gila

They aren’t concerned with deaths, this legislation positions the most harmful and most physically addictive nicotine option as relatively more accessible.

They aren’t concerned with nicotine addiction, else NRT gum wouldn’t be allowed to stock within reach of children in retail outlets.

They’re just NIMBY’s, there’s nothing else to it.

In Australia our tobacco strategy was to effectively ban vapes and price cigarettes out of existence.

The impact to date has created two totally new black markets: one for vapes after people realised anyone could just hop on AliExpress to buy them in bulk and resell for a 2000% markup. They are banned for import, but nicotine is a colourless odourless liquid and there are no rapid tests for it, no capacity to do expensive GCMS testing on all the random freight entering the country from China (our biggest trading partner by far).

The other new black market is for “chop chop”, the colloquial name for unprocessed tobacco illegally grown and sold by gangs for cheaper than regular cigarettes / RYO tobacco.

There’s also been a big increase in violent robberies at tobacco outlets and even gang turf wars over sales of illegally imported or stolen cigarettes. The excise tax is so high that the gangs can extract enormous sales margin and still undercut the market.

Predictably (and contrary to the rest of the western world) tobacco use has gone up nationally over the past couple of years following a significant downtrend lasting several decades. I’m confident that this strategy, which has been bipartisan amongst our 2 major political parties, will be used as a future case study in why prohibition is fucking moronic. It has continuously demonstrated to be a net detriment to public health, in this case related to a totally preventable yet leading cause of premature death and public health spend.

There is literally no logic to it beyond Lovejoy’s Law, except for some false manufactured statistics parroted by our leaders which blatantly ignore scientific consensus.

Originally, undiagnosed ADHD. The pathway to get licensed was somewhat annoying for me, and I couldn’t be bothered engaging with it. I’ve also always had great access to efficient public transport, which I took to school so was accustomed to using it.

There’s been lots of secondary reasons over the years - for a long time I had fines to clear before I could progress getting licensed. The fines were bullshit, and I wouldn’t pay them out of principle. Now they’ve expired, that roadblock is no longer in my way, but I’m still not licensed.

Sometimes it’s annoying, but only really in the sense that I’m proud of my independence / don’t like the rare occasions that I’m dependent on others for travel. I’m in the US on holiday now, and there is comparatively almost zero public transport - that sucks. When I’ve travelled around Europe, Asia, New Zealand, or at home in Australia - the issues are pretty few. I don’t feel held back enough to care, and it seems like a money pit.

I have learned to drive a car, though. I’m just not licensed to, and don’t. M 33

Reminder that teaching while drunk is perfectly legal in Florida

They didn’t make that the default. What was discussed was a way to make it default (add https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 as a custom search engine)

And the comments on those posts said we should actually use DDG instead lol

Under communism, sovereign authority is attributable. If you ask the US president, they’ll say they have little power. If you ask senators, or congresspeople, or local representatives, the media, the bourgeoisie, neither do any of they wield power. Where authoritarianism occurs under capitalism, apparently no one is responsible for it. Under communism, it’s directly attributable to communists.

Both are often authoritarian, but the argument that communists are more authoritarian is simply an easier one to make.

That’s fair enough, I’m literally just playing through the games now and felt compelled to comment. Kiryu’s fundamental value system is presented to us at face value right from his first interaction with Majima in the opening of the first game. He’s prepared and unconflicted about fighting Majima, just not for no reason like Majima wants. Kiryu has to have “a reason” to engage in actions typical of Yakuza, though the specific parameters of his reasoning aren’t quantified. It’s just whatever makes innate sense to him in the moment, which I’m interpreting as a rejection of conventional moral barriers to action. He’ll do whatever it takes to achieve the end he seeks, and the only difference between him and other Yakuza (or indeed Yakuza in real life) in this respect is that the ends he’s seeking are noble/just. i.e. “chaotic good”, with Majima the protagonist being his “chaotic neutral” counterpart. TBH I can’t really speak for Tak or Ichi because I haven’t finished those games, but the gist I got of what the commenter is saying is that they think although the base case for most people would be to prefer lawful-aligned governance, the outcomes secured by being chaos-aligned would justify their chaos.

I think what you’re assessing to be an obvious better choice isn’t. What would the Yakuza protagonist’ view on capital punishment be? That they’re written to have a heart of gold doesn’t define their morals outside the scope of being Yakuza. To prefer that is to accept that their morals are more likely to transcend the power structure they exist in vs politicians. Fictional or not, I think it’s interesting someone would consider this to be the case. It’s not as though the games romanticise Yakuza as moralistic. The pretense for pretty much all the drama in the series is violent disagreement with other Yakuza, behaviour I’d doubt is what the commenter is generally looking for in a political leader.

This is wrong. By looking at a single datapoint of total printed dollars, you’re measuring USD’s value relative to older USD only. This would only make sense if the value for things you would trade USD for are static. Relative to other reserve currencies, assets, goods, services, USD is significantly more valuable today than it was 4 years ago. Not to mention the proportion of printed dollars no longer circulating.

1995, I was 4. Can’t remember specs, but it ran win95. I had some preschool games like The Playroom and Math/Reading Blaster, which were pretty sweet. And Rugrats adventure game, which started my affinity for point-and-clicks. Aside from that I would just think of cool animals or other shit I wanted to know about and looked it up on Encarta. The fun lasted until shortly after we got the internet in 99, I had to build a new PC to get more frames in flash games on the Nickelodeon website and with bonzibuddy

Mod tools are the obvious answer, but it’s a platform in development. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to trade off the pain of migration/adaptation to another growing platform also in development because one part of it is supposedly a bit further along right now. The vagueness and incongruence between the action and reasoning suggests they aren’t genuinely offering their true reasoning. It also seems like they’re trying to say that federation was never appealing to them, which seems ridiculous to me. Rather they will cast it to the wind now, following immature decisions they made about federation that didn’t turn out very well.

Amyl & the sniffers is my fav

Oscar

I’ll upvote any constructive interaction, but I think a big reason why aggregators got popular was the ability for a user manifest their general disagreement with something in a way that can impact the visibility of that info. So I don’t think the overall nature of upvotes/downvotes could manage to be substantially different to Reddit or any other aggregator. The user behaviour is ultimately determined by the availability of the function, rather than the nature of the community that uses the platform/function