Tag: Politics

They just let you steal!

This is another case of simplifying a complex situation to make someone look bad: Cali lets you walk right out if you are stealing $950 or less. And ignoring the real problem (if you want to have all of these crimes investigated and prosecuted, your local/state taxes need to go up so departments can staff accordingly and enough jails can be built to house all of these criminals).

Every state has a law that differentiates between misdemeanor theft and felony theft. e.g. https://law.justia.com/codes/arkansas/title-5/subtitle-4/chapter-36/subchapter-1/section-5-36-103/ for Arkansas at $1000. I think most people would agree that someone who steals ten dollars worth of merchandise and someone who steals three grand worth of merchandise should get different punishments. Punishments are generally defined along with the classification of the crime. And each state’s law reflects this. Different states have different dollar amounts — and $950 sounds like a lot of money. But compared to the other states? California’s demarcation is pretty middle of the pack.

Unfortunately the entire criminal justice system is overloaded. Police may be too busy to deal with your theft complaint. The prosecutor may not get around to filing charges. And what happens if they do get a conviction? Now we need to find somewhere to detain the thief. And, again, if there’s a person stealing cars, a person kidnapping minors, and a person stealing the latest video game … ideally, we’d have resources to punish all of them. But we don’t. And I’d be way more upset if the kidnapper skated because they had a task force down at the GameStop gathering video from all the surrounding stores to track down this thief.

Prop 47 absolutely has some flaws. There’s a Prop 36 this year that seems like an attempt to fix some of the unintended consequences — two or more theft charges under $950 would be a felony. Stealing from multiple places that add up to over $950 would be a felony. Won’t know if that passes until November, but it’s not like all the liberals are dancing around saying this was 100% perfect and everyone else should do it too.

 

Alabama: $500
Alaska: $750
Arizona: $1,000
Arkansas: $1,000
California: $950
Colorado: $2,000
Connecticut: $2,000
Delaware: $1,500
Florida: $750
Georgia: $1,500
Hawaii: $750
Idaho: $1,000
Illinois: $500
Indiana: $750
Iowa: $300
Kansas: $1,500
Kentucky: $1,000
Louisiana: $1,000
Maine: $1,000
Maryland: $1,500
Massachusetts: $1,200
Michigan: $1,000
Minnesota: $1,000
Mississippi: $1,000
Missouri: $750
Montana: $1,500
Nebraska: $1,500
Nevada: $1,200
New Hampshire: $1,000
New Jersey: $200
New Mexico: $500
New York: $1,000
North Carolina: $1,000
North Dakota: $1,000
Ohio: $1,000
Oklahoma: $1,000
Oregon: $1,000
Pennsylvania: $2,000
Rhode Island: $1,500
South Carolina: $2,000
South Dakota: $1,000
Tennessee: $1,000
Texas: $2,500
Utah: $1,500
Vermont: $900
Virginia: $1,000
Washington: $750
West Virginia: $1,000
Wisconsin: $2,500
Wyoming: $1,000

Why so militant

Someone asked why some feminists are so anti-anything-feminine. I think a silly analogy makes it easier to understand:

If there were a law that required everyone to eat pizza for dinner every day, and a whole freedom movement evolved to ensure we could all pick our own dinner? I expect some people would be so adverse to pizza as to never eat it again. Electing to eat pizza (because I love pizza, just not every day) could be seen as an insult to the Dinner Liberation movement.

Viewing the movement as action so you never had to eat pizza again rather than action so you could chose from the entire world of options including the one that had formerly been forced upon you.

Outnumbered

Any political system requires “buy in” from a very large percentage of those being governed. If the 600,000 people who live in Wyoming thought they had absolutely no say in how the country ran because there are like 8 million people in NYC, 3.5 million in LA. Or even the just about 600,000 people who live in Harrisburg, PA … they don’t have much incentive to peaceful participation in the federal government.

I hear folks in rural parts of Ohio saying the same thing — cannabis will be legalized because of the three C’s (Cinci, Columbus, Cleveland) and they get no say in it. Which made me curious — just how “outnumbered” are these “rural” folks. So I grabbed a list of cities in Ohio with population numbers. Columbus is huge, almost a million people! But there are almost 12 million people in Ohio. So Columbus is just under 8% of the population. Add in Cleveland, and you are up to almost 11% of the population. Keep going — add Cinci to get 13.5%. So the “three C’s” are only 13.5% of the entire population. Toledo gets us over 15%. But these are hardly “bossing everyone else around” percentages. I was down to the 143rd largest city in Ohio — Fostoria with just over 13,000 people — before “cities” account for 50% of the state’s population.

And that assumes 100% of people in urban areas are voting against whatever 100% of these rural people want to see happen. Which is absurd. If 80% of the people in these cities were voting against “the rural way”, we’re adding cities with just under 4,000 residents before we reach 50%.

