Because it’s #3 in the nation in per capita impact of opioid use disorder, after West Virginia and Ohio?

Fact is, these places that MAGA wants to label as hellholes are the cultural and economic engines of our country. Even places like Texas are driven entirely by their urban blue counties.

It’s a couple of different factors at play:

• Sales of this particular product are up and Fox News, the largest and most influential conservative media source, ran a story about it as if it’s a sign of the nostalgic return of something today’s old people remember from their youth.
• Most younger people correctly recognize that this trash is actually a bad sign for the economy, because it reflects a shift down market where people are opting to make this stuff instead of the more expensive option of restaurants or takeout.
• Consistent with worsening economic conditions, the price of beef in the United States is skyrocketing, so that the product itself is changing the label to recommend replacing the beef (which customers would ordinarily buy separately) with something else, like cheaper hot dogs.

The political and economic discussion is happening in the United States, and that generally means that it spills out onto the internet where national borders are less significant for where conversations might end up.

How long before we see that in the States?

We’re about 5 days away from federal food assistance being canceled for the month of November, so less than a week, maybe?

I think it’s better understood as many different factions with their own desires:

• Those who want raw power for the sake of power. Trump is almost certainly personally in this category. This is probably the primary motivation behind the Project 2025 stuff, tearing down the guardrails that limit their power.
• Those who are trying to enrich themselves: Trump’s family is probably here, and Trump himself and his inner circle do seem to be motivated by financial gain to some degree.
• Those who want to use the Trump administration to make the U.S. whiter by expelling non-white people and restricting immigration of brown people (while increasing white refugees admitted).
• Those who want to assert dominance of certain types of Christianity (with some internal tension on whether that extends to Catholics/Protestant/Mormon/other beliefs)
• Those who want the government to pursue business friendly policies like lower taxes and lower business regulations.
• Those who want to leverage the government’s power to win a culture war (bullying schools, libraries, Hollywood, the media, etc., into supporting right-wing cultural principles).

There is tension between all of these things, and there’s tension within the Trump coalition. The business interests and the immigration hardliners jockey for position with Trump and his inner circle. The religious groups and the war hawks and the cryptocurrency scammers are all trying to advance their own agenda, too.

Not everything is going to make coherent sense. Not every idea is going to win, either. And if anything, the business side of things is less powerful than in the typical administration with several areas that are actively hostile to traditional Republican business interests (immigration, tariffs, pardoning securities fraudsters, shaking down corporations for donations or tribute).

It’s important to recognize the tensions because those are also weak spots in their coalition. Defeating fascism will involve fomenting some internal tensions and peeling off different factions.

I mean today ICE even tear gassed a bunch of Chicago cops who were trying to clear a path out for them. The ICE thugs are cowards and will turn on local police in a heartbeat. (See also capitol police beaten on Jan 6.)

He was circling on the bike taunting them, saying stuff like “I’m not an American citizen,” and the ICE dudes just tolerated it until the bike rider dropped his phone, and detected weakness and pounced, before the guy snatched up his phone and managed to ride away.

Tragicomedy is the best description.

People like to use the example of Crassus’ fire brigade as an analogy for how corporate interests extract value from regular people in society. Crassus and his fire brigade would go around buying burning houses on the cheap, and then put out the fire for the benefit of Crassus, the new owner. There were some who believed that Crassus was setting the fires himself, but the extractive playbook here works whether he was setting them himself or not.

Are agricultural megacorps buying up farms with depressed values and then fixing them so that the values increase? Probably not. They’re in basically the same boat with the price of commodities, in terms of the inputs (water, fertilizer, labor, equipment and machinery, fuel, energy) and the outputs (wheat, corn, soybeans, etc.). It’s a problem for them, too.

Maybe they have deep enough pockets to ride out the current crisis and will have more to show for it in the end, but for now, they’re in the same boat.

why were highly skilled Korean engineers working “illegally” in USA to begin with?

Most of them say they had valid visas or work authorization.

The U.S. has a visa waiver program where people can come into the U.S. without a visa, and have certain rights similar to visa holders. Many of the South Korean workers have taken the position that the visas they had that allowed them to work for 6 months, or the visa waivers they had entitled them to do temporary work for less than 90 days, and that they were within those time windows.

The lawsuits being filed also allege that immigration officials acknowledged that many of the workers did have legal rights to work, but that they were deported anyway.

So no, I don’t think it’s been shown that the workers did anything illegal. It really sounds like ICE fucked up by following a random tip a little too credulously.

Yup. That’s the playbook. DDoS this service by:

• Generating fake tweets and reporting them.
• Volunteering to fact check and do a bad job, actively sabotaging their data.
• Gathering information to doxx the people who run the site.

Bonus points for turning the wrath of this mob against MAGA types themselves.

The listeria outbreak also exposed Boar’s Head as a deeply mismanaged company. When the CFO, who had been at the company for over 20 years, was deposed under oath, he couldn’t answer the question of who the CEO was, or who his boss was. It came up in a lawsuit between family members of the family that owns and controls the company, and has their own competing factions in charge of different parts of the company.

From a pure corporate governance perspective, that type of dysfunction is a recipe for disaster.

