I think it’s more accurate to say “You will die for Epstein so that the oil class stays wealthy.”

There have been examples of postponements of elections for emergencies (most notably, the mayoral primaries in New York scheduled on September 11, 2001 had to be postponed for 14 days later), I’m not aware of any instance of an actual changing of swear-in dates being postponed.

Fuckery can still happen, but I’m more worried about threats and governmental terrorism that suppresses votes on the election day that moves forward as scheduled rather than actually moving the election schedule itself.

You buy guns to feel safe.

I buy guns to feel dangerous.

We are not the same.

I wonder how those specific buyers’ household incomes are. Part of the “k shaped recovery” from COVID is that some people genuinely are richer than ever.

If 10% of US households make more than $250k/year, and richer households are more likely to buy new cars (and buy them more frequently), it might very well be that the $1000/month payments are being paid by those who can easily afford them, while the $300/month payments are the ones actually causing financial strain on average households.

Every once in a while there are multiple parties structuring a deal where someone is left with a bad deal when it’s all said and done. As a consumer, you just have to make sure it’s not you.

But take, for example, the early days of Moviepass. You pay a cheap subscription to a service, and they buy you unlimited mobile tickets at the theater. Too good to be true in the long term, but in the short term it was a good way to spend some money that venture capitalists were giving away basically for free.

Businesses aren’t always smart. Sometimes they make financial mistakes and it’s your duty as a responsible consumer to punish those businesses for those mistakes.

In the case of dealer/manufacturer/financing incentives and the individual salesman commission, sometimes the kickback/fee scheme leaves someone else holding the bag. If you can negotiate a lower sticker price because it comes with some predatory terms on financing, but there’s no penalty for prepayment, it might make the most sense to take the low sticker price (made possible by the lender paying the dealer a kickback for the loans), finance at high rates, and then pay the whole thing off as soon as you can, so that you get the “discount” without having to pay high interest/fees, then you walk away with a good deal in exchange for just a little bit more hassle and paperwork. Sometimes the incentives swing the other way, too, where the lender is affiliated with the manufacturer and needs to juice sales volume by offering below-market rates on financing. As long as you can actually see how everything works and you can find the pain point, it may be possible to get a good deal and dump the bad deal on some faceless corporation for them to worry about.

Complex but direct. People consume resources. Find me the example of people who don’t and I’ll concede this point.

You don’t need to dip into the negatives to show that one group of 1000 people consumes less resources than a group of 10 person. If personal resource consumption varies by several orders or magnitude between individuals, where one private jet trip over the course of a day can represent more than the annual consumption of someone else, then it is very easy to show that the correlation between population size and aggregate net resource consumption is weak.

The emissions were just taking place in a way you chose not to measure.

No, running the same analysis by place of consumption doesn’t significantly change things, because the biggest drivers of greenhouse emissions are still local consumption: transportation (especially air travel), heating, and things like concrete manufacturing (where the concrete tends to cure on site).

Ocean-based shipping is so energy efficient on a joules per kg (or per cubic meter) per kilometer traveled that shipping a container 10,000 km from Shanghai to Los Angeles uses significantly less energy and emits lower carbon emissions than a 1,000 km route over land.

My point is simple: anyone who believes that climate change is solved by depopulation is dead wrong. We should still be working to reduce emissions in places that have stagnant or dropping populations, because everything we’ve seen in the last 50 years (which you describe as a selective period, but I select that period because it’s been the worst in world history for carbon emissions and climate change) is that countries significantly increase their resource consumption right around the same time they slow down their population growth.

You’re fundamentally misunderstanding my point as an argument for the status quo, that what we as humanity are doing enough. No, I’m arguing that actually making the right changes are going to be orthogonal to population growth. Decarbonization is important, and needs to be done, even if you Thanos snap half the world’s population, because there’s nothing stopping the remaining humans from being even more resource hungry.

Distrubution of resources, now, during our collapse and after with regards to anything remaining while important, are secondary to getting all of humanity’s ecological footprint down to sustainable levels. This necessarily means fewer people AND less consumption.

That doesn’t necessarily follow, and is inconsistent with past observations. At a micro level, take the example of greenhouse emissions from the United States, which peaked in 2007 and have come down since (despite population growth and economic growth). On a per capita basis, the United States peaked in 1973.

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states

At the same time, we simply cannot afford for other nations to increase their emissions to US levels on a per capita or per GDP basis. None of that has anything to do with the birth rate, and comparing the birth rates of different countries doesn’t reliably predict whether their CO2 emissions equivalents change (either by amount or by percentage).

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

Simply put, the relationship between birth rate and effect on environment is so loosely related that pushing down birth rate is likely not going to push down pollution or environmental destruction. The solutions are actual engineering and economics, not family planning and demographic policies.

One can agree that humanity and its actions are an ecological disaster, but what makes you think a shrinking population won’t be even worse than a growing population?

On a country by country basis, the low birth rate countries (that is, the rich ones) consume a lot more natural resources than the high birth rate countries.

This is because the actual amount of resources consumed by any given individual can have several orders of magnitude more or less resource consumption than some other individual, so that you can’t expect per capita stats to hold up in a world where population dramatically shifts.

How do they get calculated?

