Well that’s not I typed lol

Well, Bidens currently the guy that’ll get the magic wand… So… Maybe not so great?

It was phrased as a hypothetical though, so I get it. Still silly, as eventually the pendulum comes back.

Okay… Should congress likewise be allowed to pass laws without any oversight from the president or the courts?

Should the court not be constrained by the laws created by Congress and approved by the president?

(Just to be clear, that’s a fuck no…)

What the hell do you mean half the population doesn’t think checks and balances should be maintained? It’s a very fundamental concept of our governmental structure… If you suspend the system if checks and balances, the partisanship we’re currently struggling with becomes an absolute nightmare, for everybody… Imagine a president that can willingly ban whatever they don’t like… A congress that can fund everything, or nothing, at will… Courts that can convict on feelings…

Y’all crazy

Are they going to pay for anything that ever inspired them? Every time you publish an article, you owe a dollar to every English teacher you ever had? Fill out your taxes and you owe your math teachers?

It’s fucking goofy…

You need way more details here…

Basement or crawlspace? Do you have piers already? What’s under the wood, and is the wood above or below grade?

The Biden White House has also maintained the tariffs on Chinese products worth $370 billion imposed by predecessor Donald Trump.

That’s a hell of a sentence :) I guess we can agree on some things… Tarrifs on china, truly bipartisan…

Can’t read the article (acts like it’s paywalled but the paywall doesn’t even come up,maybe ad blocking is borking it), but let me guess… Every time a show gets big, someone splits it off into a new sub service, and people are getting sick of that shit and pulling the plug on the people they pulled the plug on cable for…

My kids hit me up for yet another subscription last week, because they wanted to watch a show. I was very close to cancelling everything instead, and teaching them some slightly sketchy skills, but I took the “high road” on it. They’re getting close to the age where that ain’t gonna happen anymore though :)

Consolidate yo shit media dudes. You got a finite limit on how many pieces of the pie can exist. When the slices get too small because you cut it into too many slices, nobody buys a slice anymore…

Does it cost the same? Could just be the “no ice” concept… No ice, more actual drink. Maybe they feel like they’re getting more of what they’re paying for with an extra shot added.

I imagine they’d specify that? There is a complete lack of any reference to priors, and in context, that implies there were (because they’d make a point to specify no priors in an article like this…), but just the life sentence on a rape charge, and dude wasn’t paroled, seems a bit much, ya know?

How many people spend 45 years in prison on a legitimate rape conviction?

For the FDA’s purposes, if a tobacco product meets the legal definition of a cigarette but the tobacco is not heated to a temperature high enough to cause combustion, the product would be currently categorized as a non-combusted cigarette and regulated as a cigarette. The types of heated tobacco products currently authorized for sale in the U.S. are all non-combusted cigarettes.

Tobacco companies got the FDAs blessing on some of those already. Some as far back as 2018.

As for why they aren’t on the market, I dunno. Could be they aren’t as profitable (they certainly would cost more to produce), could be they dont see any need to compete with their own products, and if you’re a tinfoil hat type, could be those heat-not-burn products aren’t addictive enough.

Uh… It’s kinda a long story…

Vaping started with e-cigarettes, they looked like cigarettes and tried to taste like cigarettes. Mostly it was Blu, which was a commercially advertised version, but you could get better ones if you looked. They were basically a smoking cessation device, gum/patches, but with the form factor, look, and sorta the feel of smoking.

Being a cessation aid, they were priced pretty heavy… And people like me started getting into reverse engineering them (I have 510 sized taps and dies, and various other tools I’ve made over the years as this progressed). people started using much bigger batteries, people came up with drippers, it’s essentially just a lithium battery with a piece of resistance wire, you can easily make a vape, the term “mod” came about because we were modifying things to use as vapes, flashlights, Hammond project boxes, altoid tins…

Meanwhile, it’s all gaining traction, jenny mcarthy and Stephen dorff are all over the TV telling people it’s just water vapor (incorrect, it’s theatrical fog really) and to “take back their freedom”, Blu got popular, and modders started getting serious and mods got commercialized.

Then bada-boom, vape shops started popping up everywhere… We’d sorted out that vape juice is two alcohols used in fog machines, a flavor (like loranns candy flavors, I used those early on because they’re easy to find), and nicotine (liquid, if you bring a pack of dentine to my house I can turn it into nicotine gum at whatever dose you like in seconds, nicorette is robbing motherfuckers blind). Literally anyone can mix up ejuice, and that was what drove the vape shop boom.

During that time, smoking took a dive. A big one. States get a check every year from tobacco companies, based on sales in the state. It’s ostensibly to pay for the damages done to smokers… And the checks, based on sales, also took a dive. There was also a dent in the sin taxes.

So the FDA jumps in, the NHS in UK takes notice (because less smokers means less public money spent on healthcare), and the FDA immediately says you can’t call e-cigarettes a smoking cessation aid, and the UK decides vapes are 90+% safer yhan smoking and starts prescribng vapes for free…

Fast forward through a decade of propaganda, and it’s “think of the children” and ban vapes… Ban ban ban… Evil bad vapes…

I can’t tell you as an absolute fact that the disparity between the UK NHS recommending vapes, and the US banning them is because the UK saves money if people don’t smoke, and the states lose money if people don’t smoke, but I told you the story of how we got to this point, an I’ll let you do the math :)

This isn’t about menthol IMHO, because of the lack of specificity… They just ninja banned vaping. Cigarette flavored vapes are flavored “tobacco products” (because the FDA says so… Literally). They’ll ease it in there, but I’m pretty sure this ban was the goalpost, and personally, I think it constitutes death warrants in the interest of their budget…

This program already existed, with applications being accepted to 2026 I think?

Been a discussion in our district, but it’s 3k people in the entire county… Kinda low on the totem. It’s a 14 mile route for our kids though, and it’s the shortest one. If you want impact this is the place ;)

Stupid vapers better go back to reds and camels… Vape sales don’t count as sales for the PTMA settlement money every year, and the state wants their taxes too… They sold bonds on that settlement money and spent it years in advance, and y’all stopped buying them smokes and screwed up their budget…

Buncha dicks… So what if you get cancer, 5th largest economy in the world dammit.

Hey, I threw a few humorous bits in there… ;)

I was only talking about the specific amount of funding the “budget shortfall” amounted to… Essentially, they funded whatever that amount was, and got these results.

Might be worth a look at setting up an annual grant to fund whatever they’ve done on a long term basis…

I’m not a tinfoil hat or anything, but I feel like there’s been very little of this type of stuff for pretty much the entirety of Bidens term…

Am I wrong?

Hol’ up…

Prices for sugar were this high in 2011, so prices went up on sweets back then as well? Did they go back down and now they’re going back up?

I bet they didn’t…

Soviet Union was big, included many states. Socialist economy imploded, Soviet Union became Soviet non-union. States declared sovereignty as independent countries (mass brexits, kinda?).

Russia, who used to be able to socialize assets from all the smaller countries, wants to be able to socialize the assets again, and as a bonus, is salty because some of those countries are hooking up with NATO, which is by and large a union of capitalism…

Instead of trying to create a union again, and getting others to join via diplomacy or negotiation, Russia is just trying to press its neighbors into joining the reformed union via military occupation, and hit a slight snag with Ukraine, because all this shit is a little too recent for Ukraine to have forgotten how shitty a lada is.