Pipoca

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Pipoca ,

That wall isn’t structural. There’s a much thicker wall behind it; this is just a thin internal layer for running electric and mounting drywall.

Pipoca ,

So everyone who retires transitions from the working class to the owner class?

I’m not sure it’s that useful to say that a 70 year old retired engineer is owner class because they’re living off of the stock market returns of their 401k.

Pipoca ,

Crosswords have clues going across and down.

The words just use common letters so they’re things puzzle creators wish were real words. They’re not currently words.

Pipoca ,

He wasn’t perfect, sure. But I think you’re simultaneously giving him too much and too little credit.

Presidents are figureheads. They get blamed for a lot of trailing indicators they have little control over, and are limited by the particular congresses they have to deal with.

Recently, for example, Biden was pretty limited by the fact that any climate legislation has to get voted on by Joe Manchin.

Obama’s policies were impacted by what he thought he could pass.

Look at healthcare, for example. Obama was 32 when universal healthcare blew up pretty spectacularly in Clinton’s first year in office. Insurance companies, in particular, spent tens of millions on very successful FUD ad campaigns. Unions were against it, because they often negotiate for “cadillac plans”. Much like how Trump moved on after ‘repeal and replace’ failed dramatically, Clinton did as well.

Obamacare had the advantage that it wasn’t an existential threat to the insurance industry. Obamacare was deliberately something Obama thought he could successfully pass, while still being an incremental improvement. And, of course, it did actually pass.

Could Obama have passed Medicare for all instead, or would we have just seen a repeat of Clinton’s failure? Honestly, it’s impossible to know for sure.

Pipoca ,

Ish.

There’s ye as in “hear ye, hear ye”. That’s a y. It’s an inflected form of you, much as they had both thee and thou.

Then there’s writing þe as ye.

Pipoca ,

Britain uses the same system and has some successful third parties like the Scottish National Party.

Regional third parties tend to dramatically outperform national ones. Because FPTP does best with 2 candidate elections, but those 2 candidates don’t have to be in the same party across every district.

For presidential elections - yeah. You run a third party candidate like Nader, you get Bush. You run Perot, you get Clinton.

Pipoca ,

That’s literally what a land value tax does.

Pipoca ,

Land value taxes are quite rare in the US.

A property tax and a land value tax are a bit different: a land value tax taxes the unimproved value of a plot, while a property tax taxes the total value, including the assessed value of the buildings on the land.

One effect of property taxes is that a parking lot downtown pays a fraction of what an apartment building next door pays. With a land value tax, they pay the same, which discourages land speculation by encouraging efficient uses of land.

And we’ve certainly never gone as far as Georgism, which suggests a land value tax as the main or only source of government funding, set to be around what an unimproved lot on the same location would lease for.

Pipoca ,

He wasn’t well- known, but had had a bunch of assorted roles on TV and movies.

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