If 75% are voting against “the rural way”, we’re down to cities with just under 2,000 residents.

While I think Wyoming is probably right — there are enough liberal voters nationally that conservatives would be “outnumbered” without creative districting, over-representation in the senate, and over-representation in the electoral college … the same doesn’t seem to hold true in Ohio.

The Best Medal?

I’m not sure if this is tripling down, quadrupling down, or what … but Trump’s made more statements about how he’d prefer a Medal of Freedom because Medal of Honor recipients are gravely injured or even killed.

Beyond the incredibly absurd notion that he’d qualify for a Medal of Honor — his assertion boils down to this: a Medal of Honor winner gave something significant of themselves. They put themselves into an incredibly dangerous situation to allow the rest of us to enjoy our Constitutionally protected freedoms. They earned that medal, often with their own body or even their own life.

Medal of Freedom winners also did something — but the person to whom Trump was referring? Was a doctor, who did what many other doctors do without being awarded medals. The ‘extra’ that got the medal? They gave money. Some of which went to Republican campaigns and conservative causes. Now, I presume even DonOld realized you couldn’t actually award a Medal of Freedom to someone for donations to his campaign. She (and her husband) also gave money to research centers fighting substance abuse, medical research, and Holocaust remembrance — not a bad thing, but there’s a huge difference between giving your life for something and giving your time and money for something.

Of course DonOld would rather be lauded for handing over some money (or, in his case, creating a charity to allow him to get praise for handing over other people’s money to beneficial causes) than actually have to give something of himself.

 

https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/medaloffreedom/

The following individuals received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Trump on November 16, 2018:

MIRIAM ADELSON. Miriam Adelson is a committed doctor, philanthropist, and humanitarian. She has practiced internal and emergency medicine, studied and specialized in the disease of narcotic addiction, and founded two research centers committed to fighting substance abuse. With her husband, Sheldon, she also established the Adelson Medical Research Foundation, which supports research to prevent, reduce, or eliminate disabling and life-threatening illness. As a committed member of the American Jewish community, she has supported Jewish schools, Holocaust memorial organizations, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, and Birthright Israel, among other causes.

On Suddenly

I had a dual major in Uni: history and theoretical physics. My “history mentor” was someone who studied under Howard Zinn, so my knowledge tends towards a somewhat alternative version of history. And his thesis was on slavery — so many of the Project 1619 ideas were hardly new to me. Listening to Trump say VP Harris turned Black — beyond sounding racist weird — shows a remarkable lack of historical perspective and a stunning US-centric view of the world.

Harris’s father is Jamaican. To say she isn’t Black is to say Jamaicans aren’t Black. The University of the West Indies has some 76% of the Jamaican population being of African descent.

Does he think the entirety of the slave trade was built around the USA?!? Over 90% of enslaved Africans were sent to South American and the Caribbean. Jamaica, specifically, was a British colony — and somewhere between half a million and a million enslaved people were sent there. Why? Sugar production! There were about 400,000 enslaved Africans sent to the USA. So, based on historic records? More Africans were kidnapped and forced into slavery in Jamaica than the USA.

https://www.slavevoyages.org/

Separation of Church and State

As I see states enacting laws to require religious education in public schools, I think of the history of trying to incorporate Christian philosophy in law. I’ve always wondered *which* Christian. The real answer, I expect, is everyone assumes it is their own. Good for garnering votes, but that’s going to make implementation dicey.

Obviously some sort of Reformationist Christianity (sorry Catholics!). But there’s a big difference between Lutheran, Southern Baptist, Mormon, Presebeterian, Mennonite, etc. And, yeah, they locked up the courts so what the Constitution says and what the authors meant probably don’t matter … But I like to throw Deist in there as a knod to the founding fathers.

My gut is it ends up being “left up to the states” generally. So Arkansas can be Southern Baptist, Maybe Catholics get Rhode Island (only like 40% of the population, but the next highest is Pentecostal at like 6%). In states like Ohio, religions are going to have to band together to get a majority — it’ll be like a coalition government in the UK. If we’re lucky, “I don’t want to live in a theocracy” will win a state or three.

We are either stuck with whatever religious edicts align with our region or we move. And the feds are just in charge of saying it’s not a violation of the Constitution when women wearing slacks gets banned in some state. For reasons. Really good, substantiated by history and text, reasons.

 

https://apnews.com/article/louisiana-ten-commandments-displayed-classrooms-571a2447906f7bbd5a166d53db005a62

Tax the Rich

I never really “got” the ideology of screwing over today-me on the off chance future-me started making bank. Forbes counted 735 billionaires in the US in 2023 — over 300 million people in the US. That means there’s a 0.000245% chance of someone being a billionaire.
The probability of any one person becoming the next multi-billionaire is, logically, lower than that (some billionaires start out in the 1%). Low enough that I don’t want to structure all of society around making billionaires’ lives cherry just in case I ever become one.
I mean, me personally, I’d happily fork over a couple hundred mil in taxes if I was netting a billion a year because I know I’d be using a lot of publicly funded resources for this hypothetical business, and funding those resources seems practical. But, yeah, probably not something I’m ever gonna have to worry about.

