That is a completely legitimate concern. It’s important to note that even if prisons are publicly run, there’s still a bunch of private actors in the prison system in the form of the people who work in it. Prison worker unions and police unions lobby for more laws already to protect their jobs. Private prisons might make that aspect worse, but it’s not like it’s perfect now.

Neither is obviously more efficient than the other overall, it depends on the structure and the incentives. People worry about private prisons for example. If you make it so the government sends people to prisons and you pay the prison a fixed rate per prisoner, of course you’re gonna get skimping on services by the prisons. If you instead give the prisoner a voucher for a prison and make them pick where they go and prisons get money per voucher they get from prisoners, you’re gonna get competition on quality so you’ll get high quality prisons. Opposite outcomes with just a change to incentives.

Had a coworker who used MMDDYY with no dashes. Unless you knew it was very hard to figure out, since it could also just be a number that happened to be 6 digits, too. At least YYYY-MM-DD looks like a date generally.

It wasn’t the giving money, it was the fast tracking in terms of regulations. Many people in Trump’s position would not have done that and would have waited the expected 18 months instead of the 11 that it actually took. Some in the industry were concerned as it was happening. Plenty of other countries dragged their feet in the approval process more than the US did.

Trump wasn’t single handedly responsible for the approvals. Far from it. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t know much of the details. But it still seems he was pushing for it where other people wouldn’t have. I’m not sure Biden would have. Trump likes to play fast and loose where Biden is a bit stuffier.

Basically I think my vote matters even if it doesn’t matter, so I vote for people I actually want. Lol. If there was a race where I had a strong preference between the two main party candidates and I thought my vote would have an impact, I’d ditch the third party for that race.

If your bit was sarcasm, then that makes more sense. Trump was not particularly good on Covid, but we would have had a big problem regardless of who was president at the time.

With Trump him sitting in meetings still doesn’t mean he’s heard of it. Lol.

Anyway, I’m just saying Heritage is the mastermind, not Trump.

Every country got Covid, basically. You know that, right?

I’ll be honest, unless you were in a special circumstance, that sounds like a you problem not a Trump problem. I didn’t and wouldn’t vote for him, but for most people he did not affect their day to day that much. 2020 was the peak of actual influence on daily life, but I don’t think that had as much to do with Trump as people imply, either. The whole world got Covid. The US had a bit more deaths per capita than the rest of the developed world (less than UK) but it also has a less healthy population in general.

I think we all sort of trained each other to fixate on the president and be anxious if they’re not on our team.

Every vote matters. That’s why I vote third party. Lol

If you’re in a state that goes consistently one way or the other, it’s probably true that it doesn’t matter. For president, at least.

I often vote third party, and I feel very comfortable doing that because my state is very consistent.

They’re assuming (probably correctly) that a lot of people under 28 won’t vote, and that (probably less correctly) they’d vote Democrat if they did vote. So if Trump wins and they pass a random 28 year old on the street, they’re thinking there’s a good chance that person is partially responsible for Trump’s win.

So retail workers can’t vote because they work weekends? You’re gonna screw someone over regardless of what day you pick.

In my state we have a minimum of two weeks of early voting including some weekend hours. I’d support some increases, but it’s actually not that hard to vote if you just try.

There are several different groups supporting him for different reasons. The biggest, I’d argue, is the slightly right very populist. They’re not into fascism per se, they just want a wrecking ball like Trump to go in and break apart the elite institutions they blame for all the problems and see no other way of influencing. There certainly are supporters who are encroaching on fascism territory. Then there’s long time Republicans who have flipped on a bunch of issues to try to get support from these people Trump activated.

At least he did Operation Warpspeed. Funny that some of his supporters turned on him for that.

In fairness, it’s not Trump’s plan, either, it’s Heritage’s. They’re doing it for Trump, but I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if Trump has never even heard of it. Lol

Don’t be silly. There were lots of waves of migrants before European settlers of America. They’d be more than the 2nd wave. 😉

Winter Soldier is the peak for me, with Civil War just barely below it.

Everyone went from feudal backwater to something else in that era. The US was poorer than Argentina per capita. That’s not really saying that much. It’s also not saying that much because of course if you have a strong central authority you can divert resources from more valuable production toward national pride vanity projects like a space travel. What really matters is how productive your economy is, how much it can produce for its society, and on that front the US defeated the Soviet Union soundly.

I have nothing against a space program, I just don’t see that as a very strong indicator of the success of a society.

Sure, different ones have different levels of dictorshipness. To be clear, democratic and authoritarian are not opposites at all. Chattel slavery in the US was extremely authoritarian and awful, yet it was democratic. Abolition was a minority viewpoint until around the time of the Civil War.