This page has answers:

The CPI consists of a family of indexes that measure price change experienced by urban consumers. Specifically, the CPI measures the average change in price over time of a market basket of consumer goods and services. The market basket includes everything from food items to automobiles to rent. The CPI market basket is developed from detailed expenditure information provided by families and individuals on what they actually bought. There is a time lag between the expenditure survey and its use in the CPI. For example, CPI data in 2023 was based on data collected from the Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CE) for 2021. That year, over 20,000 consumer units from around the country provided information each quarter on their spending habits in the interview survey. To collect information on frequently purchased items, such as food and personal care products, approximately another 12,000 consumer units kept diaries listing all items they bought during a 2-week period that year. This expenditure information from weekly diaries and quarterly interviews determines the relative importance, or weight, of the item categories in the CPI index structure.

The CPI represents all goods and services purchased for consumption by the reference population (U or W). BLS has classified all expenditure items into more than 200 categories, arranged into eight major groups (food and beverages, housing, apparel, transportation, medical care, recreation, education and communication, and other goods and services). Included within these major groups are various government-charged user fees, such as water and sewerage charges, auto registration fees, and vehicle tolls.

If you want to see the current makeup of the basket of goods whose prices are tracked, and their weights in the index, here is Table 1 of the most recent report. And if you want to follow the price of a specific category over time, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis keeps a really helpful interactive chart service for almost every public economic stat. Here is Table 1 of the CPI report.

It’s a lot of data collection on prices across a lot of transactions, and a lot of list prices, and a lot of locked in contract prices, to determine how much people are spending on different types of things, whether the quality of those things is changing over time, and what percentage of a typical household income gets spent on those types of things.

1 oz = 28.35 g

Maybe that 1/3 of a gram is shorting someone, but a single ounce is closer to 28g than to 30g.

Obviously depends on the specific item.

Here’s the national averages for:

Flour

Milk

Boneless chicken breast

Or an entire table of food items they’ve been tracking monthly prices on for years.

The Five Dollar Footlong was a promo created in 2003 when the normal price of a footlong was $6, by a single franchisee. By the time the promo went national, supported by the chain itself (and a national ad campaign), in 2008, that became a big enough deal to really move sales. And they watered it down at some point (by late 2010 when I was working next to a Subway and no other lunch options, I remember it only being a specific sandwich that rotated monthly, with all other footlongs regularly priced). And it was eventually discontinued in 2012.

It’s hard to pin this particular promo and call it totally representative of all pricing in the mid 2010s.

$5 in April 1980 dollars is the inflation adjusted equivalent of $20 in December 2025:

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=5.00&year1=198004&year2=202512

Resistance takes many forms.

Completely lawful resistance can include social pressure or ostracism, economic influence (boycotts, refusal to serve as customer, etc.), messaging/speech/persuasion, protests, strikes, etc. Keeping the cameras rolling, telling them how you feel about them being in your neighborhood, warning your neighbors about them.

Civil disobedience goes up the ladder a bit, and can cause disruption and might be nonviolent, but might at times actually be illegal. Generally speaking, this type of resistance is designed to clog up the system without being violent, and doesn’t even require anonymity or evasion from authorities.

Sometimes simply playing dumb can slow things down without actually committing a crime of putting yourself at much risk. Apply for a job at ICE with 1000 of your closest friends so they waste resources on your application. Forget to put in their order when you’re their waiter, or give them the shitty hotel room when they check in at your hotel, and program their keys incorrectly. Give them the wrong bay/spot when they’re renting a car from you. Call in tips for everything you see and flood their lines with bad information.

Most people jump from that category to outright violent resistance, but there are other tactics available, too. Sabotage, property crimes, plain old financial crimes, fraud, impersonation, hacking or denial of service, even things like theft, embezzlement. Locking a fence with a bicycle lock, blocking a driveway with a van, flooding a field with mud, impersonating their boss and giving them fake orders, sending them on a goose chase with a bad tip, etc.

If you shoot an ICE agent you might turn them into a hero. Steal their badge or ID when they’re drinking at the bar, though, and you might actually hurt them in ways that they won’t feel like a martyr, and will actually sap resources from their management.

Everyone is in a different situation, with different capabilities. Every war has plenty of roles, many of them nonviolent. There’s probably something you can do today to contribute to the cause, from your unique position.

The hubless wheel is on their current models. It’s basically their signature differentiator.

There’s reason to be skeptical of the company and its claims as a whole, but at least that particular feature has shipped and has been test driven by reviewers:

https://thepack.news/11000-km-in-2-months-marc-travels-rides-the-verge-ts-across-europe/

JD Vance may single handedly destroy the popularity of the full beard on a chubby face, which is basically the millennial version of a comb-over (except they’re hiding fat neck instead of hair loss).

Kinda like Hitler did with the toothbrush mustache.

There’s a famous Agatha Christie quote where she mentions that when she was young, she never imagined she’d be rich enough to own an automobile or poor enough to not have servants in her house. At some point, the affordability of one shot way past the other.

In my lifetime, I’ve seen huge cost increases in housing, and huge cost decreases in most technological products. When I was a kid, the normal TV size was something like 20 inches, and cost more than a month’s rent for a typical apartment. In 1990, the average rent was $447, according to this. I found a Sears catalog from 1989 with a 25 inch TV selling for $549, and a 20 inch TV for $318. It would be hard to convince someone from 1990 that one day the cheapest, shittiest apartments in the poorest neighborhoods would rent for more than a 60-inch TV per month. Or that the typical ambulance ride costs something like a month’s salary of a factory worker.

That’s the real problem with old people’s sense of money. The human tendency is to assume that all products cost the same multiple of those products prices in their early adulthood, so the luxury products of their youth remain the luxury products of today. These old people are stuck in some kind of Agatha Christie style of cost comparison, without the self awareness, and thinking that someone who owns a cell phone should be able to afford to buy a single family detached house, or couldn’t possibly be bankrupted by a single Emergency Room visit.