I wouldn’t say justified, buuuuuuuuuut where else could he have gone? China is about the only other possibility.

To be clear, I think he should be pardoned, and thing USA-Patriot act should be overturned.

Yeah, we’re doing the same in the US… :(

The essential problem is that the people working now are paying for the people that are retired. It would make more sense for the gov’t to have taxed the people prior to their retirement, and have invested those taxes, so that in their retirement they would be getting out what they had previously paid in. And switching over to a system like that would require double taxation on the population now, which will make such a proposal very unopopular.

But if your retired population is growing, and you have fewer people working, then you either need to increase the retirement age–so that more people are paying into the system–or increase the taxation overall. If I recall correctly, Denmark has been seeing a negative population growth; that’s a real problem for retirement schemes that rely on current taxes paying for retirees.

Is this fair to people that have been working in trades and have beaten up their body for 40 years? No. Likewise, it’s not really fair to people that have working in white-collar jobs that may still be more than capable of excelling at their job, and still want to work. (My dad had mandatory retirement at 72 due to company policy; he immediately got re-hired as an on-site consultant, and has been doing that for over a decade.)

EDIT - this is a huge problem in the US. The social security taxes now on working people are immediately paid out to retirees. SS benefits go up to account for inflation, but the amount coming in is decreasing because population growth has slowed. Without major reforms, social security in the US won’t be solvent by the time I retire, IF I ever retire.

I’ve had a car with where the oil pressure sensor failed; combine that with an oil leak, and you quickly have a major problem. So, what happens when the sensor telling you the oil level fails? A dipstick is extremely unlikely to ever fail to work correctly, so…?

Depends on how much you drive, and what the recommended interval is. If the interval is 7k miles, and you drive 18k in a year, yeah, you need to change the oil 3x/year.

It seems to me that counting the number of cycles each makes, and basing your intervals off that would make more sense than mileage. If I’m constantly running at high RPM, that should require more frequent oil changes in terms of mileage.

My experience certainly does.

I’ve worked with some really great people. But maybe 1 in 5 or so was a loudmouthed shitbag, and when you called them on being shitty, they either threatened you, or acted like it was all a joke or a big misunderstanding, and you were at fault for being upset, etc. I can’t guarantee that the shitty people I’ve known have harassed women, but the probability seems high.

Encapsulation, yeah. That’s usually what they do now, since encapsulation is usually cheaper, and generally less disruptive.

I did in Chicago. And I absolutely would again, because it makes my house much less likely to burn down from e.g. an electrical fire.

I quit smoking a decade ago; my risk of lung cancer was–is–far, far higher from smoking than it ever would have been from living in a house with asbestos insulation in the walls and around pipes.

I’m still in favor of asbestos. It’s an amazing material for preventing fires AS LONG AS you never disturb it. The people that were most at risk of cancers were the people involved in the mining, manufacturing, and installation of asbestos products, but once the asbestos-containing products were installed, they were almost entirely safe for the occupants of the building. You could, in theory, largely mitigate the risks to the miners, manufacturers, and installers, but that is… Well, expensive. And people have a really bad tendency to ignore health and safety warnings when they’re inconvenient. You see the same issue with quartz countertops; they’re known to cause silicosis in people that are doing the cutting unless they do wet cutting for everything, and wear PPE, but a lot of people don’t, because wet-cutting is messy and slow, and PPE is hot and uncomfortable.

There was a big movement in the late 90s to remove asbestos from old buildings; the current advice is to encapsulate it, and leave it in place.

Well, yeah, it would be.

We would need to drastically increase taxes in order to have UBI for the poorest people in the US. Right now, across the board, all of us are paying some of the lowest income taxes since income taxation was introduced. After you consider things like the EIC, a lot of poor people have a negative tax rate. As it is, we’re running a budget deficit every single year, and most of that deficit is entitlement programs (I’m not using that in a pejorative sense) like social security and Medicare.

(No, social security is not fully funded; people pay in far less than they end up getting paid back, and the system relies on a constantly expanding pool of people paying into it to fund the people that are currently drawing from it. To fix that, we would need to increase social security taxes, end the cap on those taxes, and probably set the retirement age higher.)

Even if we took every single penny that every billionaire in the US had, that would fund the federal gov’t for something like eight months. Total. And then it would all be gone. (Plus the stock and bond markets would crater, but eh.)

Yeah, we need to bring back the highest marginal tax rates for sure. And we need to increase corporate taxes and eliminate a lot of the corporate cash giveaways. But we also need to increase taxes on the middle class. I’m saying this as someone that’s at the lower end of middle class; I’m not paying enough in taxes for what i think this country should be doing for the citizens of the country. But man, if you told me my tax bill was going to go up by $8k, but I’d also get national single payer health care? And national public transit, and free public universities? I would cream my panties.

To me it tastes more like dry-rotting lawn clippings.

But in a good way.

I have an earlier version of this (got it on sale from Costco, and it was the highest-rated model by Consumer Reports at the time); I love it. It’s not great for carpets, but it’s fast and easy for hardwood floors.

Would I have bought it if it needed to connect to my cell phone? Absofuckinglutely not. Not in a million fucking years. It could have been the best goddamn vacuum in the world at sucking, powered by a miniature black hole, sucking dirt to the event horizon, and I still would have passed.

I need LESS connectivity in my life, not more.