Most of the fraud was the business loans, that they then forgave. That structure innately gave them the opportunity to take their time investigating them, after the benefit was already produced. They just chose not to.
The DoD was named such by the act of Congress that established it. The President does not have the authority to rename it, no matter how much he pouts about it.
Touché on the actual renaming, but I kind of prefer “war” anyways. It’s a refreshing removal of euphemisms, of which I believe we have way too many.
If you are on a plane and they announce they are collecting “service items” people might be confused and hand over their “service weapon” if they forget that one means trash and the other means gun. Good thing we have the TSA to prevent this kind of misunderstanding.
The problem is that there is a deliberate lack of information that clearly distinguishes the "technically a product" category from the "someone put effort into this" category. Price doesn't do it, brand doesn't do it, name recognition doesn't do it because companies are constantly enshittifying existing products, too.
The problem with that strategy is that, used at scale like it is, it just creates a perverse incentive to raise the prices on your crappy product, without changing anything else.
For example, in the liquor market, there are basically 4 price points for 750ml bottles: $20 and below is generally swill, but it's cheap swill. Companies here are competing on price. $40-60 gets you something worth drinking, but perhaps not prestigious. Companies here are competing on quality. $100 gets you something prestigious, and companies are competing on such, and the $200+ price point gets you something rare.
If I buy a $30 dollar bottle, in a sane world it would be something with a middling tradeoff between price and quality. Instead what you get is something that is as bad, if not worse, than the $20 stuff, because the company is simultaneously failing to compete on price AND on quality. That leaves them in the hail-mary zone of hoping to offload their product on uninformed buyers, who typically would be in $20 range, but think they're splurging on something a little nicer.
Same principle goes for consumer electronics, like headphones. There's the $20-ish range of cheap stuff, there's the >$100 range of good stuff (though less cleanly sorted than liquor, probably because people buy a lot more bottles over time than they do headphones), and no-mans land of $50 which suck and cost twice as much as the $20 pairs.
It's fantastic that we've reached a point where Down syndrome isn't a rather imminent death sentence, and that people are able to live fulfilling lives despite their disability.
But it's still a profound disability that leads to health complications that necessitate significant medical interventions to achieve a lifespan that's still reduced by ~10 years. Only about a third of the afflicted can live by themselves.
Their lifetime warranty used to be taken extremely seriously, and I really don't know what lifetime they were referring to. I had an old external frame pack that was my grandfather's back when my father was a Boy Scout. That pack outlived its buyer, and I was still using at Philmont where they had the same model as a museum piece. One of the zippers broke, and the back mesh was disintegrating, and pretty much as a joke we made a warranty claim. They honored that, circa 2012 or so.
Their schoolbags were pretty great in the 2000s, too. Withstood some serious abuse, though their zippers were notably on the decline. But that was covered by warranty, so it was fine. By the mid 2010's, they were in full decline, and that's about when I stopped recommending their stuff.
What's your pitch for reconciling an overturn of Citizens United with freedom of speech and association?
It's a tricky problem. Banning political spending for for-profit organizations is an easy win, but not a particularly big one. The big issue is PACs, and I can't come up with clean line to draw between "me and my friends got together to oppose evil policy XYZ" (which is clear, unambiguous 1st amendment activity) and "me and my billionaire cronies got together to oppose good policy ABC".
Since when are political donations speech? Last I checked, financial transfers involve NO expression of sentiment beyond “I want this person to have my money”. By that same logic all drug enforcement / wire fraud enforcement is also a violation of the first amendment. And why should we allow wealthy individuals to have more “voice” than others? It’s the most anti-democratic setup imaginable.
I would love to know what % of PACs - weighted by size (or “voice”, as you call it) - are operated as truly grassroots organizations with a normal distribution of contribution size. I’d put my money on <5%.
My solution is pretty simple. Do away with political donations altogether. People can still get together and make signs and go door to door for a candidate. And split the cost of pizza among themselves.
Generally PACs don't directly hand much money to politicians or their campaigns. Instead, they make and run ads, they organize speaking events, they spend money instead of some politician's campaign. That's why all the political ads have some "This ad was paid for by Americans for Extreme Goodliness" taglines. They're not being run by the campaign itself (which has limits on its funding, mostly transparency stuff, but not necessarily), they're run by PACs.
And that's basically impossible to curtail, without seriously violating fundamental 1st amendment protections.
Unless they try to make booze from woodchips, they'll be fine. Using fruit or grains or potatoes makes it really hard to end up with enough methanol to be dangerous.
Methanol is dangerous. But you are simply misinformed about the risk of methanol showing up in your homebrew spirits. It's not your fault: this has been a propagandized issue. But methanol poisoning was only a thing during the prohibition because the feds started poisoning the fuel ethanol supply with it, and people either served it to people unwittingly, maliciously, or tried and failed to separate out the ethanol.
In real homebrew, you are not at risk of methanol poisoning. If you brew some beer (step 1 to making yourself whiskey), the alcohol makeup ends up being in a 1:1000 ratio of methanol to ethanol. Distilling does not create any more methanol, it merely concentrates it. Let's play out the worst possible scenario here, where you're targeting azeotropic ethanol, and specifically targeting methanol with your cuts. In order to end up with a 100ml of methanol, you would need to be running a batch of targeting 100L (26 gallons) of ethanol, which means starting with 2,000L (530 gallons) of beer. That is wildly outside the range of casual home distilling.
And keep in mind in order to hit that worst case scenario, the distiller needs to know enough to be making cuts, but not know to discard the first cut, which is done normally even without methanol concerns simply because it contains a bunch of really disgusting aromatics.
"But you are simply misinformed about the risk of methanol showing up in your homebrew spirits."
I did not say that. I'm sick of being misquoted (at least twice to this story).
I well know that methanol only appears in trace amounts in drinking spirits (also naturally in trace amounts in one's gut/body sans drinking—it's even in fruit juice). That is not what I was talking about. What I said was:
"Many ways exist for methanol to enter the food chain both accidentally and through deliberate substitution for ethanol…"
In that paragraph I made no mention of homebrew spirits and it's clear I was referring to methanol manufactured in industry on an industrial scale. Industrially-manufactured methanol has found its way into the food chain and has killed people.
You should read my reply to reisse where I make it clear how methanol could enter the food chain (right, I also mentioned it earlier).
It's pretty obvious to me that if a large cultural rush/sudden fad to homebrew spirits were to happen (assuming the decision is upheld) then things will in all probability go wrong unless there's a broad reeducation about the potential for methanol substitution coupled with regulations covering sales especially through third parties.
I'm specifically referring to the US here, the entrepreneurial nature of business being what it is this decision will be seen by some (and a few is too many) to run amok and start trading HB spirits in ways traditional homebrewers would never (or very rarely) do
It's also worth reading the link on methanol poisoning in my reply to pessimizer.
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