent to the process. Only limit is whatever the Supreme Court deems “unusual”. Cruelty is allowed by the Constitution as long as it is “usual” cruelty.

In states that have death penalty (and federal when we have a president who supports death penalty), it’s the pro-death penalty groups - the ones that want it to cause suffering - that get to pick the process.

What figure is this? Sikh maybe?

There is deeply emotional resistance to the idea of topics being too complex for the average person to understand. The “experts” promote something that superficially contradicts our lived experience? They must be corrupt liars! Down with the experts!

The economy had, on balance, positive trends in 2024? We felt poorer, so economists should be lynched! /s

Feels scarily like America is moving towards something like China’s Great Leap Forward https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

The Great Leap Forward stemmed from multiple factors, including "the purge of intellectuals, the surge of less-educated radicals… Mao was dismissive of technical experts and basic economic principles…

Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster which was being caused by these policies… Mao did not retreat from his policies; instead, he blamed problems on bad implementation and “rightists” who opposed him…

…dozens of dams constructed in Zhumadian, Henan, during the Great Leap Forward collapsed in 1975 (under the influence of Typhoon Nina)… with estimates of its death toll ranging from tens of thousands to 240,000.

The failure of agricultural policies… suppressed the food supply… The shortage of supply clashed with an explosion in demand, leading to millions of deaths from severe famine.

I think they lack a diaphragm. It was weird reading in my cockatiel care books that some handling on the neck was fine, but even small pressure to their chest could prevent them from breathing.

Neat to see some competition developing in this space.

Being invested at an identity level is a human trait, not a Republican or MAGA one. It’s not “lately”, it’s all of human history.

We all readily recognize the blind spots in people we consider part of an out-group. Becoming more aware of the blind spots of people we consider fellow in-group members, and especially in ourselves, is more difficult, but I believe important to strive for. Having blind spots is natural. Recognizing them and trying to compensate for them in our thinking can benefit decision-making.

In the case of “are the tattoos on this guy’s fingers MS13-related”, there is way more substantive discussion to be had than demanding the guy’s girlfriend dig up and share publicly a years-old couple’s picture without the emoji. Some quotes below if they are of interest, and the article has a picture with the full fingers and their tattoos fully visible in case that really was what you were going for. https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/01/politics/abrego-garcias-tattoos-explainer

“I see a bunch of symbols that could be interpreted any number of ways,” Jorja Leap, a University of California, Los Angeles professor who has served as an expert gang witness in court, told CNN.

…“These are definitely NOT MS-13 tattoos,” Thomas Ward, a University of Southern California professor who spent years embedded with MS-13 researching the gang, and is the author of an ethnography that studies MS-13, said in an email.

…While some gangs will opt for more low-profile or ambiguous means of identifying members to evade detection from law enforcement or rival gang members, MS-13 tattoos, according to Leap, aren’t exactly subtle. They are used to market the gang’s brutality.

“MS-13 members have tattoos that say ‘MS-13,’” Leap said. “They’re not head-scratchers; they’re billboards. There’s no ambiguity.”

Birthers claimed for years that seeing Obama’s long form birth certificate would alleviate their citizenship concerns. Spoiler: it didn’t, they moved the goal posts.

Once people are identity-level invested in something being true - in this case that deportations are about public safety and not racism, because no way could they or people they respect be racist - sinking time into producing evidence for them is futile. It is no longer about facts, it’s about identity. Sometimes people break out of these self-imposed mental prisons if a main trusted person who helped lead them there loses their trust for an unrelated reason (not one that had become identity-latched). Sometimes being welcomed into a different community that fulfills those identity needs will let them see their previously identity-latched falsehoods as false. But evidence is always futile.

Neat to see a 6-7 solar mass black hole spotted. First one without a companion star to give it away! As we get better at finding black holes of this size, will be interesting to see if they end up explaining part of the “dark matter” problem.

As long as it’s mutually wanted. One of the women interviewed for the article started building her career later in the marriage, and cites her husband’s anger at her increasing independence as a major factor in their divorce.

Apparently she started out saying AI, then switched to A1 mid-statement. Might have been corrected privately before, but it only partially took.

Elsewhere in the thread, someone said non-primate mammals (like mice) are dichromic (can’t see orange), but birds are quadchromic (see even more colors than trichromics like primates). Is your cat only a good mouse-hunter, and comparatively a bad bird-hunter?

Apparently pink works as well, if a hunter wants a second color vest

I guess people eating a basket of shrimp are balanced out by people sharing one cow with several hundred others.

Well, changing it dramatically. It’s going to stay within historical ranges where ocean life flourished, but without any exoskeleton-heavy animals like corals in the mix.

Military conquest. That line of thinking was a big driver for Germany and Japan in WWII. Scary to see that path opening as a possible future.

Not sure about now, but there was a time period where he owned no properties and lived in the houses of friends. Staying in someone’s fourth home is not a hardship, but technically he didn’t have a home.