Maybe for some things, like working in fields. (Maybe. That would be a preeeeeettttttty good time for someone to pull a runner.) Probably not for construction, where you’d have to be giving inmates access to things that readily be used as weapons. Same with meat packing, where they’d literally be working with knives.

If people that are left of center can get their shit together some day, they really need to rewrite that amendment to ban all involuntary servitude.

Yeah, but does he like his step dad? Maybe he’s planning on ratting his dad out, ever think about that?

There’s no need.

Really.

If Trump does what he says he was going to do-and I don’t doubt he will–then the economy will crash on its own.

Tariffs will raise prices, and will drive inflation. Why will tariffs raise prices? Because the people selling will just add the price of the tariff to the goods sold. And unless the tariffs are the result of a new law, any incoming president can cancel them. That means that it would be a very risky environment to try and build domestic production in. The place I work for uses aluminum extrusion; we get it from a domestic supplier, and they get all their raw aluminum stock from China. When tariffs were enacted on Chinese aluminum, our supplier passed the cost on to us, and we had to raise our prices to account for our increased costs. So our customers had to pay more to get exactly the same product.

Deporting all of the undocumented immigrants will mean that we’ll suddenly have lots of jobs not getting done; most produce is picked by undocumented immigrants, a ton of general construction is done by undocumented immigrants, most meat-packing plants are full of undocumented immigrants laborers. We’ll suddenly be a negative unemployment; there won’t be enough workers in the workforce to fill demand. That means wages will have to rise, which will drive inflation, and housing costs will rise sharply because new construction will be so expensive with undocumented immigrants. One of the people I work with is undocumented; if he gets deported, then we’re up shit creek, because no one else can do his job as efficiently as he can, if anyone can do it at all (yay, lean manufacturing…).

I would place a financial bet on the economy crashing if Trump actually does what he says he will.

Since the ACA was passed, Democrats have not held all three branches of the gov’t. (In fact, Mitch McConnell refused to take up Obama’s nomination of a SCOTUS justice because he thought that eight months was too close to the election. Or, that was his claim.) They haven’t had any opportunities to make significant reforms to the ACA–or pass something better–because they haven’t had the power to do so. Republicans came close to overturning it, but blew their chances in 2018. So, to be more accurate, the party that wants to fix healthcare has not had the political ability to do so.

Short of a political change, there is no way to change the system.

Fair enough.

I don’t really think that D.C. should be a state, but I think that it should have more autonomy for the administration of the city than it has.

If Trump wins, expect it to be much, much worse. The ACA/Obamacare guarantees that certain things must be covered, that you can’t be denied covered based on pre-existing conditions, and that you can’t be charged more due to age, gender, etc. It also gives subsidies to people that are buying their own covered on the marketplace, which was set up by the federal gov’t.

Under Trump, expect all of that to be tossed out. If Trump wins, it’s highly likely that Republicans with flip the Senate, and retain control of the House, which means Republicans will have all three branches of the federal government captured, and there will be no brakes to repealing the ACA and going back to the old, much shittier system.

If Harris wins, don’t expect to see many changes. If she wins, it’s unlikely that Democrats would also have control of both the House and Senate. While it’s true that she was in favor of a single-payer system five years ago, it’s unlikely that she would be able to get that through the House and Senate unless they were both controlled by a Democratic majority. (In the case of the Senate, they would need to nuke the filibuster, which–IMO–is not a good idea in the long run).

To be fair, Harris had a contentious relationship with cops, when–IIRC–she didn’t pursue the death penalty for a cop killer.

Prosecutors have to work with police, but aren’t police. Prosecutors want to win, because that’s how they get elected. When cops do dumb, illegal shit, prosecutors get pissed because then they can’t win a case. Cops usually blame prosecutors for not locking everyone up. Prosecutors get pissed at cops, because cops botch investigations and make stupid, illegal arrests.

Of the two, I have much more respect for prosecutors. Prosecutors are often very good attorneys (in their field).

To reiterate a point: district attorney are elected. The public expects them to win cases. When they don’t, even if it’s because cops are handing them steaming piles of garbage, they tend to lose their jobs. Shitty, but true. We may say ACAB, but when it comes down to it, a prosecutor that refuses to, for instance, prosecute certain low-level crimes will tend to get voted out of office because it pisses off the constituents.