Finding Benefits Anywhere

At a recent school board meeting, we had a lady suggesting a list of things they should teach about how slaves benefited … evidently this is some recent research? I propose we nab her and all of these researchers out of their houses, throw them in a crowded van, and take them to a prison facility for a year or three. While they are there, they will be fed well, entered into a program to become certified in a trade, and given free access to health care. They’ll be given free range of the facility, not locked in cells; but they’ll have to work and complete their training classes. They’ll be given clothing to wear, a bed in which to sleep. If they’re really lucky, their spouse and kids will be nabbed and get to “benefit” from this great service too.

Obviously, they’d be free to leave at any point they wanted — not an option for actual slaves. If they opt to leave early, they no longer get to claim slavery had benefits for anyone other than those exploiting free labor. They will be admitting that no matter how nicely you treat someone — and these folks are going to be treated far better than most slaves were, so they’re experiencing the best case scenario — doing it against their will is not benefiting them.

Understanding Scale

There’s all sorts of bad advice about how people just aren’t trying hard enough to not be poor — if only you saved more money like there is a surfeit of money around to save. Work more like you can add a couple of extra hours to each day or just jam another day into the week. And this guy … who evidently thinks the whole problem is that people don’t understand … scale?

The funniest part to me? This dude wants to start with “you don’t understand scale, I’m gonna educate you …” and then proceeds to not understand scale. Small scale purchases will yield the highest price per pound — someone who is buying tomatoes by the tonne certainly isn’t paying a buck a tomato or even fifty cents a tomato. What’s the price for a tonne of tomatoes? The tomato price per tonne data I’ve found are a little outdated, but lets say $100 a tonne for easy mental math. Even if these tomatoes weigh a pound each (unlikely), then every 2k tomatoes gets you $100. He has about 4 million tomatoes … so 2,000 tonnes of tomatoes @ $100 a tonne grosses $200,000. In addition to not understanding scale, he is not understanding gross v/s net income. And, well, tomatoes.

Even if we ignore the required land (which wouldn’t be trivial — planting 150k tomato plants with adequate spacing is going to be 10+ acres), equipment, and labor required to produce and harvest all of those tomatoes. Say they ripen over a 90 day period (which is super generous in my part of the world, but again pretending it’s reasonable for the sake of argument), you need to move some 44,000 tomatoes A DAY for 90 days. Where are these things going as they get picked? How to I transport them to these hypothetical customers? And who are these customers? Even if every customer buys ten tomatoes a week, I need over 30,000 unique customers (every single one of whom repeats their ten tomato a week purchase for three months straight). Are there actually 30,000 people willing to buy a $10/week tomato subscription for the entire harvest season?

This guy’s hypothetical tomatoes aren’t an example of scale, they’re an example of generational wealth. If you inherited a few thousand acres of land (probably complete with an irrigation system and greenhouses), equipment, warehouses, and a fleet of trucks to move ’em … then maybe you could employ a lot of people for planting, harvesting, and selling at farm markets where you might hope to get something even approaching a buck a tomato. Even then, you aren’t netting hundreds of millions of dollars — you’ve got electrical, transportation, and labor expenses to pay. That’s not building a tomato empire from fifty bucks and a handful of tomato plants — that’s millions of dollars in inherited assets to net maybe a million bucks a year.

Roe v Performance Art

Since the leaked draft overturning Roe v Wade was released, I’ve encountered a number of forums in which women are advocating we all delete any menstruation tracking apps. This seems, to me, like performance art meant as protest. Not an effective solution to the stated problem.

I get the point — people don’t want their data tracked in a place where the state can readily compel production of records. If they have reasonable suspicion that an abortion took place, they can get a warrant for your data. But deleting the app from your phone — that doesn’t actually delete the data on the cloud hosting provider’s side. Deleting the app has the same impact as ceasing to enter new data. Except you’ve inconvenienced yourself by losing access to your old data. Check if an account can be deleted — and learn what the details of ‘delete’ actually mean. In many cases, ‘delete’ means disable and then purge after some delta time elapses. What about backups? For how long would the company be able to produce data if they really needed to?

But before going to extremes to actually delete data, consider if the alternatives are actually any “safer” by your definition. If I were tracking my period on a little paper calendar in my purse or one pinned to the cork board in the rec room? They may get a warrant and seize my paper calendar too. And, really, you could continue to enter “periods” even if they’re not happening. There’s usually a field for ‘notes’ and you could put something in like ‘really painful cramping’ or ‘so many hot flashes’ whenever you actually mean “yeah, this one didn’t happen” — which would make the data the government is able to gather rather meaningless.