The US literally just tried that with gambling, and we discovered that making gambling legal increased the number of addicts by so much that it shows up in "total bankruptcies" statistics.
The key difference is people view heroin as something that will ruin your life, but think gambling is a harmless pass time until it is too late. There’s nobody who doesn’t know the perils of heroin, legal gambling existed in most places in some form and had for a long time. People view it much more like alcohol than heroin.
Also we didn’t just try that with gambling (48 states have had some legal form of it forever) we just tried it with online sports books, which turn out to be a particularly virulent form of gambling. And we haven’t really begun to sensibly regulate that, a lot of harm may be reduced in the near future as we do.
It's worth noting that there's a form of gambling that's exactly the same as sports betting that has been legal for much longer, the financial markets.
This is a distinction without a difference. "Regressive", "reactionary", and "conservative" are three words that refer to the exact same people and mean the exact same thing.
Reactionary movements can be paradoxically revolutionary in their means, aspirations and intended outcomes, and sticking to the academic definition of conservatism, the word doesn't accurately describe all of them.
But yes, in general, I agree with your point, in a colloquial sense, the Venn diagram is usually a circle.
No, the words mean different things. When used to refer to a group, those meanings confer connotations. The point is that we need to stop referring to people destroying our society as "conservative".
why do we need to do that? Which of the two political parties in the US is known as "conservative"? What does that party look like now? What policies are being pursued by that party's elected officials, and how much do they differ in concept from what that same party was doing ten years ago, twenty years ago, fifty years ago? The Southern Strategy, Reagan's speech at Neshoba county fair, "Starve the Beast", "Brownie you're doing a heckuva job", you can draw a straight line all the way through to today.
we're living in the utter pinnacle of unfettered conservatism today.
...made by a company that's really good at releasing cool demos and taking people's money, but really bad at actually delivering products to those people.
Computer usage is nothing new in the U.S., people just used to find a university or business to buy mainframe time from. Microcomputers just meant that they didn't have to maintain a relationship with a university.
It went from having to go out of your way to locate and operate with a bookie who had little away with the sports organization to... Pulling out your phone and tapping a couple of buttons, paying a legitimate business who can then apply enormous legislative and financial pressure directly against the teams with billions in backing.
It has dramatically changed the state of gambling, sports, and the businesses around them.
I'm talking about the bribe risk for a referee. It was always there. Probably even more so in the past when the mafia controlled vegas and bookies across the country.
But there is a massive difference here. The left uses social pressure to silence people they don't like, the right uses government power to silence people they don't like.
But in this case, the government threatened to yank ABC's broadcast licenses (worth way more than $1m) if they didn't cancel Kimmel for criticizing the regime.
It’s the FCC as long as he makes important decisions there. There is no way you can honestly say that he wouldn’t influence others there, and the businesses who are currently facing FCC approval would have to take that influence into consideration or ask whether the level of corruption on display isn’t unique to him.
Think about it this way: if a police officer came by your business and suggested that a donation to their annual ball might lead to faster response if you called 911, would you immediately conclude that the rest of the force would strongly condemn that appearance of corruption or would the mere fact that they were comfortable saying it make you worry that the sentiment was shared by other officers?
Part of what the current administration has been doing is normalizing levels of politicization and corruption which would previously have been unthinkable in modern America. Actions like this are considered in light of the broader context where the President is openly shaking down businesses and the AG has made it clear that they’re his personal lawyer first and the nation’s top law enforcement official only to the extent that it serves his goals.
Yes but you're not a mind reader and you don't know how much of his firing was due to government pressure vs a decision he was alienating half the country irreparably - and I'm curious to know why you didn't mention his ratings had been slipping. Surely that has some place in the discussion?
That’s probably why they didn’t put up a fight but it doesn’t cancel out the illegality of the threat. If the local mob boss shows up and says “nice business, it’d be a shame if something happened to it” that’s still extortion even if you decide it was losing money and walk away.
No. "If he were more profitable, his company would have spent money on a legal defense instead" is not a valid counterargument to "It is bad that the government threatened a company into cancelling a show because they criticized a friend of the regime."
We really need to go back to on-premise. We have surrendered our autonomy to these megacorps and now are paying for it - quite literally in many cases.
My 3TB, 41 billion row table costs pennies to query day to day. The billing is based on the data processed by the query, not the table size. I pay more for storage.
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