Oh and Best Buy owes its survival to investing heavily into cell phone plans and contracts. They would’ve folded without it.

Radio Shack limped along for maybe a decade after their core business stopped making sense, because of their cell phone deals. This Onion article from 2007 captures the cultural place that RadioShack operated in at the time, and they didn’t file bankruptcy until 2015 (and then reorganized and filed bankruptcy again in 2017).

This is a counter to the Democratic party supporters you see everywhere who always get irrationally upset at third party voters, not about Republicans.

Plenty of us Democrats are very much in support of a ranked choice voting schemes, or similar structural rules like non-partisan blanket primaries (aka jungle primaries). The most solidly Democratic state, California, has implemented top-2 primaries that give independents and third parties a solid shot for anyone who can get close to a plurality of votes as the top choice.

Alaska’s top four primary, with RCV deciding between those four on election day, is probably the best system we can realistically achieve in a relatively short amount of time.

Plenty of states have ballot initiatives that bypass elected officials, so people should be putting energy into those campaigns.

But by the time it comes down to a plurality-take-all election between a Republican who won the primary, a Democrat who won the primary, and various third party or independents who have no chance of winning, the responsible thing to make your views represented is to vote for the person who represents the best option among people who can win.

Partisan affiliation is open. If a person really wants to run on their own platform, they can go and try to win a primary for a major party, and change it from within.

TL;DR: I’ll fight for structural changes to make it easier for third parties and independents to win. But under the current rules, voting for a spoiler is throwing the election and owning the results.

Racists would pay quite a bit of money to be able to target certain ethnic groups.

Oh you can remember which one is which by remembering that they have a university named USC.

There was. If you map that onto the growth in population you’ll see that tickets per person has been dropping since about 2000.

Michael Scott : I am a victim of a hate crime. Stanley knows what I’m talking about.

Stanley : That’s not what a hate crime is.

Michael Scott : Well, I hated it, a lot, okay.

Why are you sticking with a specific spectrum? You made it hard to read in service of a requirement that doesn’t make any sense.

The whole conversation from the vegan side has been that those proteins and other substances essential to cats are already commonly synthesized for things like animal feed or even human energy drinks. Your own source says it’s impossible without synthetic supplementation, but the deleted comments from that dumpster fire were specifically about synthetic supplementation.

I’m not an expert in this stuff but I can see when comments aren’t actually engaging with arguments from the other side, which is why I think that the vegans have the better argument in this whole saga.

There’s that one game that censored “Nasser” to “N***er” which made it much worse.

Each change is less costly to store than each comment, and the system processes millions of comments per day.

And that introduces a specific type of supply chain threat: someone who possesses a computer can infect their own computer, sell it or transfer it to the target, and then use the embedded microcode against the target, even if the target completely reformats and reinstalls a new OS from scratch.

That’s not going to affect most people, but for certain types of high value targets they now need to make sure that the hardware they buy hasn’t already been infected in the supply chain.

I don’t know why you’re framing this as solely a demand problem, or why you think the elasticity of demand won’t extend to negative prices. Negative prices tend to show up only during periods of very high supply, due to a confluence of factors like weather, so supply is part of it (low or even negative prices can induce producers to curtail production). There’s nothing special about the number zero.

And negative prices therefore take the place of disposal: oversupply and the need to expand real resources taking that energy off of the grid in that particular moment. That’s demand, too: incentivizing people to do what needs to be done, and get rid of that excess energy by disposing it or whatever.

you don’t have to pay electricity to f*ck off if you produce too much of it.

It’s not any different than most physical goods. Whatever you can’t sell before it goes bad, you have to pay someone to take off your hands using real resources (dumpsters, trucks, human labor).

Too much electricity in the system is harmful, and if nobody wants to buy it, then you have to pay someone to take it out of the system.

If we were able to adequately shape demand to match available supply, rates would fluctuate, but they would never go negative.

I don’t see why that would follow.

If supply is higher than demand, then getting rid of that excess supply costs money, and the producer might have to pay someone to take it away. It applies to grocery stores that over order inventory of perishable goods, to oil companies that run out of space to store oil, and electricity grids that need to get rid of damaging/dangerous excess power.

The first Rambo was definitely about PTSD and how the act of killing fucks up American soldiers.

Yes, that’s in the picture.

It’s true, but not as much as people seem to believe. US regulations require a minimum of 80% butterfat, and EU regulations require 82%.

Kind of sad that some grade schoolers can do better than a large corporation.

Better at what metric?

The cynical take is that the corporations did optimize for the best butter, only that their definition of “best” is different from yours.

I’ve seen some discussion hypothesizing an explanation that Millennials actually use more sunscreen, use less nicotine, and exercise more than Gen Z. I can buy it.

I think in some jurisdictions it’s considered a bump stock.