Unless either candidate OVERWHELMINGLY wins, there’s not going to be anything tonight, and probably not tomorrow. The last of the swing states won’t close polls until 8p (Mountain time, I think). Trump is almost certainly going to declare that he is the winner “by a lot”. Best case, we’ll know tomorrow morning.

So take a couple alprazolam, drink a couple shots, and black out until tomorrow.

I’m very surprised that you haven’t heard of Ghost of Tsushima; it has been a highly successful game.

But maybe I am mistaken? I would swear that I had to accept EA terms and conditions to play, but it’s by Sony and Sucker Punch. I dunno.

It’s out of their hands.

Uh, yeah, it literally was. Unless you’re saying that you want the president to be able to do whatever they want, even when a majority of congress and courts say no.

This might give you some better idea of what happened.

It’s not lying under any conventional definition of lying though. Saying something is a lie usually indicates deceptive intent, along with a knowledge–or a reasonable belief–that something you’re saying isn’t accurate. If I believe that the earth is flat, and I say so, am I lying? Or am I just wrong?

Biden said that he would cancel student loans; he’s done everything in his legal authority, and a few things that weren’t, to try an cancel them out. Do you think that the fact that SCOTUS prevented him from doing so makes it a lie? Or was he unable to follow through due to factors that he couldn’t directly control?

Eh, I dunno, I’m currently really enjoying Ghosts of Tsushima, although strictly in off-line mode. And I enjoyed the first Jedi: Fallen Order, again, solely off-line.

Obama was prevented from closing Gitmo by congress. IIRC, a big part of the problem was how to handle the criminal cases; all of the prisoners (“detainees”) in Gitmo have been tortured, the chain of evidence has multiple breaks in it, and it’s highly debatable that they can be tried in any kind of court. Yet intelligence agencies remain convinced that the remaining prisoners are guilty of terrorism. Congress didn’t want to move any of them to the US, because they didn’t want purported terrorists being held on US soil because ???

The president isn’t supposed to be able to act unilaterally, but we’ve allowed that Overton window to shift towards heavily authoritarian.

Given that independent (non-Democratic/Republican) candidates hold only a very, very tiny minority of all elected positions, I’d say that there have not been plenty of people putting in the work. Shit, look at local election; school boards positions elections sometimes have less than a thousand voters participating, depending on the school board. You should absolutely be able to get enough people knocking on doors to get Libertarian candidates (in Republican-dominated areas) or Green candidates (in Democratic-dominated areas) winning, if you just had people going out and knocking on doors.

That’s mostly because not enough people are willing to put in the work down ballot years prior to a presidential campaign to do anything. You have an infinitesimal number of 3rd party candidates holding local offices, almost none holding state offices, and only four independents in Congress (…two of whom are not running for reelection).

If you’re not seeing 3rd party people getting elected to state and national office, then voting 3rd party for president is obviously a losing strategy.

You shouldn’t need to. .300 Win mag is long action, so you’re going to be using a bolt action rifle. There’s not going to be too many contexts where you’re going to want to swap out the scope for anything other than fairly long range.

Why would you us a bow? Range is poor, and lethality is also low, esp. with the access the the ultra-wealthy have to medicine. When you hunt deer with a bow, you can usually expect to have to follow a blood trail, as it’s rarely an instant drop.

Use a .300 Winchester magnum from 1000 yards; at that distance, you still have about 850 foot-pounds of energy, which is roughly double a 9mm at point black range. With the right ammo, that’s more than enough to get the job done. You probably want a combined mechanical and ammunition accuracy of about .5 MOA range though, so that you have deviation of less than 6" at that range. It’s a challenging shot, but it’s definitely doable if you know your holds and can call the wind.

Well. technically he was an ape rather than a monkey.

The guy in the front is one of the producers for Drumeo on YouTube, not a member of Sleep Token.

unless one wishes to subject a certain percentage of the deaths in WW2 to Stalin’s decisionmaking

…Which would not be entirely unreasonable. But if we’re going to do that, then we would have to do the same with Hitler and German casualties, and then you could argue that Hitler caused all of the German casualties by invading Poland.