I don't know where OP is, but here in Massachusetts, we have no sales tax on groceries:
https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/massachusetts/sales-tax-exemptions
Are you suggesting a privatized National Weather Service and toll bridges would be better? If so, I have a nice bear-ridden town in New Hampshire you might like to move to.
Regulations are exactly how you deal with negative externalities.The EPA makes corporations pay for reducing pollution and cleanup. Why do you think corporations target EPA so much? Because EPA costs them money. Never hear any corporations whining about that free taxpayer-funded geological data coming out of USGS
I like clean water, good weather forecasts, and I want to fix the bridges.
From a person with a lot of years of experience fighting mold on wood in a humid climate, what you want is borax:
https://www.thisoldhouse.com/green-home/21331232/killing-mold-on-wood
Borax kills mold and also soaks into wood and stays there to prevent future growth. Bleach does not help on porous surfaces like wood:
"Note that bleach should not be used to kill mold found on wood. While bleach is very effective for killing mold on non-porous surfaces, it doesn’t work well when it comes to wood. This is because the chlorine in bleach can’t penetrate wood, so only the water portion of the bleach gets absorbed.
The mold may appear to be removed from the surface, but it’ll likely continue to grow underneath and return within a few months."
Yeah, I grew up in a small American town and my cousins were more like my siblings than my actual sister because they were the same age as me. We all fled that small town, so the next generation are all growing up not surrounded by extended family.
I think there are good and bad sides to it. It was nice to grow up surrounded by family with a strong sense of belonging. But my cousins' children are growing up knowing people from far more diverse backgrounds than I ever had access to, which is good for them in a different way.
Overall, I think the effects are probably neutral
Making noise is the only way things actually get done in this world. Asking politely gets you nowhere. Squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that
You joke, but my dad literally built (most) of his own helicopter. My mom wouldn't let him fly it because of us kids haha. He sold it still incomplete
I grew up with a trans girl who is now 38 years old.
Trans people existed before the internet. Their existence is not a fad.
Yes. Bonobos.
Human appear to be about halfway between chimps and bonobos on the primate spectrum. The violence of chimps combined with the fluid sexual social habits of bonobos lol
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-insights-same-sex-sexual-interactions-important.amp
Just did. Won our vote Wednesday night 💪
no illicit drugs were present
I'm deeply afraid that this might have turned out differently if she had even something as simple as cannabis in her system.
This is exactly why the billionaires are dismantling the current social media platforms. Organizing is the only threat they truly fear.
We're saying that entire societies benefit from having parents spend early months/years with their young children. Because society as a whole profits from that activity, that activity should be subsidized by the government.
And I promise I'm at least as old as you
But golden gate doesn't have anything inherent that pushes people to commit suicide.
Don't be so sure about that. Check out some of this research.
Believe it or not, reducing access to lethal means actually reduces the number of deaths by suicide, and we have robust data to back this up.
"Nine out of ten people who attempt suicide and survive will not go on to die by suicide at a later date. This has been well-established in the suicidology literature. A literature review (Owens 2002) summarized 90 studies that have followed over time people who have made suicide attempts that resulted in medical care. Approximately 7% (range: 5-11%) of attempters eventually died by suicide, approximately 23% reattempted non-fatally, and 70% had no further attempts."
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/survival/
We ALSO need to improve people's material conditions and provide better mental health care. But even in societies with strong social safety nets, people still die by suicide. Reducing access to lethal means will reduce deaths, giving people time and opportunity to access any social safety net that exists.
There's one particularly fascinating case study out of Washington state:
"Running perpendicular to the Ellington Bridge, a stone’s throw away, is another bridge, the Taft. Both span Rock Creek, and even though they have virtually identical drops into the gorge below - about 125 feet - it is the Ellington that has always been notorious as Washington’s “suicide bridge.” By the 1980s, the four people who, on average, leapt from its stone balustrades each year accounted for half of all jumping suicides in the nation’s capital. The adjacent Taft, by contrast, averaged less than two.
After three people leapt from the Ellington in a single 10-day period in 1985, a consortium of civic groups lobbied for a suicide barrier to be erected on the span. Opponents to the plan...had the added ammunition of pointing to the equally lethal Taft standing just yards away: if a barrier were placed on the Ellington, it was not at all hard to see exactly where thwarted jumpers would head.
Except the opponents were wrong. A study conducted five years after the Ellington barrier went up showed that while suicides at the Ellington were eliminated completely, the rate at the Taft barely changed, inching up from 1.7 to 2 deaths per year. What’s more, over the same five-year span, the total number of jumping suicides in Washington had decreased by 50 percent, or the precise percentage the Ellington once accounted for."
