I’d like to see Idiocracy cited a lot less often, given that a good chunk of the plot boils down to eugenics from wealth (poor people had lots of kids, rich people stopped having kids).

Sex strikes have been used more recently as well to end gang conflicts, wars, and other violence.

44% children, 26% women, 30% men. Gaza is about half under 18, so that’s nearly randomly killing people. That said, these are only confirmed fatalities, so presumably susceptible to bias.

The report is here

The inflation will be yuge!

A lot of what you’re listing off is more a symptom of Harris entering the race so late. She’s barely had the time to put together a campaign, let alone flesh out a real policy platform. That usually takes a long time, especially given that she has to show some level of independence from Biden while also

no healthcare reform mostly just give aways to insurance companies through tax credits.

What type of healthcare reform are you referring to? I don’t think that anything terribly drastic is really going to happen within the foreseeable future. The Democrats burned a 60-40 majority in the Senate just to get the ACA, a relatively modest reform, through Congress. Something like single payer does poll well… until you remind people that there’s no free lunch.

no minimum wage increase

She supports an increase to $15/hour, but that was pretty recent.

wont commit to keeping kahn the most effective FTC chair in more than 4 decades.

I won’t defend her here, she should have the courage to tell her tech allies that she’s not going to topple Kahn.

wont commit to supporting striking workers.

I’m not exactly sure what this means. The Biden administration has strengthened labor’s hand on the NLRB, which marked a significant difference from the Trump administration. Are you referring to the railroad strike of 2022?

no mandated PTO/Sick leave for workers.

What left wing people are really telling you:

I would be fine if that was what everyone was actually saying, but I hear a lot of people encouraging not voting or voting third party this cycle.

let your reps know that your vote is at risk if the genocide continues post election. and then follow through in the next cycle.

Politicians are trying to paste together a winning coalition. That’s why you’ll see Kamala’s platform roughly representing the center-left, that is a winning platform for a general election. The problem with having a hard line non-mainstream view on something like the Israel-Palestine conflict is that playing hard to get will only get you so far. If your opinion isn’t supported by the majority, it’s very, very hard to get a politician’s support.

There are also some great ways to get written off by the Democratic Party. Frequently not voting or voting third party makes for an unreliable constituency. No politician is going to pay a group that plays hard to get much heed. But for a constituency that turns out and works to turn out others, they’re going to be all ears. There’s a reason causes championed by Black women always feature fairly heavily in the Democratic Party platform. They really punch above their weight.

All politicians meet with lobbyists. It’s hard to get a handle on the needs of the nation (or state, or so on), and lobbying is how people inform their representatives of that need. Now whether those lobbyists are scumbags or saints, that’s a different question.

I’ve heard it’s also fairly easy to do security for.

Yup, can’t get rid of someone like Trump if enough of the population is either willing or eager to go along with him.

Everything she does will be timed to coincide with the heat death of the universe.

He’s also refusing to meet with Biden. This is about politics for DeSantis, so that he can complain that Biden and Harris aren’t doing their jobs.

They’re still helpful in sorting out a 600 calorie meal that’s going to keep someone on track to lose weight versus a 1200 calorie meal that is going to make them gain weight. Even if it’s not exact, it’s a useful guideline.

Wonder Bread is just gross junk food. Also, if you consult the label again, it’s worse than that. The 5g added sugar is for 57g of bread, so it’s nearly 10% sugar by mass.

There are good brands here. I usually get Dave’s Killer Bread. It still has some added sugar, but there are varieties with fairly small amounts.

I was ready to hear something like a story from someone who had signed onto a medical trial and was upset the trial was ending. Nope, instead an absurdly short support period that seemingly is fed by the same culture of replacement over repair that has infected our economy.

The latter. The US only has a veto in the Security Council. Though even that isn’t entirely unconditional. Recently it abstained on a vote about a cease fire resolution, leading to much entitled complaining from Israel.

We’ve also managed to wedge ourselves into a situation where Congress can’t handle anything controversial. The closest we came in recent years was the (relatively timid) ACA, and that barely passed after an unpopular war and the 2008 economic crash.

Don’t worry, they’ll pass another strongly worded resolution.

Not really. It was always her tactic to make him go nuts. Provoking him into shouting over her would have gone along with that and just made him look bad.

Oh certificate, I thought you meant mark.

I’m doing a series of conversations/interviews with my parents’ generation to keep a voice record of their stories. As part of that, I’m doing transcripts that start with the transcript feature of Google’s Recorder. It can do some nifty things like assign speakers to individual voices. I have to clean up the transcripts some, but it’s far less laborious than dealing with a 15-20 minute conversation. I can fix up a transcript in maybe 5 minutes.