I often wonder how much of the toll is used to fund the road maintenance itself vs funding the structures to collect tolls like the toll booths, the collections, technology, billing, and all the employees.

You’re spot on with accountability. Why not just legally allow people harmed by following the advice to be ableto sue the influencers and allow those with proper credentials to become certified in the topic and certification protects from lawsuits?

Or maybe not the second part. Anybody giving bad advice should be sued.

“This isn’t medical advice, but drinking battery acid will allow you to live forever.” Would never hold up in court.

Freedom of speech seems to be the most misunderstood right.

This is probably the best answer based on the stuff that I’ve heard.

During the first term, a local talk radio show had a woman on who grew up in a cult. She was born into it. She described her own story about how she learned what was happening and eventually got out. IIRC, her parents cut all ties with her, as that was the way of the cult. Anyhow, she described the process of “deprogramming” someone and it is basically along the same lines of what you describe.

Sadly, it’s easy to “mass convert” people to cults, but deprogramming is a one on one conversation over a long period of time.

I think you’re on to something. This could accelerate the movement of tech jobs to India & other countries vs just importing cheap labor.

In the past, when tech jobs were outsourced, it was just the coders. Lately, ilve noticed entire teams being outsourced, manager, project/product managers, coders, agilists, designers and others. Big companies are letting all technology be performed offshore and only the business units remain. This administration policy move could accelerate this trend, which could have far reaching implications.

There’s already some good discussion here. A little less drastic is a soft succession. It’s already happened and is happening. The blog articulates it much better than i could, but the essence is that the US constitution already has been interpreted to give state laws a sort if priority over feseral laws. Additionally, states can apply financial pressure to the federal government.

Near rhe end of the blog he ponders whether this could result in a shell fedwral government.

I’m loving all the Canadians in this thread.

If you’re a kind person, there’s always something to apologize for. I was taught a long time ago that it was OK to apologize, but that you should add " for…" to the end and if it still sounds OK then you should say it.

“I’m sorry for hurting your feelings.” “I’m sorry that you don’t enjoy the meal that I prepared for the family.” “I’m sorry your face looks like an anus.” “I’m sorry that you’re too stupid to understand that I’m not complimenting you.” …and so on. This took an unexpected turn.

PS: I’ll apologize in most confrontations as a way to de-escalate the situation.

I thought Nazism, Hitler and WWII was the cautionary tale? I wasn’t present at the time, but i heard that Bad Things happened.

I also thought that after WWII, systems were put in place to ensure that it would not happen again. Where are these systems and why aren’t they working?

I was about to argue and then read “legality doesn’t matter”. You’re right.

It’s important to remember that Powell himself does not set the rates, it’s decided by a committee which he is currently the chair of. I feel like this fact is absent from much of the news I read/hear surrounding Powell & Fed interest rates.

From MSN:

Powell chairs the central bank’s eight annual meetings. But the other 11 voting members of the Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC, get an equal say on each Fed rate decision via a majority vote.

Also important:

the Fed’s four no-cut calls so far this year have been unanimous.

I realize that the chair is an important role, but am I missing something that replacing 1 person would change the interest rate voting outcome?

I use OSMAnd+. The searching is the biggest problem, so I will contribute to StreetComplete in an effort to improve the areas in which I travel.

When I do need a location that isn’t found in OSM, I’ll grab the coords from LatLong.net and copy/paste them into OSM. When I get to the destination, I’ll pop open street complete and fill in details in the hopes that next time will be better.

Not MENSA, but came to the unfortunate realization that I’m on the skinny side of the intelligence bell curve late in life. For me, I was frustrated that I could not easily relate my thoughts and ideas to others. I’d just get a blank stare or worse. I figured that I was dumb and everybody else knew something that I didn’t. So I kept quiet and kept all my thoughts to myself.

Many years later, I tried again to voice my thoughts and ideas, but would use lots of examples and references to areas where my listener may be familiar. That seemed to work.

It was only when I started talking about my feelings to others when I realized that things in my head work differently. I’m able to absorb information faster and deeper but also extrapolate those learnings to other unrelated areas.

As some of the other posters argued, this is a slippery slope to censorship by those in power, which does not allow for dissenting opinions to propogate.

Given that free speech doesn’t mean that anybody needs to listen, I feel that the problem (and solution) lies in the conduit for the free speech. I don’t understand the complexities of the laws but have wondered if adjusting the laws to hold entities accountable for their actions would have a positive effect. For example, an idiot shouting from the town square has a limited audience, but if a newspaper picks up the message and promotes it, aren’t they partially responsible for that message?

It gets tricky with opinion pieces, but we already have an established mechansm with newspapers’ opinion pages. One potential problem is that the current media companies enjoy no accountability, no content creation costs and profits from advertisers.

On that topic, I’d even go so far as to argue that advertisers share in the accountability of providing funds to organizations that support harmful messages.

There’s a lot more to this but would be interesting to see a country who has done it and if it had a net positive effect.

They touch on it in the article. What if the goal is to trade globally in cryptocurrency?

While this has been historically true, it’s not working this time.

But the dollar not only failed to strengthen this time, it fell, puzzling economists and hurting consumers. The dollar lost more than 5% against the euro and pound, and 6% against the yen since early April.

As with most things happening under this US administration, he pushes things to the breaking point to see how it reacts. He’s stress testing the global economy. From there, I would guess that he’d back off just before the breaking point and move on to something else.

When filing paperwork, like in those hanging file folders, the papers should be placed into the folder with the paper’s left margin up. This way, any stapled pages can be flipped through as a bunch rather than individual pages. Also, the most important text tends to be left justified, such as the return address. Apparently this goes counter to every accountant’s training, but I’m sticking to it.

How do you feel about mandated helmets for children?

I’ve posted this elsewhere (skip to paragraph 21 for the meaty parts). The short version is that the US demanded that trade partners implement protections for US companies in exchange for trade deals. Those trade deals are no longer present, so why don’t the governments reverse the protections since the US isn’t holding up their end of the bargain anymore?

Similar story. I was in elementary school and fell off the monkeybars and landed flat on my back and knocked myself out, surrounded by kids. I woke up later and everyone was gone, so I got up and went back to class. I got detention for being late. When my parents asked why I “skipped class” I said that I didn’t know and was grounded for not telling the truth.

I did other dumb things, mostly around bodies of water (cliff diving, rip currents). I’m surprised that I’m not dead. As an adult, I’m afraid of everything.

For comments, I read that the upvote indicates that you feel that the comment is adding to the conversation and a downvote indicates that it detracts. I don’t know how this applies to the articles.

Americans get really upset when people go to the US and do things like they do in their home country, but also expect to be able to act like Americans in other countries. It’s a little arrogant or ignorant. Some people who who were even invited to study in the US have been deported for doing things that Americans do themselves, like protesting.

Whittle this story down to its core and you have, “guest in country breaks law and gets punished”. Is that really surprising? How about, “guest in country exercises rights of citizens and gets punished?”