And you know why twice as many people jumped off the Ellington vs. the Taft bridge in the first place? Because the railings on the Taft were slightly higher and therefore harder to scale.
I don't know if this article is paywalled or how to fix that, but it also contains details of a specific study conducted on people who intended to, but didn't jump off the Golden Gate bridge specifically. The absurdity of how minor an obstacle was required to prevent their deaths is amazing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06suicide-t.html
Show me where pregnant women are being given anything remotely resembling a trial by jury and due process of law before being sentenced to death.
They didn't get genetic raw data of anyone beyond the 14K, they got family relationship information. Which is an option you can turn on or off, if you want. It's very clear that you're exposing yourself to other people if you choose to see who you're related to. It doesn't expose raw data and it doesn't instantly expose names, just how they're related to you. (And most of the "relations" are 3rd to 5th cousins, aka strangers.)
Hackers used the genetic ancestry data of the 14K hacked users and their "relatives" connections to deduce large families of Ashkenazi Jews.
Yes, Massachusetts. I have a dual fuel heat pump with natural gas backup installed in 2020, so it's a newer system. And I have one heat pump mini split in the least energy efficient, but most used room in my house (large, high ceilings, exterior walls on three sides, and a skylight).
The first couple of years I noticed when it got just below freezing, the central heat pump seemed to struggle to keep up. Then this year I replaced my windows and got new wall insulation in both of the main bedrooms and bathrooms (previous insulation was original from the 1960s and shredded to bits with huge gaps.)
After those improvements, I've been running my heat pump down to 20⁰F/-7⁰C so far without any issues at all. I'm excited to see how cold we can get and this system still keep up. I am still supplementing my one large room with the mini split, but that's mostly because all my plants are in here, so I keep this room warmer than 68⁰F/20⁰C.
I was being hyperbolic; I thought that would be obvious.
not nearly as easily or quickly as they can move staffing agencies in the current climate
You and I must work in very different current climates.
You didn't personally experience that anecdote (and it's also just an anecdote). Show me a NURSING union that protects people who are dangers to that level. We don't because it's not our professional culture, so it's not how we run our unions. The president of the Massachusetts Nurses Association is still a practicing nurse. She has no personal or professional interest in protecting nurses who are genuinely dangerous.
I also have 20 years experience in management prior to becoming a nurse, including quality, safety and accident investigation experience. One accident doesn't prove that an employee is bad, no matter how much damage it cost. Systemic errors exist. Was that guy being impatient because management was on his ass to do more and more with less and less support? Holding him to an impossible schedule like they do the rail workers? How was he able to have his truck in a situation like that in the first place? Did he bypass safety signalling/communication, or did the signaling/communication policies not exist in the first place? If that driver was genuinely a dangerous employee and had no prior disciplinary action, then that's a management failure to document concerning actions in the past. None of that has anything to do with the union and the union was right to stick to the letter of the contract.
And policing needs to be reformed top to bottom. Union protection alone is not sufficient to create the culture of abusive power that exists in modern policing. That requires the full complicity of our legislative and judicial branches. (See: "tough on crime" politicians and SCOTUS shielding cops from accountability and responsibility.)
they can just choose to go to a different staffing agency
That's just free market labor. Shit hospital nurses are free to bounce from facility to facility as well. Welcome to America.
A union gives me more power to enact change inside my own corporation-owned facility. Staffing negotiations give me leverage to force staffing levels that keep my patients both safe and receiving the care that they need.
I had a woman sitting in her own feces for over an hour on Sunday because our hospital chooses not to staff the central stock room on weekends and holidays, and we were completely out of the only size briefs that would fit her. I checked the next unit over and they were out too. This is a standard item that should be stocked at all times. I had to ask one of our transporters hunt them down for us.
Part of our union contract will be to demand that our local unit supply rooms are stocked no less than once per day 365 days a year. It's INSANE that an American hospital chooses to operate without that.
"The union" doesn't do anything. WE are the union. I AM the union. I'm planning to be one of the people sitting right there at the negotiation table working on our contract. WE will be the ones negotiating how disciplinary grievances are handled and the union only exists to provide us with legal representation to ensure that OUR chosen contract terms are adhered to.
Why do American nurses in particular believe such heinous lies and propaganda about how unions work? You overheard some hearsay from someone about a union that doesn't even represent nurses and you just swallowed that hook, line, and sinker?