The "you can just not agree to it" argument is so bogus. You can only buy good/services that are for sale, and when they all have the same crappy terms, you have to agree to somebody's to live in the modern world.
That's like the people who claim only idiots live in HOAs but neglect the fact that, in some markets, nearly all real estate worth living in is covered by an HOA of some sort so your alternative isn't "buy a different house" it's "live in an apartment forever"
> You can only buy good/services that are for sale
The world is full of custom car builders. Buying a something like the F-150, but without the undesirable computing components, is quite practical and very possible.
It'll be expensive, which I expect is what you were really trying to say when you pretend there is no such thing for sale, but you're just returning us to the heart of discussion: The F-150 is cheap, comparatively, because it has already priced in the tracking subsidy. You're accepting of those undesirable terms because the lower price makes it compelling enough to do so.
Is it really "accepting a concession" if the "alternative" is so expensive as to not be an option anyway?
This is like telling someone who doesn't like that they have to wait in traffic they should just take a helicopter to work everyday. Yes, it's technically an option for some people, but for the vast majority it's not.
Yes. That concession is what gets one with limited means into an F-150. If it was sold at its true market value, absent of all value diminishing systems like tracking, they wouldn't be able to afford that either.
Same goes for roads. You most definitely can build roads that don't have traffic, but only the rich will be able to afford to use them. Traffic is what enables those of lesser means to also participate.
It's a pretty good tradeoff for those who are poor. And the rich can buy whatever they want anyway.
Yes, the world is full of custom car builders. I'm sure I'll find someone that can build me a replica of the f150 lightning that doesn't enable spyware on me.
Mind to help me out a bit and point me at a few companies doing that? Around Kentucky if you don't mind since that's where I am.
I'd start with Ford. They're well known for their custom builds — what they call VSO. And they're already tooled up for production of an F-150-style vehicle around Kentucky to boot.
It won't come cheap like an F-150, but nobody can expect it to be cheap when the value proposition is much higher.
When someone comes to you with a unique custom request for something, your response is: “Nope. Not on my website, not going to do it”?
Must be nice to have the luxury of being able to do nothing. Ford doesn’t have that luxury, though. It has to answer to angry shareholders if it lets a lucrative customer slip through.
Who exactly would you ever ask to find out that the samsung fridge you were looking at was going to get ads in the future?
Certainly not the appliance salesman, they don't know samsung's plans. And good luck calling samsung and asking for the "future plans" department. This is such a dishonest take.
Dental insurance is even worse. My dental insurance has ridiculously low limits, but it gets you access to the "real" negotiated rates rather than whatever silliness "retail price" is.
I tried going without when I switched jobs to an employer that doesn't offer it, but one cleaning as a "cash payer" cost more than the annual premiums to buy insurance privately.
I've been in the hospital more than once for a week at a time. At no point did I ever see the same doctor more than once in a 24 hour period - from that perspective, it seems irrelevant to continuity of care how long their shift was.
Perhaps if we didn't expect superhuman schedules from doctors, doctors wouldn't command as much of a cost as they do now.
From the doctors I know, it seems like most don't get into it for the money, but they put up with it long-term because of the money. If we treated them better and increased supply, they would almost certainly cost less.
I wonder if any private entity can provide this with a net benefit.
Architects, engineers, and doctors, among many others, have ethical obligations tied to their professional affiliation. I would approach this problem from the same angle with home inspectors.
Not necessarily. That’s where class actions come in
The point is that relief should be tied to proper procedure, not handed out universally by default. One judge shouldn’t decide national policy based on one plaintiff unless the case is structured to justify it
No. If a ruling has determined that a government action has the potential to be illegal and must be halted for the suing party, it should absolutely be halted for everyone, because you're dealing with an action that's ambiguously illegal for everyone. It's not just the wronged party at the center of this issue, it's the capacity for the government to engage in illegal activity. Once you've identified behavior as questionable, you stop the behavior.
The "proper procedure" is increasingly out of reach for all but the richest or most numerous groups in our society (i.e. those equipped and qualified to launch a class action). It's justice on paper and injustice in practice.
They slow down the “forever lawsuit” problem by consolidating claims, reducing conflicting rulings, and giving defendants a clear path to challenge the case’s scope. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than unlimited nationwide injunctions from any one court.
