LDP, which has governed Japan almost uninterrupted for decades.

I think this actually undersells how unprecedented the LDP not being in power is. The LDP has been the ruling party in Japan since the end of US occupation in 1954, over half a century. The only interruptions being between 1994 and 1995 and between 2009 and 2011.

Japan’s modern poltical history is super interesting and less monolithic than that would make it sound, but it’s a big deal when the LDP isn’t in charge.

Let’s see if it flops just as hard as Blair’s attempt.

Nah this goes way back, this is home grown New Labor security state ideas. Blair tried doing it 15 years ago and has been banging on about it from the side lines since then.

Sounds like Putin wants to have his Baltic desert before he’s even finished his Ukraine.

I worry that if they do Gerrymander it won’t just be for the sake of beating republicans, but preventing primary wins by progressive candidates.

A lot of supermarkets like Kroger are particularly bad about pricing. They will stock stuff that barely anyone buys, lose money because the case goes bad long before it sells out, and waste space on super obscure goods, necessitating a larger floor plan. Then they take the cost of that and spread it over all the items that move regularly, pushing up prices for everyone.

Why do they do this? Because it helps kill competition. If they didn’t have the obscure item, the one customer in a 1000 who wants it might go to a second store, and they might buy some of the quickly moving items there as well. By incentivizing shoppers to buy everything at one store, they are able to kill off smaller competitors that can’t afford to take losses or are unwilling to stock superfluous items.

Aldi’s is a fairly good example of a store that doesn’t do this. They tend to avoid stocking products that won’t move quickly. Keeping the inventory, and thus floor plan, small saves them money and prevents them from having to spread costs over staple goods. This model is much more common in Europe, but in the US, particularly in suburbs where the density is super low, it easier for them to absorb all the local demand and thus push out smaller more affordable stores.

It’s a sales tax, effectively, a nationwide sales tax.

An attempt to implement a sort of regressive tax to offset the tax cuts. Shifting the burden of government on to working class people who are disproportionately impacted by price hikes on everyday goods.

It was never about on-shoring manufacturing. Always about stealing from the poor to give to the rich.

Even if the stores them selves end up having issues, or if most people choose to continue to go to private stores, the presence of a public option with competitive pricing will anchor prices at other stores.

Specifically, I could see it undermining any attempt to implement software based price fixing among the private grocery stores, where they all use a common piece of software to “recommend prices”, with the software set up to increase prices at an even rate among all the clients so that none of them are undercutting each other. It should be illegal, but since technically no one at the companies are communicating about it, it falls in to a legal grey area. I haven’t heard about grocery stores doing this yet, but it’s been well documented in everything from real estate and renting to frozen potatoes.

Disillusioning his base will likely hurt turn out of voters for all right wing candidates. I imagine he wants to siphon some away, but I doubt they’ll vote for him ether.

A lot of these people will just go back to not voting.

If you want a serious answer ask a serious question. Not an absurd and ghoulish hypothetical.

We don’t need to. We just need to stop letting business interests direct economic priority.

“ Get ready everybody, he’s about to do something stupid “

I wonder how much of him coming out now is him personally taking revenge on Adam’s in an attempt to torpedo his reelection campaign, and in turn crow bar the influence of NYPD people still standing by him.

Like, not doubting what he’s saying is true, but I wonder if he held his tongue till now because he feels personally burned by the system.

It’s impressive to see half a century of work building up institutional respect and influence be burnt up over the course of less than two years.

It definitely is hilarious to see people legitimately considering backing Adams and Cuomo, both of who are well known to be profoundly corrupt and personally unpleasant people with no real plans to deal with issues that huge portions of the electorate are facing.

Like, systematically, they have pushed out and disenfranchised anyone who has suggested anything but increasing the NYPD budgets. Suddenly a grass roots socialist candidate is the only one in the field with any real popular support.

I wonder how much longer hegseth will last. He seems to be causing more problems for trump than he’s solving.

Transneft is the largest oil pipeline company in Russia for context. It’s state controlled and moves about 80% of the crude and 30% of the oil products.

China’s not exactly flush with cash to buy debt with at the moment, they’re having their own struggle party at the moment, although they tend to be less vocal about it. After all, their real estate market basically got massively over leveraged and a lot of capital disappeared and turned out wasted.

The Saudi’s too are having a bit of a liquidity problem at the moment, they’ve made a lot of commitments on weird mega projects and spent a lot of money trying to diversify their economy and repair their image, much of it with limited success.

Prices really haven’t come back to normal. Average prices is around 7 dollars a dozen, with lows around 5 dollars a dozen depending on area.

In 2019 it was between 1.30 and 2 dollars a dozen.

The H5 bird flu strain hasn’t been contained, and it probably never will be, it’s been rampant for nearly half a decade at this point and they’re still nowhere near containing it. It’s endemic in the migratory bird population. At this point the only flocks that won’t be routinely wiped by it are smaller flocks in better conditions.

Beyond the reality of higher turn over in flocks due to routine outbreaks, it also gives them an excuse to steadily press up prices to pad margins.

The prices are also still like 5X what they were before this bout of bird flue started over 5 years ago.