Glassnoser
17hr ago
The point is it's a tiny share of the budget and much of it is not frivolous spending. If you want to reduce the deficit, these cuts are definitely not necessary, while cuts to social security Medicaid, and Medicare are unless you want massive tax increases.
Glassnoser
17hr ago
It's more like four-twenty-eleven.
Glassnoser
1d ago
If a judge prevented an American citizen from being expelled from the US because it was illegal, would that be a good thing or would it be a problem because it undermined the country's ability to decide who to keep and who to expel?
Glassnoser
1d ago
Why do people say "half a dozen" instead of "six"?
Glassnoser
2d ago
The lockdowns caused a massive plunge in the stock market. There was a recovery, but I don't see how that could have been caused by money printing. Printing money doesn't affect the real prices of assets.
Glassnoser
2d ago
Opposition to free trade and a belief that it has cost Americans good jobs.
Glassnoser
2d ago
One of the many problems with this is that if investors think that tariffs will be reversed in two years, then you won't accomplish any reshoring. You'll just slow down the economy for two years.
Glassnoser
2d ago
How is China more of an adversary than Russia?
Glassnoser
2d ago
I think you're underestimating the extent to which people can fail to accept that Trump's trade policies are the cause of any bad economic effects and the extent to which they can fail to accept that the bad economic effects are even happening.
Glassnoser
2d ago
How many politicians were assassinated during the COVID lockdowns or during the Great Depression?
Glassnoser
2d ago
It might take more than that because there is actually a fair bit of support among Democrats for what Trump is doing.
Glassnoser
3d ago
Glassnoser
3d ago
I don't see how they're relevant. The law prohibits abridgments of freedom of speech. This abridges freedom of speech. Therefore, it is unconstitutional unless someone can explain how it falls under one of the established exempted forms of speech.
Glassnoser
4d ago
Controlling what language people speak is abridging freedom of speech. People are not free to use whatever language they want to use.
Glassnoser
4d ago
They disallow English in employment offer letters and promotion letters.
Glassnoser
4d ago
Yes. They specifically have a law prohibiting students who do not have a parent who was not taught in English at a school in Canada from being taught in English at public schools.
Glassnoser
4d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyer_v._Nebraska
Not necessarily a first amendment violation in this case, but still unconstitutional.
Glassnoser
4d ago
The first amendment prohibits state governments from passing laws abridging the freedom of speech, unless it falls under a few exempted categories of speech restriction, such as laws against obscenity, defamation, and threats. Forcing people to speak French is not in one of those categories. So you explain to me why those other concepts are relevant and why this is a case where abridging freedom of speech would be allowed.
Glassnoser
5d ago
I'm not sure what the 1A argument is, though.
It's a law that controls what people say and write.
Do such laws prevent store signs from also having other languages, or do they just mandate that French must be present?
It can have other languages, but French has to be more prominent.
If just the latter, it's not so clear to me. There is some compelled nature to the speech, but the standards there are different, especially if it's just commercial regulation or gov't-run schools. So yeah, I'd really appreciate if anyone could put out at least a sketch of the argument.
You and I are talking. You are my employee. That means you can demand that I speak French and it is enforced by the government, so the government is controlling what I say. I cannot send an email to you in English if you have asked that I speak in French to you.
I'm a doctor and you're my patient. The government can force me to speak French to you if you want.
I'm an engineer and you're my client. The government can require that I speak to you in French.
I want to hire you for a job. We both speak English. We both want to speak English. The employment offer letter has to be in French.
I have a business and I want the name of the business to contain an English word. The government will force me to translate it to French.
Glassnoser
5d ago
There are law that forbid the use of languages other than French in many situations. For example, businesses must be able to communicate to employees in French. Employees have the right to demand that all communication be in French. Employment offer letters must be in French. Engineers and doctors must speak French.
There is no scenario where Canada becomes part of the US voluntarily. It just isn't politically possible. Canada has a deep-seated anti-Americanism, which doesn't normally manifest as hate towards the US, but it does manifest as a deep conviction to never be part of the US.
Remember, Canada was largely founded by Americans who were loyal to the Crown during the American Revolution and established new settlements in a freezing cold theretofore sparsely populated territory. It is the only country that was founded in explicit opposition to the founding principles of the US. And then followed two hundred and seventy years of selective migration of Canadians who did not care about this out of the country into the more prosperous and warmer US.
Today, the politics are very different, but not being American is still the single core defining feature of our national identity, which we latch onto because we are culturally so similar. Quebec is another story, in that they have a different ethnic origin and a separate national identity, but they only make voluntary annexation more certainly impossible, because a change to the constitution of this kind would require unanimous agreement by all ten provinces. And if English Canada defines itself by not being American, modern Quebec defines itself by its French language and there is no more sacred political principle in Quebec than the belief that the French language must be protected by law. These laws would undoubtedly violate the first amendment. They violate Canada's own constitutionally protected freedom of expression, but Quebec sidesteps that using the notorious notwithstanding clause. Quebec will not join the US and be forced to give them up.
No amount of economic pressure is going to make Canadians want to give up these cherished identities. For most of our country's history, Canadians have been able to increase their incomes substantially by moving to the US. The profesional class in Canada can still do this, and there is still a significant brain drain. As irrational as it may seem, the ones who remain do not care as much about their material well-being as they do about preserving their independence and national identity, even if they associate it with ideas about peacekeeping and free healthcare rather than loyalty to the British Crown.
Annexation is extremely unpopular and there is an absolute determination not to get stuck with what is regarded here as a seriously dysfunctional political culture.
Glassnoser
6d ago
The tariffs the US just announced are about 10 to 20 times larger than the tariffs that most other countries have on US goods.
Glassnoser
6d ago
Firms that sell goods at the marginal cost of production deserve to survive.
This is an expensive diet. Fish and berries are very expensive and I don't think a person trying to save money would eat much of them.
I have a spreadsheet I've been working on to find the cheapest possible diet given various constraints. My current diet costs $5.95 a day. That's CAD, so it's only $4.29 USD a day. All subsequent numbers are in CAD.
As part of a challenge, I got it down to about $2 a day by relaxing some of the nutritional requirements that would take a very long time to cause any problems. However, this was a diet where almost all of the calories came from potatoes, so it would be pretty boring.
The cheapest possible nutritionally complete diet according to my spreadsheet (which doesn't yet have all food types) would cost only $4.29 a day. But I used a minimum protein intake of only 60 g a day, and allowed the saturated fat intake to be as high as 30 g (it ended up being 28.4 g) a day.
The diet is:
Note that milk is twice as expensive in Canada as it is in the US.
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