This creates conflicting rulings, because now anyone who is party to a lawsuit has one precedent for them, and everyone else isn't.
If a state now sues the federal government on behalf of its citizens that a federal action is illegal, and wins, you now has a situation where a federal action is constitutionally illegal in one state, but is legal in another. How the hell is this consistent?
This doesn't consolidate anything. It removes the thing that forced consolidation - the ability of a court to issue an injunction and stop illegal actions from continuing - which forced the government to either give up, or appeal up. Now, everything is a legal patchwork.
That’s exactly how constitutional challenges have always worked. In our system, different circuits can interpret federal law differently until SCOTUS resolves the split. It’s not ideal, but it’s how precedent gets built.
Nationwide injunctions didn’t “force” consolidation. Often, they often blocked it.
We need to follow the process as designed.
This ruling restores pressure to actually appeal and get clarity at the appellate or Supreme Court level.
I’ll admit it’s slower but it’s slower by design. Less patchwork this way.
What if the executive prefers not to appeal their losses because they see a patch work as better than a permanent nationwide loss? Because that seems to be exactly their strategy here.
As I have been saying, courts aren’t not the only avenue to resolve. So what if their strategy is to not appeal? Find another way. Vote, change immigration law, apply political pressure, demand change through democratic means
But certainly don’t use one course of action
Finally injunctions were not envisioned by the Founders. Foreign concept along with circuit court. Only fairly recent
SCOTUS has been packed, voting districts gerrymandered, the national guard has been deployed against protesters, journalists are being shot with rubber bullets and threatened with legal action, and elected representatives are being charged with trumped up crimes.
The other avenues are also being obstructed.
And Republicans certainly didn't mind nation wide injunctions when they were used to block much of Biden's agenda. Or violent attempts to stop the transfer of power. Or pardons for everyone involved in attempts to stop the transfer of power ...
Hard disagree. I have replaced hand written reports that were total nightmares to reason about and maintain with fairly trivial activerecord implementations that were quite literally hundreds of times faster.
Activerecord may not give optimal solutions but it can get close enough for a lot of workloads, and complicated sql can become a complete bear over time.
We are not defending obesity, we are advocating for a balanced view, while you are busy with your little crusade.
My suggestion is to look at old black/white tribal photos of natives. They do not fullfill your beauty standards, but they lived normal sustenance lifes.
And yes, the woman and men have bellies. Not huge ones, but noticeable ones.
Same thing in the animal kingdom.
The dominant monkey in a harem, besides the normal hormonal dominance meat-mountain bloat, usually has a belly.
Our beauty standard is met by animals in distress, being pushed into marginal territories. Healthy is, somewhere in the middle, not on either side of the isles of madness.
If you are overweight, you need to take responsibility and change your lifestyle.
Of course, everyone instinctively knows this even if they want to use mental gymnastics to explain why it is OK. Alcoholics, drug addicts, etc are defensive too and have many excuses at the ready for why their behavior is acceptable.
In the end, however, reality will hit hard and five dollar words aren’t going to save the obese and those with unhealthy lifestyles from sickness and early death.
Not true. Bears live about 25 years. 35-40 years in captivity. I don’t think they’re normalizing obesity upthread, they’re merely pointing out that in nature accumulation of significant quantities of subcutaneous and visceral fat is normal, as are periods of starvation that we no longer experience.
Correct - I wasn't trying to normalize obesity upthread, at all.
Bears are an example that shows very clearly it's normal for animals in nature to become very much "not lean" to survive, and the drive to put on fat stores is probably much broader in nature than animals that hibernate to survive winter.
What's unique about humans is that we've engineered our environment to the point that most of us no longer suffer long stretches of being unfed or underfed to strip the excess fat stores off of us.
Some people are clearly better than others at fighting the behavior evolution has programmed into them. It's not good for them today, but at the same time that drive for survival is what kept their ancestors alive.
Of course we don't, but then again I think bears were just thrown in as an (extreme) example. As I read the thread before that, the point was that most animals' weights vary on an annual cycle, fattened up during summer-autumn and slimmer after the winter. Which seems fairly uncontroversial to me.