Just based on the transcript of his revocation of pretrial release, requiring him to be in jail while awaiting trial, it sounds like OP is misrepresenting the record.

https://rockenhaus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/U.S.-v.-Rockenhaus-2-20-20-2.pdf

That transcript makes it pretty clear that the government’s evidence that he violated the terms of his pretrial release was that:

• He was required to download and install computer monitoring software on any device he used that accessed the internet.
• He did download and install computer monitoring software.
• Within 24 hours, the software logged internet activity of him visiting the Tor project site, and the Spice project site.
• The monitoring did not log him downloading or installing Tor software.
• The monitoring did log him downloading and installing Spice.
• The FBI agent testified that Spice was VM client software for remotely accessing VMs elsewhere. He also caveated that there were plenty of legitimate uses for VMs, and did not go a long with the prosecutor’s line of questioning suggesting that the VM software was installed to bypass monitoring. He simply acknowledged that it was possible to use such software to bypass the monitoring software, and testifying that such techniques were consistent with the hacking crimes that he was being charged with in that case.
• The monitoring software logged no more activity for something like 2 months afterwards. The guy claimed to his probation officer that he hadn’t been on his computer, or that he used his iPhone to access the internet.
• The terms of release required that he not use iPhones because iPhones couldn’t be monitored with the software the government had available.

It seems like kinda a shitty situation, but that’s also just how things work when charged with hacking crimes. It does look like the guy immediately bypassed the monitoring, and then lied about not using his computer. But the software itself sounds pretty shitty.

Whatever it is, though, the transcript doesn’t support the claim that he was just downloading graphics drivers. The circumstances all together do sound pretty suspicious.

The Onion: GOP Maintains Solid Hold On Youth That Already Look Like Old Men

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.

It has long been used as a transitive verb. The Oxford English Dictionary has collected examples going as far back as 1897 using it generically to make something disappear, but this particular meaning, of government officials forcibly abducting a person and not explaining where the person went, really started to pick up by the 1960’s. The novel Catch-22, published in 1961, had a character use it in the transitive way, with the protagonist complaining that it wasn’t even proper grammar. And that novel was popular enough that it started to appear a lot shortly afterwards, in magazines and newspapers and books.

There are basically 3 main systems for universal healthcare in the world:

Beveridge model: the government runs the hospitals and employs the doctors, and any resident may use the services. This is known as socialized healthcare, and it’s what UK uses.

Bismarck model: the government mandates everyone get insurance from highly regulated competing insurance companies (some of which might be government operated and run, and some of which might be private). Everyone is put into the risk pools so that the insurers will collect enough from the entire population, including the low risk demographics. Those who cannot reasonably afford insurance are given government subsidies so that they can be covered, too. This is what Germany and Switzerland use, and is sometimes referred to as an “all payer” or “Swiss” model.

National Health Insurance Model: This is where the government gives everyone insurance and positions itself as basically the monopoly/monopsony health insurer to cover everyone and negotiate compensation rates for health care services provided by private providers. This is what Canada uses. It’s also known as “single payer.”

The fourth model of health care economics should be mentioned, as well. It does not promise, or even try to provide, universal health care. It’s the fee for service model, where private providers set their own prices and consumers decide whether to purchase those services. Sometimes insurance can be involved, but the providers are free to negotiate their own prices with insurers, but might opt not to take insurance at all and make the patients deal with that paperwork.

Many countries use hybrid models that combine elements of the Beveridge Model and the Bismarck Model, with government providers competing with private providers, and maybe government insurers providing a backstop for what private insurers won’t cover.

The U.S. doesn’t follow any one model. It follows all 4 models in different settings:

• It follows the socialized model for the military and veterans affairs, as well as the Indian Health Service for Native American tribes (the government owns the hospitals and employs the staff directly).
• It follows elements of the all payer model for most employer-provided health insurance (employers of a certain size are required to provide optional health insurance) and there are the ACA exchanges, where private insurance is highly regulated and is generally required to provide coverage to anyone who a>!!

Substitution bias tends to overstate inflation, because they only reweight once a year (which is much more frequently than what they used to do). And the reweighting of the components won’t change the fact that the individual components continue to be published.

Beef is getting much more expensive than it used to be. In the 90’s, ground beef used to be cheaper per pound than chicken breast. In the 30 years since, beef has gotten expensive much faster than chicken, and now ground beef costs almost 50% more than ground beef:

Ground beef

Chicken breast

To add to your comment, if anyone is interested in the data series for steaks generally:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000FC3101

Wouldn’t hedonic adjustments go the other direction from what the parent comment is saying? If the quality goes down, then the adjustment should increase the stated inflation.

I read the parent comment as talking about substitution effects in consumer behavior, but the CPI doesn’t reweight month to month (it used to only adjust once every few years, but has recently switched to once a year).

So generally, substitution bias makes the CPI overstate the inflation as actually experienced by the typical household.

Capping congressional salary that low is a bad idea

Exactly. Giving someone immense power without giving them pay reflecting that power is just an unstable incentive for corruption.

There are some downstream effects, too. Federal law caps regular federal employee pay to formulas based on the Congressional pay, so plenty of senior managers and Ph.D.-level specialists have their pay capped because Congress hasn’t given itself a raise since 2009, all while inflation has gone up by about 50% in those 16 years. It used to be that federal employees would put up with lower salaries for better job security and belief in the mission, but the current administration has basically torn down those assumptions.

In theory Congress could lift the caps on federal salaries without giving themselves a raise, but I don’t think that’s very likely.

You’re talking about a guy who congratulated Putin on his sham election victory while staring at a card that said “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.” And he’s aged 7 years since then.